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Friday Art Blogging - The Bland, the Meh, and the Ugly

October 2, 2009 While I do like talking about art I enjoy, I also want to take some time to talk about art that I think isn't really all that great, art that's OK but not really appropriate for the book, or art that's so bad that anyone who thinks it's good should be associated with fans of velvet Elvises or porcelain statues of sad clowns.

A cover that's simply boring, or fails to tell any sort of interesting story about the contents of a book can often serve to draw a potential reader's eye to the book from across a room, or even just on an Amazon.com suggestions page.  For all of the complaints about the constant sameness of style on covers of genre fiction, it's not just there because people are lazy, it's there because it serves a purpose.  An example of someone who I personally find not all that interesting as a matter of taste, but who's a superb artist, and who's work is instantly recognizable as being associated with a certain type of fiction is John Harris.  His cover work for Ender in Exile by Orson Scott Card is a great composition.  It's a science fiction book that takes place in space, and is marketed at a similar audience of people who liked Old Man's War by John Scalzi.  Personally, I find these uninspiring.  I prefer the cover by Donato Giancola because it tells more of a story, and also because like Harris, Donato is a superb artist.  This is a level of personal preference. 

The downside to the personal approach is art like Eric Bowman's work on The Lord of Castle Black by Steve Brust (it takes a few clicks to get to a larger version of the cover, if anyone knows of a better image, let me know) which I find to be not horrible, but not really interesting.  Certainly it portrays the main character well, but the colors on the face have far too much green, and the expression is either bored, or sick.  Contrast this with Bowman's much better work on Paths of the Dead in which the expression, pose, color and lighting are all much more engaging.  I'm not the only one who had an issue with the cover on Castle Black either. 
And then, of course, there's art that's just plain bad.  John Scalzi has a great write up of Zombie Racoons and Killer Bunnies cover art.  It's not just schlocky good-bad, it's actually just bad, both in poor design, and in terms of not making me want to pick the book.  It's not just the "art", it's also the horrible fonts, the awful placement of the title, and the lack of skill shown in the photo manipulation. 

Feel free to use this space to talk about issues you have with art in genre fiction.  Pan some bad covers.  Get your mad on about how, if you see another Daryl Sweet(*) parti-colored dragon and topless flying centaur on a Xanth novel, your head will explode.  Or, if you just need a laugh, take a look at someone's collection of bad book covers.

*I love Daryl's work.  I really do.  But those topless flying centaurs make my head hurt.

Posted by Josh Jasper on October 2, 2009 | Comments (1)