some extremely unimpressive fiction-magazine covers:

1st issue, dated July 1926
I'm going to guess they were going for KKK vampire
ghost with possibly a Frankenstein's behemoth bolt on neck,
(modeled by a Tor Johnson ancestor) who, like Uncle Sam, wants you...

August, 1964 (my birth-month). Even by the weak
standards of "shudder" fiction magazines... 

Don't you hate it when lions insist on Marquess of
Queensbury rules? August 1953. This (Joe) Weider publication
spent its last years as one of three Playboy clones from JW.

Happily, the names sold it...from the decade of
the laziest cover-conception for the magazine...
and really atrocious production values within.

Of all the bad photo covers (and the several July covers
with US flag stripes), this 1968 cover might be the worst.

It has some rivals, but this might just be the most
inept (and illegible) of all MSMM covers.

Can you tell the no-budget publisher had to put
 this package together in a hurry, after the first
 publisher had to pass on publishing it? (1964)

There's almost nothing right about this 1957 painting...
except it's as lurid as it was meant to be. From perhaps
the worst period in Amazing's run, Paul Fairman's years
...Fairman left Ziff-Davis to assist editing EQMM...

One of many simply extremely ugly covers.

If you're putting together a reprint magazine on no
budget, you still might not want to use bad
(if free) illos as clip art, and make the rest of the
cover look like an appliance store newspaper ad.

Of course, using bad old cover illos as clip art for
reprint magazine covers is an old tradition among
Amazing's stablemates...

Sometimes a concept just doesn't come off...

Sometimes lack of concept doesn't work either...(2004)

Even Jove nods...

And some artists just leaned bad, whether in 1974...

...on in 1926...

And some formats and titles would  confound the
best artists...whether with a probably bad issue...

...or a very impressive one... (this magazine ran
1950-54 as a sibling of Planet Stories)

...or a very impressive, if perhaps familiar, one indeed.

And some never seem to care...
Italo Calvino, William Stafford, Cynthia
Ozick in this issue...can't you tell? (1957)