AQATSA: In Celebration of Bad Covers

[inverarity]

Don't you love Contemptible Covers? What is up with paranormal romance covers? They're worse than those bodice-ripper romances with the Highlander Spice Guy flexing his abs at Victorian strippers. It's all Photoshopped bubble-butts and fuck-me tattoos. I actually saw this on the shelf at Borders and thought they'd forgotten to put one of their

Comments

[fpb]

Well, we both know that sleaze has been part of this business for longer than I care to remember. Boris Vallejo was doing that sort of thing when I wasn't old enough to legally buy them. But what is really horrendous about the Exalted cover is that it has just enough perception of what would be a valid and interesting myth-idea to pervert it. The rest are just repetitious and boring, but this one - I mean, pale girl with floaty white clothing, seen against a background of white bird outlines and sky - that is something that means something, something almost Junghian in its imaginative suggestion. But the white floaty clothes are arranged in an Ann Summers/Victoria's Secret cheapo sleazo design, keeping just enoug of what they should have to show that the artist, or whoever suggested that design, had a good idea of what he wanted to pervert. Even the violent foreshortening on the body has directly to do with the image that is being perverted, since it points upwards at the sky, as such an image should - but does so by seizing our eyes, as it were, by the scruff of their neck and forcing them along exaggerated and uncomfortably fleshy lines. This is not Poser or Photoshop: the artist is competent enough to do his own drawing, imaginative enough to select the right colours and line quality - and villainous enough to deliberately pervert the very thing he had been able to perceive.