I know, I know—the RWA has suspended the graphics standards, they have an ad hoc committee studying the issue, yadda yadda yadda. But I came across this image for Cory Doctorow’s Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town and was struck by two things:
1. It’s really, really beautiful. Which isn’t a surprise, because it seems that the artist is Dave McKean, who’s done some really, really cool stuff, including illustrating one of my all-time favorite children’s books, The Day I Swapped My Dad For Two Goldfish (written by the absolutely squee-worthy Neil Gaiman).
2. This cover would not have passed the (now-suspended) RWA cover standards.
There’s some sort of lesson here, I guess. Somewhere.
Also: Cory Doctorow utilizes a Creative Commons License, whereby you can download his books for free. How cool is that? SO FUCKING COOL. Just for that, I’m going to go check out his books from the library (no e-book reader for me, and no comfy chair, so reading books on the computer is not feasible) and if I like ‘em, I’ll definitely buy them.
I say this as if this is in any way different from the way I usually do things, ha!
Thanks are due to Vanessa Jaye, because if it hadn’t been for her blog, I wouldn’t have noticed the cover and a pretty nifty new-to-me writer.
Addendum:
I found more smut. I might add more as the mood hits me.
Damn, that is a beautiful cover.
Yeah, it’s beautiful.. but it’s a different cover than what’s shown on her website and on amazon.com. Similar style, but different.
or
http://tinyurl.com/a9fzx
Oh, I know what I posted wasn’t the official cover image. I don’t believe I said it was. The official cover is very, very beautiful as well.
Hot damn, that monstrously big JPG is bugging me. I’m going to re-size it.
oops! I’m sorry – I’d only intended to give the pic to the JPG, not include it itself. Please edit it out!
where did you find the other graphic you included? I’d like to see it in a larger form than you showed. It’s truly beautiful. Just that illo alone is making me want to read the book.
At least Aphrodite will soon be covered by a wrap of some kind. Perhaps the woman holding the wrap was sent by the RWA.
Spitting coffee at my monitor at Alyssa’s comment.
where did you find the other graphic you included?
Vanessa Jaye included it on her blog. I looked all over Cory’s site, and I can’t find it; he might’ve taken it down. But I managed to figure out that he uploaded a series of graphics that seemed to be different iterations on the same theme—Dave McKean probably made a bunch of different images before deciding on which one to go with for the official cover.
Anyway, here are links to the big-ass versions of the various images:
Image 1
Image 2
Image 3 (this is the image I posted in my blog entry)
Image 4
Image 5
Thanks, Candy. (I was trying to figure out how many hands there were, and if it was just two hands blurred multiple times, or many hands. I’m still not sure.)
I love that trading dad for goldfish book. We used to read it a lot. I think he should have kept the rabbit though. Mom would have grown to like it fine.