{Spoiler}It's great to have a topic that I can compete in again! I've been selecting my entries according to a secret set of criteria, and if I can't meet the criteria, I have to sit out for the week. Even starting with a large pool of potential covers available, there have been occasional weeks that I couldn't participate in, when the topic was just way too specific for my criteria to be satisfied. As my project continued, that reserve of cover options has become smaller and smaller, and as I expected, here near the end, the challenge of matching the topic has become extremely difficult, and I've had to sit out more and more.
I don't want to spill the beans on just what my theme has been until I finish (although at least one member of the forum has figured it out!), but I will tell you this much: I now have only four entries remaining to complete the project. One of those entries must be selected from a specific run of covers from the early 1940's, one from a handful of issues from two different series from the early 1960's, one from a particular series published in the late 1960's and one from a run of covers published in the 1980's. I trust I'll find some appropriate topics over the coming months to finally finish this up!
When I began, I had a somewhat different set of criteria I was working from. Along the way, I made some expansions to allow me to stay in the game and to broaden the scope of my initial challenge. That led me to a few further expansions of my roster, eventually settling on one that was, in a very specific way, more "complete" than my initial one. Today's entry, in fact, features the final "recruit" to the team, a last minute decision to include..Batman and Robin? Catman? Catwoman? Batwoman? Cats? Detective Comics? I'm not telling...yet!
By the way, one additional hint to my Secret Classic Comics Cover Contest Challenge can be found in the covers I hit the "Like"button on each week: those are all covers that I could have potentially used somewhere along the way, but had either been eliminated by earlier usage or would have been an available option to the one that I entered myself that week.