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I’ve Got You Covered

I’ve Got You Covered

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Frank Frazetta The Death Dealer

In my last post I took a look at SF cover art, and how the fashion in covers changes over the decades. As with fashion in clothing or hairstyles, you can make a pretty accurate guess about time periods and genres just from a book’s cover. Whether you’re influenced in your purchases by that cover is a personal thing. In the spirit of leaving no stone unturned, today I’m looking at Fantasy cover art.

Since I’m a writer and not an art critic, I avoided discussing the work of any particular SF artist – I was looking at how covers change, not how an artist evolves. However, I don’t think we can talk about Fantasy cover art without at least a brief look at Frank Frazetta. In a way, his covers are the perfect example of what I’m talking about. When you look at a Frazetta cover, you know what time period, and what genre you’re looking at.

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Mastabas: Early Tombs of Ancient Egypt

Mastabas: Early Tombs of Ancient Egypt

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Interior of the mastaba of Meresankh III. The row of
statues shows the queen and female members of her family

Not everyone gets a pyramid when they die.

As nice as it would be for everyone to get their own massive stone monument that lasts for all time, it’s really expensive and the one percenters want to have something of their own that makes them feel special.

So for those of us who don’t get to rule over Ancient Egypt with an iron fist, but aren’t so poor that we’re stuck in a shallow pit in the desert, there’s the mastaba, a home away home where we can spend the afterlife.

Mastabas were rectangular buildings made of mud brick or stone containing a few rooms and a burial chamber beneath it reached via a vertical shaft. They were wonderfully decorated on the inside and had a place for making offerings to the dead.

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A Tale of Two Covers: The Loney by Andrew Michael Hurley

A Tale of Two Covers: The Loney by Andrew Michael Hurley

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The Loney UK-small The Loney-small

Andrew Michael Hurley self-published his first collection Cages and Other Stories (2006), and released his second, The Unusual Death of Julie Christie and Other Stories (2008) through tiny Lime Tree Press. However, those days are over. His debut novel Loney, released in the UK in trade paperback by John Murray last year (cover above left) won the Costa First Novel Award, was listed as a Best Book of the Year by the London Times and Daily Mail, ranked a Best Summer Book by Publishers Weekly, won Best Book of the Year in the British Book Industry Awards, and was a Sunday Times Top Ten bestseller.

It was published in the US by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt last May with a new cover (above right), and the buzz on this side of the pond was just as stellar. The New York Times Book Review said “The terrors of this novel feel timeless… There are abominations here, and miracles.” Jeff VanderMeer called it “Stunning,” and Stephen King said, “It’s not just good, it’s great. An amazing piece of fiction.”

Here’s the description.

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Vintage Treasures: Famous Fantastic Mysteries, edited by Stefan R. Dziemianowicz, Robert Weinberg, and Martin H. Greenberg

Vintage Treasures: Famous Fantastic Mysteries, edited by Stefan R. Dziemianowicz, Robert Weinberg, and Martin H. Greenberg

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Famous Fantastic Mysteries Weinberg-smallI spent yesterday and Friday at the Windy City Pulp and Paperback show in Lombard, Illinois, about 30 minutes from my house. And as soon as I finish this article, I’m going to scoot over there again.

I found a great many treasures at this show this year. More than usual, even. And I’m looking forward to reporting on them here. One of the more interesting was a copy of Famous Fantastic Mysteries, a 1991 pulp reprint anthology from Gramercy edited by Stefan R. Dziemianowicz, Robert Weinberg, and Martin H. Greenberg, in terrific shape, which I bought for just $5.

Famous Fantastic Mysteries was a much-beloved fantasy pulp which ran from 1939 to 1953. The publisher was Frank A. Munsey, a name well known to pulp fans. The first bi-monthly issue was cover-dated September-October 1939, and contained A. Merritt’s “The Moon Pool,” Ray Cummings’ “The Girl in the Golden Atom,” and stories by Manly Wade Wellman, Donald Wandrei, and many others. The magazine was a success, and it quickly switched from bi-monthly to monthly.

While the magazine relied chiefly on reprints, especially in the early days, it commissioned original art from many of the top artists of the day, especially Virgil Finlay and Lawrence Sterne Sevens, and today is treasured as much for the fabulous covers and interior art as the fiction.

In its 81 issues, Famous Fantastic Mysteries offered reprints of SF and fantasy pulp stories by Max Brand, E. F. Benson, Robert W. Chambers, William Hope Hodgson, Lord Dunsany, Bram Stoker, H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Arthur Conan Doyle, Jack London, and countless others, as well as brand new fiction from Henry Kuttner, C. L. Moore, Murray Leinster, Theodore Sturgeon, William Tenn, Margaret St. Clair, Arthur C. Clarke, Donald A. Wollheim, Robert Bloch, Ray Bradbury, and many more. See the complete issue checklist at Galactic Central.

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Shabtis: Servants in the Ancient Egyptian Afterlife

Shabtis: Servants in the Ancient Egyptian Afterlife

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Some very bling shabtis from the 18th dynasty tomb of Yuya and Thuya

We all know the ancient Egyptians were obsessed with death. What with their elaborate spells, mummification, and tomb preparations, you’d think that the Egyptian afterlife would be one big vacation. After all that preparation they deserved a bit of rest.

Not so. The gods subjected the deceased to all sorts of jobs and obligations. The afterlife was just like our world, where all the usual cultivation and manufacturing had to be done. If you didn’t want to spend eternity doing manual labor, you needed to have some hired help.

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A Tale of Two Covers: Skullsworn by Brian Staveley

A Tale of Two Covers: Skullsworn by Brian Staveley

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Skullsworn-small Skullsworn UK-small

We covered the first three novels in Brian Staveley’s Chronicle of the Unhewn Throne right here last year. Skullsworn, the new standalone novel in the same world, features the adventures of a priestess-assassin for the God of Death. It will be published by Tor Books this week in both the US and the UK.

Although the US and UK editions have similar publishing dates, that’s pretty much all they have in common. The descriptions for each book are markedly different — and the covers are dramatically different. The US version by Richard Anderson (above left) has lush colors and and action scene, while the UK cover (above right), designed by Matthew Garrett, is heavily design-focused. In a guest post at Tor.com, Brian Staveley talks about the US cover.

This one hits all the right notes… it gives a feel for the city, but here Pyrre is in the shadows, close to the quotidian world of human affairs, but separate, unnoticed. She’s also motionless. Her knife is drawn, but the drama doesn’t come from the knife itself, or the imminent violence, but from what’s in her mind, from her struggle to understand her own motives and emotions, then to translate them into the life she wants to live. It’s not easy to fall in love, especially when you’re staying up late every night giving women and men to the god of death. That’s the book I’m trying to write… The final version of the cover is just perfect. The color, the claustrophobia of Dombang’s hot, narrow alleys, the fish-scale lanterns, Pyrre’s crouch, ready, predatory, but not yet committed — this cover captures everything I’d hoped about the book.

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3×3 Illustration Annual #13 Now Available

3×3 Illustration Annual #13 Now Available

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3x3magazine interior

One of my most cherished annual purchases is the Spectrum anthology of Contemporary Fantastic Art, which collects some of the finest SF, fantasy, and comic art created every year. It’s a gorgeous volume that’s well worth a leisurely browse on a Sunday morning.

Volume 23, edited by John Fleskes, was released last November. We’ve previously covered Spectrum 20, with a Donato Giancola cover that’s a companion piece to his Red Sonja cover for Black Gate 15, and Spectrum 16, which contained Malcolm McClinton’s cover to Black Gate 13.

I know that Spectrum is unique in celebrating the best fantastic art every year, but I also knew — at least theoretically — that there had to be other illustration anthologies out there. But it was still a surprise to stumble on a copy of 3×3 Illustration Annual #13 in the magazine rack at Barnes & Noble last week. It’s a thick magazine printed on heavy stock, 400 pages crammed full of full color art. And such art!

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Cover to Cover

Cover to Cover

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Heinlein Door 1 Heinlein Door 2 Heinlein Door 3

Until relatively recently, I never looked at cover art. I bought books because of a review, or, more likely, because of a personal recommendation. There was art I liked, and some I didn’t like, and some that embarrassed me for one reason or another. But, the art in and of itself didn’t influence my purchasing of any book.

It was recently brought to my attention, however, that the style of cover art comes in and out of fashion, like anything else. Many of us can tell, just looking at the clothing in a photograph, in what decade the photo was taken. Hairstyle is a great indicator, as are necklines, width and length of collars and cuffs, of hemlines and sleeves. Shoulder pads anyone? Thirty years from now, someone looking at today’s photos are going to think of the 2010’s as “the decade of the beard.”

There are many people better qualified than I to talk about cover art as art. I just want to talk about it as covers. My examples are completely arbitrary, and usually come from my own shelves. Keep in mind that in order to look at changing fashion in covers over decades, I have to look at works that have been in print for that long.

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A Tale of Three Covers: Allen Steele Resurrects Captain Future

A Tale of Three Covers: Allen Steele Resurrects Captain Future

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Captain Future Winter 1941 Asimovs-October-1985-small Avengers-of-the-Moon-smaller

Captain Future was created by editor Mort Weisinger way back in 1940, but it was the great pulp writer Edmond Hamilton who made him popular. Hamilton wrote dozens of stories featuring the futuristic adventurer between 1940 and 1951, such as “Captain Future and the Seven Space Stones,” which appeared in the Winter 1941 issue of Captain Future: Man of Tomorrow (above left, cover by Earle K. Bergey). Most of Hamilton’s short novels were reprinted in paperback in the 60s, and there was even a 1978-79 anime production that brought the Captain some fame in markets like Spain and Germany, but in general the character was long forgotten here in the US by the mid-80s.

In 1995, Allen Steele wrote “The Death of Captain Future,” a fond homage to Hamilton’s classic tales. It was the cover story for the October 1995 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction, with a stellar retro-pulp cover by Black Gate cover artist Todd Lockwood (click the image above left to see Todd’s original painting). “The Death of Captain Future” was nominated for a Nebula Award, and won the Hugo Award for best novella of the year. Steele returned to the same characters four years later with “The Exile of Evening Star” (Asimov’s SF, January 1999).

Fast forward nearly 20 years, and we find Steele’s brand new novel Avengers of the Moon on sale at bookstores across the country. It returns once again to Hamilton’s Captain Future milieu, but with a more ambitious tale, and this time Steele hews much closer to the original source material, right down to Captain Future’s colorful cast of sidekicks, and the villainous U1 Quorn, a half-Martian renegade scientist. Avengers of the Moon was published in hardcover by Tor Books this week; the cover artist is uncredited.

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Revolutionary Street Art in Cairo

Revolutionary Street Art in Cairo

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From January 25 to February 11, 2011, the world watched as Egypt convulsed in a mass uprising. Across the country, protesters from a wide range of backgrounds vented their anger at the regime of President Hosni Mubarak, which they accused of corruption and police brutality. They also protested against rising prices, high rates of unemployment, and a host of other grievances. Everyone from students to labor unions to feminists to Islamists marched to topple the regime.

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