Boom.
Late last week, with the unfinished artwork for Darrell K. Sweet’s painting for the cover of A Memory of Light, the final volume in Robert Jordan’s legendary Wheel of Time series, many of you suggested that it might be the best cover in the series. Well, is it?
Well, I’ll be damned. This piece was looking to be one of Sweet’s best in years. Suitably epic. Love the colour palette.
Curious that there’s no Rand on the cover, though. Hmm…
So, I do a google search for “fantasy women art” and this shit pops up:
We’ve all seen it before, and it’s fucking absurd. Do any three of those women look like they’re ready to take a sword-swing from those angry warriors behind them? Do they look like they could stand any sort of a chance in a pitted battle against even a moderately armed and armoured child?
No, no they do not.
So, in comes one of my new favourite websites: Women Fighters In Reasonable Armor. It’s exactly what it sounds like: a collection of artwork from around the web that features female characters wearing reasonable, functional and cool looking outfits. Like, you know, the kind that you generally find on male characters?
Art by Alex Alice:
I’m fairly certain that Newton and the art team at Tor UK are just trolling me at this point. An old geezer and a melancholy Dashboard Confessional fan who doesn’t even know how to properly wear a bag with a shoulder strap? Le sigh. I’m far more interested in the fact that Newton spent some time combing through the first volume, Nights of Villjamur, and smoothing out some of the wrinkles:
There’s more, though: I’ve actually made quite a few (over a hundred) changes to Nights of Villjamur. Call it the ambitions of a first-time author, call it crap writing, but there were a few points of the text in this book that I believed caused a clunky experience. I’ve managed to iron many, many of these out, thankfully. It’s only a word or two here, a line there – not a complete re-edit, mind you, but enough to give me peace of mind that the most ridiculous of the excesses have now been removed.
This sort of thing happens all the time when authors are given a chance to tinker with their own work (David Anthony Durham recently mentioned that he’s done the same thing to the first volume of his Acacia trilogy). Nevertheless, it would be interesting to compare the revision.
You know, hooded figure aside, that’s pretty darn sexy and much preferable to the photorealistic cover for The Black Prism, while still retaining the same feeling for the series. This isn’t the final cover, but gives us a good idea of the direction that Orbit Books is taking with the series. I like it. Great colours. I’ll be sure to post the final cover when I get my hands on it.
Thoughts?
