When I posted about my blog post about book covers and cover artists, Of Covers and Books, my friend Nalin, whom I’ve known since grade 6, commented about his love of the art of Boris Vallejo. (Nalin is the only other person I know of from that far back, apart from me, who still has the same love of science fiction that we had back then 🙂)
I had totally forgotten Boris Vallejo till Nalin reminded me, but I do remember being fascinated with the art of both Vallejo and Luis Royo. I don’t think I knew of either one doing book covers back then. But, if I recall correctly, I do remember there being both art books and possibly calendars with both their art back in the 90s. I even have a vague recollection of some connection to the Science Fiction book club for both of them, but maybe that’s a false memory?
I went back and checked and obviously, both Vallejo and Royo have done cover art for books. And there are plenty of people who’ll tell you they bought a book just because of a cover by either Vallejo or Royo. I looked through some of the covers and while I didn’t recognize any of the books that Royo had done cover art for, I did recognize a bunch that Vallejo had worked on.
For example, (again, hat tip to Nalin) there are these Tarzan covers — not to mention so many other memorably fantasy series such as Conan, Death Stalker, Gor and many others.
The page I linked to with the Tarzan covers by Vallejo, also has other Tarzan covers by Neal Adams. I’m more familiar with Adams from comic books and if I were to go into comic book artists, then this post is going to be very long indeed. So let me actually get to the point of this particular post 🙂
While thinking about Vallejo and Royo and their non-cover art, it occurred to me that cover art doesn’t have to be about book covers alone.
For example, there’s the cover art for albums where you find some beautiful (and brilliant) artwork. One example that is close to my heart is Meat Loaf’s “Bat Out of Hell” trilogy of albums.
The art for the “Bat Out of Hell” cover was done by Richard Corben. Now, I love Richard Corben’s distinctive artwork — it has this colourful and almost 3D quality that I think is hard to miss. I think I first became aware of Corben through his work on the “Den” comics, but he is somebody that I think has a very memorable style.
Then there’s the art for the second album by Michael Whelan:
Michael requires no introduction if you’ve seen any of my poems based on his artwork, or if you are a science fiction/fantasy fan since his art is used for the covers of many well-known and well-loved books.
Then there’s the final album in the trilogy and the cover by Julie Bell:
In case you missed the fact that Boris Vallejo’s and Julie Bell’s website is one and the same, Julie is married to Boris 🙂 They collaborate on projects and while I had seen Julie Bell’s artwork before, I had no idea that she’d done the artwork for the third “Bat Out of Hell” album, which kind of brings us all the way back full circle to the start of this post.
And if you think that is a curious connection, I’ll leave you to consider this cover art by Josh Kirby for Terry Pratchett’s “Soul Music”:
I knew at one point in time that this was considered to be (possibly?) an intentional reference to the “Bat Out of Hell” album art, but had forgotten all about it. But just now, looking at Michael Whelan’s art for the second album (and not Richard Corben’s), I was like “Oh, doesn’t that look like the Soul Music cover?”
So I went to the APF (Annotated Pratchett File) and looked up “Soul Music” and sure enough, they mention the connection to “Bat Out of Hell” 🙂
I have read most of the APF at one point in time, but I swear, I didn’t remember any of this and this post was not planned to have so many coincidences 😛
