Welcome back to Cover Snark! Get a beverage of choice, pull up a chair, and let’s go!
Tara: The sea has many songs and I have many questions. Question number one: WTF?
Claudia: No. 2, will she be able to swim at all if her head is bigger than her tail?
Maya: I guess now I know what it looks like when an accent color stops being an accent color and become a violet hellscape I’ll never escape
Shana: Is this what they meant by violet eyes? Because those laser orbs are terrifying.
Sarah: She looks SO pissed off. Like, “You sea faring fuckboys have shown up again and expect me to sing on command? UGH. Why.”
Carrie: You know, I was willing to throw down for this cover, sins of bad perspective aside. I rather like the terrifying eyes of doom because pissed off mermaids are the best kind. But then I realized that her hair is not only perfectly dry but also perfectly styled, and I know mermaids do like their combs, but she’s not sitting on a rock so what the hell how is her hair like that.
Maybe we are incorrectly assuming that the tail and the head belong to the same person. Maybe the mermaid is looking for her favorite barbie doll which she thinks may have gotten lost in the depths but is in fact bobbing along the surface.
Although anyone who has ever taken a Barbie doll out of the box knows all too well that that hair would never happen – all Barbie dolls have a secret power which causes their hair to become tangled irreversibly the moment the box is opened.
Tara: Right? Her hair is perfect and her makeup is flawless. How is this possible?
Catherine: I’m not at all sure it’s her tail. If it is, she’s an awfully strange shape. Maybe there’s another mermaid sneaking up behind her, about to shoot out of the water and splash that annoyingly perfect hair?
From Elizabeth S: His butt is a black hole HAHAHAHAHAHA
Sarah: Also, he’s horny.
Amanda: Also squicked out by the wet, goopy embryo planet.
Catherine: I really thought she had impaled his shoulders on her claws for a minute. And now I am staring at his snakeskin back like it’s a Rorschach blot, trying to find meaning. I don’t think I’m going to find meaning…
From Pam G: Is that a flashlight in your jeans or are you just glad to see me?
Sarah: How did he get his bread rolls so impossibly fluffy?
Elyse: I love that his top is just sleeves. That’s it.
Tara: A little alien bolero jacket!
Sarah: What does he use to keep the chest parts in place?
Tara: Double-sided tape?
AJ: I’m gonna be honest, if that alien doesn’t have 4 arms I’m not interested. STACKABLE PECS OR GTFO
Tara: Soooo, I don’t know what to say about this except to point out that that’s a drag queen on the wing. So much is wrong with this that I might be starting to grow fond of it
Shana: That cover looks like someone cut out a bunch of random things from a children’s book, and glued them together
Sarah: That cover is a disaster in many, many ways.
Susan: When your only tool is clipart…?
Amanda:
I just read a book where the heroine, upon seeing the hero’s abs for the first time, describes them as looking like “a package of King’s Hawaiian sweet rolls.” That description aside, it was a good book—but I kept getting an image similar to the OUT OF DARKNESS cover. I don’t care how many hours a day a man puts in at the gym, no one has abs like that!
You’d think, after 17 years that I’d know better than to look at cover snark first thing in the morning. I’m going back to bed. My brain…it…there’s not enough coffee in the world… And I have no words.
My biggest WTF question about the meramid cover is the angle of her tail. It just doesn’t mentally line up. Plus the head looks like the Barbie doll head you practiced makeup on.
Alien Embrace – between the shoulder horns that will rip up bedding (he better be paying to replace) and the vacuum sealed butthole (not going near him at a chili cookoff) I would have to hard pass.
Out of Darkness – the king’s hawaiian yummy abs aside, his arms look like intestines. no.
The Right Closet – I am intrigued yet want to stay away from politics in my romance.
I went to Amazon to look at the OUT OF DARKNESS cover to see it more clearly. I searched on Anna Carven and the first thing that came up was a book by Anna Hackett: EMPEROR – Book 2 of 2 of Galactic King series. I think EMPEROR is a worthy cover for snark. It features a heavily muscled sci-fi type of warrior, long hair, probably wearing a kilt, looking very determined, carrying a neon blue laser-eyed hobby horse. A hobby horse???? Now I’m picturing this warrior riding into battle on his hobby horse, kind of like a Monty Python skit.
Sorry, can’t get a link that works. But please take the time to search it out. Priceless.
Out of Darkness: Can’t decide if those are shoulder length gloves (like opera gloves for people with extreme arm modesty) or somehow his arm skin is scaly armor. Those abs look very injection molded to me.
To Hear: Is it skewed perspective, or are Ocean Barbie’s shoulders extra narrow– about 3 inches from neck to shoulder on each side? I don’t think that’s her tail, and the gauzy fins are giving me weird shrimp vibes.
Alien Embrace: She seems to be the only one actually embracing, but I guess a human would be an alien to spike shoulder snake dude (with an odd lavender ear).
Right Closet: Why does the cartoon person have a halo/nimbus? Is the patriotic doughnut supposed to be a life buoy, or just another random element?
This week’s pictorial theme seems to be If looks could kill.
To Hear the Sea-Maid‘s Music: I picture a whole series, like Andrew Lang’s polychrome fairy books. This one happens to be deep indigo; others in the series will have cerulean eyes and teal eyes and sea-green eyes and stormy grey eyes and so on, each with a suitably colored background.
Alien Embrace: Decades ago I read a commentary on this trope of “alien (or monster) goes for human woman”, pointing out that this is just as implausible as a human man being attracted to female lobsters . . . but not males. And yeah, either there’s a third party involved, or the lady has two additional hands with some truly lethal claws.
Out of Darkness: Is this about a double amputee recovering from the trauma with a couple of highly specialized killer prostheses?
The Right Closet: Ermm, that’s actually kinda cute. But the over-the-top silliness really calls for one or two additional, wholly unrelated items. Paradoxically, I think it requires more mismatched colors. And for heaven’s sake get rid of the flames; they kill the frivolous effect.
Tbh, I thought the guy on the Out of Darkness cover had scorpion claws for arms. I stand by that interpretation.
I ain’t embracing anything that has spikes where I’m likely to embrace. Getting stabbed in the middle of a makeout is a real buzzkill.
Nor would I be that jaunty if my plane was crashing.
@Lori, I agree, I could not decide if that was armor or a carapace. I think he’s part lobster.
Asssuming the rest of his nails are like his thumbnails Out of Darkeness guy would be taking a nail trim before he got anywhere near me.
Dee ocean mermaid either has very narrow shoulders indeed or seriously sloped shoulders which seem unlikely in a swimmer … Why am I applying logic to one of these covers?
The Out of Darkness cover guy might be holding dog puppets….
To Hear the Sea-Maid’s Music: Shana, you’re right. Those are laser eyes. This is obviously Jessica Jones’s cousin, who really does have laser eyes. Which would be a much more interesting tale retold.
Alien Embrace: If he’s got a black hole for a butt — and he so, so obviously does — what kind of “protection” does he use?
Out of Darkness: This is what happens when the cover designer mixes up two entirely different Lego kits to make the cover model. Or more than two.
The Right Closet: If “politics can be a drag,” what does that say about those kicked out of the Kitchen Cabinet?
Now I can see it’s a fish (mermaid?) tail. My first thought was “Why is a vacuum hose in the ocean spraying out water.”
Out of Darkness looks like a superhero wannabe, but he’s gone rogue after being rejected by Marvel and DC.
I think it’s clear that “Out of Darkness” alien got together with “Alien Embrace” alien sometime in the past and now the light that connects the two shines brightly – across universes, across planets, across authors and book series, to be re-united here… on the screens of cover snark.
@Jazzlet we have to make sense of what our eyes are seeing. That’s why we try to logic cover snark