Judging by the Cover...This Book is Like a Total Freakout, Man.

I'm almost done with The Blue Star and will have some thoughts on it later (well I have thoughts now, but I 'll save them for later). But I wanted to do a quick post about the cover of the book. One thing that first attracted me to collecting the BAF series was the striking cover art. Amazing artists like Gevasio Gallardo, Bob Pepper, Robert LoGrippo, Dean Ellis, Sheryl Slavitt, and many others produced a series of beautiful wraparound cover art that, I think, set a standard for fantasy art.

That said the cover for The Blue Star, while striking, is rather atypical of the series. The painting by Ron Walotsky is uncredited, as are the first 8 or so covers in the series. But his signature does appear on the cover, so there is no mystery about the artist. I think this may have been his only cover in the series, but I'll check on that and get back to you if I'm wrong.

What, I think, makes it atypical is the psychedelic quality. It has the hard-edged hallucinatory look of a black-light poster you might have found in a head shop or dorm room back in 1969. So it seems to be more of it's period than many other covers in the series. Not that realism ruled the day in the rest of the series, but the acid tinged quality of Walotsky's work (in this case) looks like it could have come from a poster for a Dead concert at the Fillmore. Right down to the font used for the title. That rounded, bottom heavy, lettering seemed to be the default psychedelic lettering style of the late sixties. I know most of the kids in my 6th grade class could do a pretty good rendering. It turned up in alot of art class projects. (We were so damned groovy).

In addition to that, having now read all but 30 pages of The Blue Star, I don't find it particularly representative of anything in the story itself. Is suspect someone told Walotsky the story had witches and a blue jewel in it and he took it from there. I don't recall any cat or cauldrons in the book, but they are depicted prominently the back cover. At least I think that's a cat. Ditto for the bird (Phoenix?) on the front cover. Not in the story. He does depict a blue star, so it seems unlikely that this was just some painting they had lying around in the art department. I know this sometimes happened. It happened to my friend Dave Smith. One of his Oron books had a cover that was totally unrelated to anything in the story. Turned out "Vinnie" in the art department had bought up a bunch of paintings from an artist, and they needed to be used somehow.

I hope to discuss the cover art for the BAF as I move along. I'm not sure I'll always have something to say, and I'm sure I don't know anything about art. But why let that stop me. I don't really know anything about writing either. I just like readin' books n' stuff.