Well, if it makes you feel any better, I pegged Dreamfall as a Whelan cover the second I picked it up, but I didn't realize Catspaw was him as well until I went to look it up for that last comment and suddenly noticed that familiar little signature on the data-screen behind Cat! Somehow that one didn't ping for me as his style the way the later book did...and it probably didn't help any that Cat looks so different on the two books that some bit in the back of my mind had trouble imagining they could be by the same artist. There's not a huge gap in story time between them to justify huge changes, either -- he's in his late teens in Catspaw and early twenties in Dreamfall, although the text is a bit ambiguous as to how much he might appear to look his actual age. His early life was extremely rough and could very well have left him looking a bit prematurely aged, but at the same time his Hydran blood leaves him a bit shorter and finer-boned than average for human males, so that all might make him look a bit younger too...
The weird lighting on both of those covers does wash things out some and make it hard to judge the true skintone under all the weird lighting effects, but the relative lack of contrast between hair and skin in both makes it hard for me to imagine that his skintone, whatever undertone it might have in more normal lighting, is anything close to what I'd call "dark"...
But still, those are two of the best covers this lot's managed. This later edition of Psion doesn't just wash out his skin tone, but gives him straight hair too! The first edition, aside from all the dated late-70s styling, is the only one to show a skintone I'd actually consider dark, but turning the curly hair into a full-out afro makes me a little twitchy; while there's nothing in the text to blatantly support or contradict that hairstyle, I can't shake a nagging little voice wondering if someone in cover design might have been thinking "hmmm, homeless drug-using uneducated slum-dwelling petty criminal with dark skin...yeah, he's black!" And the latest edition, well, I'm just not terribly crazy about that as a painting, and in my mind he's darker than that, but at least this time he has both curls and a skintone that's at least a few shades darker than his hair...
(Or am I just working from a totally different scale here? When I hear "dark" or "brown" I do not think of a shade like a caucasian with an olive complexion or a bit of a tan, which is about as far as most of these covers go...I'm thinking someone with coloring at least as deep as my mother at a bare minimum, skintone that'd fail the brown paper bag test.)
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The weird lighting on both of those covers does wash things out some and make it hard to judge the true skintone under all the weird lighting effects, but the relative lack of contrast between hair and skin in both makes it hard for me to imagine that his skintone, whatever undertone it might have in more normal lighting, is anything close to what I'd call "dark"...
But still, those are two of the best covers this lot's managed. This later edition of Psion doesn't just wash out his skin tone, but gives him straight hair too! The first edition, aside from all the dated late-70s styling, is the only one to show a skintone I'd actually consider dark, but turning the curly hair into a full-out afro makes me a little twitchy; while there's nothing in the text to blatantly support or contradict that hairstyle, I can't shake a nagging little voice wondering if someone in cover design might have been thinking "hmmm, homeless drug-using uneducated slum-dwelling petty criminal with dark skin...yeah, he's black!" And the latest edition, well, I'm just not terribly crazy about that as a painting, and in my mind he's darker than that, but at least this time he has both curls and a skintone that's at least a few shades darker than his hair...
(Or am I just working from a totally different scale here? When I hear "dark" or "brown" I do not think of a shade like a caucasian with an olive complexion or a bit of a tan, which is about as far as most of these covers go...I'm thinking someone with coloring at least as deep as my mother at a bare minimum, skintone that'd fail the brown paper bag test.)