The funny thing about it is it's not even a case like A Wizard of Earthsea where Le Guin very carefully and deliberately takes her time in letting you realize that Ged is not white. The Cat books do not have an awful lot of deeply detailed physical description of the protagonist, since they're written in the first person and Cat is not exactly the sort to spend hours in front of a mirror brooding about his looks! But in each book (and the one short story) she manages to find a way to slip in a rundown of the most basic details -- dark skin, pale curly hair, slit-pupilled green eyes -- somewhere close to the beginning; you never have to read more than two or three chapters into the book to find it. And yet somehow all the artists manage to get the eyes and the haircolor right, but the skintone and hair texture mentioned in the same paragraph as those details is so very, very far off. It's a puzzlement.
I'm generally a big fan of Whelan, but his cover here for Dreamfall is in some ways the worst offender here. Taken in isolation, I like it the best of any of the cover art for this series just as a painting with no connection to anything; the colors and composition and facial expression really catch my eye. But as a depiction of the book and the character...it's a very mixed bag. He's got a lot of details there -- the wreckage, the dream-reef, the tattered clothing and visibly bandaged injuries -- that show he's paid a lot of attention to the scene being shown; Cat is actually even more bloodied and bruised than shown there, but I can see downplaying that sort of gore when it's not a horror title. But even if you want to excuse the too-short hairstyle as the curls being straightened out and spiked with product the way he did in the previous book...Cat's still shown as so white he nearly seems albino! And out of all the books, this one is probably the one where it's hardest to ignore that Cat has brown skin; he's half-alien, on a planet where the human corporations have basically disposessed and ghettoized the native aliens, and so there are repeated mentions that the Hydrans all have dark, brown, "spice-colored" skin with golden or reddish undertones that aren't seen in humans, and more emphasis than usual that despite his mixed heritage, Cat's looks are pure Hydran and the humans around him are very aware of it. I can sort of see missing the hair length as that's not something that's noted in as much detail as the color of his skin, hair, and eyes -- blink in the wrong spot where he's being disguised with traditional Hydran clothing and hairstyle, and it'd be easy enough to not realize that his hair can't possibly be this short. But I'm a little boggled at missing all the skintone cues.
His cover for Catspaw, on the other hand, does a lot better with the details; Cat's still too pale there, but the shorter spiky hairdo this time is actually straight out of the text, as are the databand on his wrist and the earring; and for my tastes it does the best job of all the different cover paintings of capturing that blend of old-before-his-time streetsmart wariness and painfully youthful vulnerability. It's not obviously from any particular scene, or perhaps I should say it could fit a number of different scenes, but other than the too-pale complexion it feels the most like the vision of Cat in my head. (And I've got a very, very vivid picture, despite or perhaps because of Vinge only giving the most basic details -- other than the feline slit pupils, he could be my girl Rosa's long-lost littermate.)
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branchandroot
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Date: 2008-03-06 07:39 pm (UTC)I'm generally a big fan of Whelan, but his cover here for Dreamfall is in some ways the worst offender here. Taken in isolation, I like it the best of any of the cover art for this series just as a painting with no connection to anything; the colors and composition and facial expression really catch my eye. But as a depiction of the book and the character...it's a very mixed bag. He's got a lot of details there -- the wreckage, the dream-reef, the tattered clothing and visibly bandaged injuries -- that show he's paid a lot of attention to the scene being shown; Cat is actually even more bloodied and bruised than shown there, but I can see downplaying that sort of gore when it's not a horror title. But even if you want to excuse the too-short hairstyle as the curls being straightened out and spiked with product the way he did in the previous book...Cat's still shown as so white he nearly seems albino! And out of all the books, this one is probably the one where it's hardest to ignore that Cat has brown skin; he's half-alien, on a planet where the human corporations have basically disposessed and ghettoized the native aliens, and so there are repeated mentions that the Hydrans all have dark, brown, "spice-colored" skin with golden or reddish undertones that aren't seen in humans, and more emphasis than usual that despite his mixed heritage, Cat's looks are pure Hydran and the humans around him are very aware of it. I can sort of see missing the hair length as that's not something that's noted in as much detail as the color of his skin, hair, and eyes -- blink in the wrong spot where he's being disguised with traditional Hydran clothing and hairstyle, and it'd be easy enough to not realize that his hair can't possibly be this short. But I'm a little boggled at missing all the skintone cues.
His cover for Catspaw, on the other hand, does a lot better with the details; Cat's still too pale there, but the shorter spiky hairdo this time is actually straight out of the text, as are the databand on his wrist and the earring; and for my tastes it does the best job of all the different cover paintings of capturing that blend of old-before-his-time streetsmart wariness and painfully youthful vulnerability. It's not obviously from any particular scene, or perhaps I should say it could fit a number of different scenes, but other than the too-pale complexion it feels the most like the vision of Cat in my head. (And I've got a very, very vivid picture, despite or perhaps because of Vinge only giving the most basic details -- other than the feline slit pupils, he could be my girl Rosa's long-lost littermate.)