Don’t judge a book by its cover.
That’s what people say, right? But we all do it. You’re in the bookstore, or the library, and you’ve got dozens—hundreds—of choices. Which book do you pick up first?
The one with the most intriguing cover, of course.
Then you read the back. If you like what you read there, you maybe read the flap copy. If that pulls you in, you read the first page. Maybe the first chapter. And somewhere along the way it’s the story, the writing, that makes you buy the book or check it out.
But it’s that cover that makes you pick it up in the first place.
How important is a good cover to an author? With rare exceptions, I would say it’s almost essential to the success of a novel.
So when my Starscape editor, Susan Chang, called me one day to ask for input on the cover for The League of Seven, the first book in my new middle grade trilogy about superpowered kids in an alternate 1870s America fighting giant monsters with rayguns and airships and clockwork robots, I was both excited and scared.
I was excited because none of my previous publishers had ever asked me what I wanted my covers to look like. Always before, my covers would appear fully illustrated and polished in my inbox with a note from my editor to the effect of, “Here it is!” Never “What do you think?” or “Let me know if you have any feedback.” The covers were presented as finished products for me to love or hate without recourse, which, frankly, is pretty standard in publishing.
So I was excited to be asked, but scared because I’m not an artist. Like great art, I like to think I know a great cover when I see one. But how is a great cover made? How is a great cover composed, designed, illustrated, lettered? These were all mysteries to me, and it felt presumptuous to tell the trained, skilled art director and artist how I, a fiction writer, thought they should do their jobs. What to do?
Rather than dictate something specific, which was a job far better left to the professionals, I decided to fall back on “I know great art when I see it,” and scoured the Internet for illustrations that had the same look, flair, and emotion I hoped my cover would have. I started with steampunk images I loved—faux-Victorian men and women tinkering with steambots, kids in leather vests and brass goggles, and a host of raygun and airship designs. These, I hoped, would demonstrate the look and tone I wanted.
Next I looked for images by some of my favorite illustrators. I pinned Hellboy and B.P.R.D. images from Mike Mignola and Guy Davis. The Mignola-designed DC Animated Mr. Freeze. Catwoman images by Darwyn Cooke. (That black leather and goggles look is very steampunk, after all.) Spot illustrations and portraits by Abigail Halpin.
But by far the most pinned artist on my Pinterest board was Brett Helquist. For the uninitiated, Brett Helquist is the illustrator of tons of terrific middle grade books, including Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, Blue Balliett’s Chasing Vermeer, James Howe’s Tales from Bunnicula series, and Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark series. I love the way he draws characters, with heavy lines, angular, exaggerated features, and the sense that there is actually something going on inside those illustrated heads. “I know there’s no way we could get Brett Helquist,” I wrote in the note to one of his illustrations I’d pinned to my board, “but if we could get someone who draws like him, that would be awesome.”
Three months later, I get an e-mail from Susan that says, “So, we got Brett Helquist to do the cover.”
Cut to me falling out of my chair.
I’m so thrilled to have Brett Helquist illustrating the League of Seven series. At this point, I knew it was time for me to just get out of the way. “Um, yeah, I’d love to see the three main characters on the cover,” I said. “And maybe Mr. Rivets, their clockwork manservant. And an airship? And a raygun? Just whatever Brett wants to do will be awesome!”
And it is. It’s the most amazingly awesome thing ever. There’s Archie Dent, with his white hair and brass goggles. And Hachi Emartha, the Seminole girl, with her flying clockwork circus, and Fergus MacFerguson, whose blood was replaced with the blood of an electric squid. And yes, Brett even got a raygun and an airship in there too, and a few gears for good measure.
When I wrote The League of Seven, I started with a list of all the things ten-year-old me would have thought were awesome and threw in as many of them as I could: rayguns, airships, submarines, giant monsters, secret societies, superpowers, brains in jars. And I can tell you right now, ten-year-old me would have thought this cover was the awesomest thing of all.
So please, I beg you: do judge my book by its cover. If you do, it’ll be a blockbuster.
Here’s a Q&A with Editor Susan Chang, Art Director Seth Lerner, and artist Brett Helquist, along with early mock-ups Brett did of the cover. The book was originally subtitled “Mangleborn,” but the subtitle was eventually dropped on the final cover.
Starscape: Brett, you were our number one choice to illustrate The League of Seven. How do you choose which illustration projects to take on?
Brett: It’s not very complicated. I simply choose things that I enjoy. Sometimes I’m drawn to a character, sometimes it’s the story. I work almost entirely from my imagination, so I need the characters and their world to be very vivid and real in my mind. That’s about it.
Starscape: How did you approach the cover concept for this book?
Brett: I loved the characters in this book, so I wanted to find a composition that showcased them and show a little of the world they live in.
Starscape: Did you use cover models for the three protagonists? If not, who or what were your inspirations for how these characters would be depicted?
Brett: I rarely use models. I read the manuscript carefully and completely and then I start drawing. I draw faces until something feels right. It feels a little like a recognition.
The League of Seven by Alan Gratz, illustrated by Brett Helquist, will be available from Tor’s Starscape imprint in August 2014!
So, did you really enjoy Q getting decked by Sisko, or what?
hahahahahahahahahaah
At first I really hated the idea of Q. As a sci-fi fan, I hate the way sci-fi and fantasy are often lumped together in the same category and I saw an omnipotent alien as a way to sneak an element of fantasy into a sci-fi series. And that did happen: in the TNG episode “Qpid” — the last time we saw Vash — Q took the Enterprise crew on a romp through Sherwood Forest.
Nevertheless, in time I became a big fan of John de Lancie. His fun, charming and one-of-a-kind performances earned him complete ownership of the role. I couldn’t imagine another actor playing Q. This episode is not de Lancie’s best; it aired about the same time as the TNG episode “Tapestry” and I always thought that “Tapestry” was the stronger performance. Still, I enjoyed this one, too.
Vash is an interesting character because she represents one of the first efforts to steer away from Gene Roddenberry’s vision of a utopian future where humans are no longer motivated by profit and material gain. That vision was most evident in the first season of TNG and it often had a whiff of smug triumphalism about it. The franchise was already backing away from that vision in TNG Season 3 when we first met Vash. In “Q-Less” — the last time we see Vash in TV Star Trek — the transition is complete. Vash may very well be a misfit in 24th century human society, but misfits make interesting characters and one of the refreshing things about DS9 is the way characters are given more individuality and are not merely stereotypes of their respective cultures.
I liked the sexual tension between Vash and Bashir. It looked like Julian was about to get lucky but then Q intervenes and sends him to bed — alone! The oo-mox scene with Vash and Quark was hilarious.
Q is seriously my ALL TIME FAVORITE SNG charachter ever!! I don’t think I’ve disliked a single episode he’s been in. He’s especially amazing in Voyager!! Him and Janeway crack me up lol
@2: I tend to agree: DeLancie’s performance was the only thing that made the ludicrous concept of Q palatable.
But this episode illustrates how the writers often seemed to use Q as a sort of audience stand-in, voicing the criticisms you’d hear from viewers and basically giving the characters a chance to respond to those criticisms. The fact that he actually used the word “technobabble” in onscreen dialogue makes that clear; until then, that was just a bit of fan/producer vernacular, a teasing nickname for the technical dialogue. Q was almost a metatextual character, coming ever so close to breaking through the fourth wall and acknowledging the audience.
On the pre/post-ganglionic thing, I never felt that later fix was necessary. I never took his line here to mean that he mistook the actual items for one another, but rather that he misread a written question, thinking it said one thing when it actually said another.
Why does the Daystrom Institute, which is named for a computer scientist, have an archaeology department? I think that once the Institute was introduced, there was too much tendency by later writers to use it as a catchall science institution, which is a case of small-universe syndrome.
This in some ways seemed more like a half-baked idea than a fully thought out episode. “Hey, what if Q shows up on DS9?” says one writer. “But he has Vash with him” says another. “Bring her along and let her be disreputable with Quark” says the first. “What’s the problem in the episode?” says the second writer. “Make something up- it’s a Q episode… just technobabble a b plot…”
While I love the interaction between Q and Sisko (it further differentiates that Sisko is not Picard just as Picard was not Kirk) but there really isn’t anything happening here. As you pointed out, Vash has chemistry with just about everyone except Picard, but I think that’s because Picard is a very responsible and mature individual and you can’t quite imagine him involved with someone as irresponsible and immature like Vash. Picard is simply too serious to get involved with Vash, whereas Quark is appropriately irresponsible, Bashir is appropriately immature (and young enough to be motivated by lust) and Sisko isn’t so “by the book” like Picard is.
To follow up on CLB’s point in #4 about the Daystrom institute, I agree with your basic issue. The only thing I could think is that like Harvard University, which was built as a divinity school and remained as such for almost 170 years before it was secularized. Perhaps Daystrom started out as a computer/AI institute but became involved in other areas as it grew. A real world example is the US’ supercomputer network, run by the National Science Foundation. The supercomputer network is run by NSF’s Office of Cyberinfrastructure but it touches on almost every other scientific discipline because of the growing abilities of computer based experimentation and modeling. But unless that’s what happened, Daystrom institute has basically been a catchall for non-Starfleet or Vulcan scientific research.
@@.-@ and @5: As for the Daystrom Institute, consider MIT. It is generally considered an engineering/applied science school; yet it has a stellar linguistics department and even the philosophy department is well regarded. Nevertheless, in a Federation of hundreds of worlds one would expect a number of top-notch research institutes. Perhaps the Daystrom Institute is the MIT of 24th century Earth and it appeals to Vash because Earth is home.
As much as I love John Delancie, I generally hate Q episodes (“Tapestry” is a major exception, perhaps because it’s never entirely clear whether or not it is a Q episode). But here at least he keeps this from becoming merely a Vash episode. Vash is never a good idea. Hetrick’s lack of on-screen chemistry with Patrick Stewart is odd, since they apparently had a fair amount of it off screen, even being engaged at one point. Still, that lack of chemistry poisoned the character for me forever. She’s never written very well either.
I do like that neither Vash nor Q recognize O’Brien at first. We know him, because he regularly had lines to speak and interacted with the main cast. But for guests of the week, he really was just the guy who pushed the buttons for the transporter (which meant that Q really never would have had anything to do with him).
@@.-@: I really like your explanation for Bashir screwing up the question by misreading it. Happened to me in high school where I flipped biography and autobiography in a test because I was going too fast. Unfortunately, the way the line is written it is difficult to interpret it that way. I think I’ll do so anyway, though.
One of my favorites from season 1. Sisko decking Q is also a favorite scene of mine.
Bobby
http://www.bobbynash.com
I had stopped watching early in the 1st season, so when I decided to pick it back up again, this was the last episode I remembered watching, so I started back up with the next ep. (Unfortunately I had already seen the next 3 eps. Just didn’t remember that I had.)
I always thought Q had a personal connection to Picard, but his appearance here made me wonder if Q pestered other Starfleet ships and outposts, not just those that happened to have a tv show. I haven’t read any of the novels, so I don’t know if that’s been addressed. I suppose it probably has.
I see the bug lunky alien that’s always hanging about is in the picture with Q and Sisko dueling (no idea whatsoever what his name is). Is this his first appearance? Personally I think he should have a section in the recap just letting us know if he appeared and where he was hanging out (you could even mention what he was doing, which would just be hanging out).
I always loved this episode because it really underscored the difference between DS:9 and TOS/TNG, as well as between Sisko and Kirk or Picard. “Picard would never hit me!”
DS:9 was a much darker, more violent – and yes, far more exciting – series. Sisko isn’t the Gorn; I seriously doubt Kirk & Picard together could take him in a fistfight.