Time Magazine, as part of a feature offering 50 Top 10 Lists of 2007, shares its choices for the year’s Top 10 Magazine Covers.

The winner?

The January 2007 issue of Texas Monthly, which played off National Lampoon‘s famous January 1973 issue, the one which featured the tagline “If You Don’t Buy This Magazine, We’ll Kill This Dog!”

As far as newsstand inspirations go, that original cover has been alluded to by subsequent magazines more times than any other. Its only possible competitors for that record might be the often-spoofed Janet Jackson Rolling Stone cover or the Demi Moore Vanity Fair cover.

I wasn’t as impressed with this particular cover as much as others seem to have been, regardless of the quality of the Dick Cheney photoshopping, perhaps because that allusion has by now been so overdone as to have become a cliche.

I keep hoping that someday a science fiction, fantasy, or horror magazine will pull off a design coup and make one of these lists. But I wouldn’t hold my breath.