Jackets Required: Special Issue: Silhouetted Men
By Fwis -- Publishers Weekly, 1/16/2008 11:00:00 AM
This is the latest installment in a weekly column by Fwis, a graphic design group that blogs on book jacket design. The Fwis designers judge a recent book by its cover each week on PublishersWeekly.com.
In this Special Issue, Fwis takes a look at five of this season's thrillers:
The Silver Swan by Benjamin Black (Holt), jacket art designed by Kelly Too
The Invisible by Andrew Britton (Kensington), jacket art designed by Louis Malcangi
The Betrayal Game by David L. Robbins (Bantam), jacket art designed by Yook Louie
Prepared for Rage by Dana Stabenow (St. Martin's Minotaur), jacket art designed by Jesse Sanchez
A Paragon of Virtue by Christian Von Ditfurth (Toby), jacket art designed by Tani Bayer
Click here for larger jacket images
Let’s make a New Year’s resolution for political thrillers: no more silhouetted men. Deal?
The silhouetted man—let’s call him Jason Trenchcoat—does his job well. He taps into the classical American “lone hero,” isolated and vulnerable, but solid-shouldered, self-reliant and quietly menacing. Jason Trenchcoat is a tabula rasa onto which the reader can project his own fantasies of being on the run from the CIA (and really, what are political thrillers but comic books without the tights?).
This blank space even has a special bonus: when one of these books gets optioned by Warner Bros., it will be a simple matter to Photoshop Tom Cruise, Alec Baldwin or Wesley Snipes into that black space. No need to even make a movie poster, easier than paint-by-numbers.
Which isn’t to say that the silhouetted man is without possibilities. In the cover for John Updike’s Terrorist, Chip Kidd used a photograph of Jason Trenchcoat—reflected in a puddle and flipped upside-down. The anonymity of these p
ulp thrillers is not one of “any man,” but that of a generic hero, and you better believe he has a square jaw and a noble spirit (and, admit it, he’s white). The rainwater and cobblestone strip Jason of his gender, race and nobility, leaving behind an enigmatic and dreadful “any man but me.”
Terrorist, then, has successfully subverted Jason Trenchcoat. Unfortunately, the trope will continue to fuel political thrillers, but expecting something new from political thriller covers would be like expecting something new from any clichéd genre, wouldn’t it?
