IBARW and whitewashing on genre book covers

[sholio]

This week is International Blog Against Racism Week. Information and ongoing link roundup at ibarw.

My plan to write fic again this year, uh, fell through. In a major way. And beyond that, I can't think of much to say other than navel-gazing about my own whiteness and unrecognized privilege, and while there may be a time and a place for that, I don't feel that this is either.

But reading through the links from ibarw, I stumbled across one topic that I realized I actually do have something to say about. It's something that's fairly close to my heart as both a writer and a sci-fi/fantasy reader -- the way that dark-skinned characters are whitewashed on fantasy and science fiction book covers. There is a great post by smillaraaq on whitewashing on Joan Vinge's "Cat" books, that got me thinking about the whole issue of PoC characters in genre fiction being depicted as white -- whether as a marketing ploy or simply as a cultural default.

As smillaraaq's post touches upon, it's not like it happens occasionally, by accident, when the artist had an inaccurate or inadequate description of the character. It's everywhere, all over the place. It speaks to the unstated assumption that white=default, that white "sells". And, when there are already few enough characters of color in genre fiction, it makes those who do exist all the more invisible.

I went to my own bookshelves looking for examples, and didn't have to look far -- and, worse, both the books I found, in the first few minutes of looking, are new books, published without the last ten years or so. This isn't something that used to happen back in the 1960s and 70s but doesn't happen anymore. It's ongoing.

One that has been bothering me because I was just discussing it with a friend is Carol Berg's Transformation, in which it's made clear that the main character and his people are dark. But on the cover, we have this:



(I am not even going to begin to try to figure out WTF is up with the glowing green wings.)

Another book I have is Serpent Mage by Margaret Weiss and Tracy Hickman:



Okay. The girl on the balcony could be one of two characters, since, of the human or generally human-looking characters in the book, there are really only two that fit. One of them is, yes, blond. But she's barely seen in the book (I don't remember that she even has a speaking part) and dies off-camera about halfway through. The other, who has a large role in the book and is therefore a much better candidate to be on the cover, is described like this:

Her skin is a dark ebony. Her black hair is braided in countless tiny braids that hang down her back, each braid ending in beads of blue and orange (her tribal colors) and brass. ... She wore the accepted dress of Phondra, a single piece of blue and orange cloth wound around the body.

So they did one of two things here: either they chose to depict the white character who has almost no role at all in the book (or simply a generic woman who isn't meant to be any specific character -- and, therefore, clearly, the default for "princess" is presumed to be blond-haired and white even in a book where it's nothing of the sort) -- or the girl who is very obviously supposed to be African-looking in the book is blond and white-skinned on the cover.

I seriously do wonder what goes through the artists' heads when they do this. Is it because white is the cultural default, so that when they think "princess" or "swordsman" or "wizard", all they can manage to see is a white template? Is it because they send a layout to the art manager and it comes back with "Too ethnic - no mass appeal" scribbled across it? Some of both?

You might think this wouldn't happen in graphic novels, because the characters on the cover are basically drawn as they are in the book, but ... not exactly. There are definitely cases I can think of (and, as with mass-market paperbacks, probably many that aren't coming to mind or that I haven't seen) where a fairly dark character in the book was represented as a lighter shade on the cover. For example, Wendy and Richard Pini's Elfquest. This one doesn't even have the excuse that the cover artist is a different person, since they're self-published and Wendy Pini does all the art herself.

The Sun Folk are dark-skinned, and one of them, Leetah, is a major character. (See my icon! Leetah is NOT white.) But this is not at all evident on many of the original covers. For example, the original cover to the 1980s graphic novel of Elfquest: Book 1 depicts Leetah (far right in sparkly dress) in the exact same (Caucasian) skin tones as the other characters.



Her darker coloring is a little more evident on the cover to the second issue (this dates back to the late 1970s) but, two issues later, she's basically white again, and there's no excuse for this. It's not as if the author doesn't know what color her skin is. (Note: I'm not touching any of the OTHER issues with Elfquest's color-coding and exoticism here. There are areas where I think they did very well and areas that make me wince, but that could be a whole post all by itself.)

I don't think Wendy Pini was sitting around thinking "I have to make Leetah white on the cover or no one will buy the book" because, well, she wrote it; if she wanted to make Leetah pale-skinned, she could have done so. What's going on here is subtle and insidious as much as it's overt. It's what you get when you dig deep down into the artist's bag of symbols that we carry around in our brains and dredge up the symbol that our culture has given us for "glamorous" or "beautiful" or "best-seller" and come up with a white woman with flowing hair.

I know that I've seen Marvel and DC covers that depict supposedly PoC characters like Storm, etc., looking white (or in Storm's case, maybe I should say whiter than usual), but none of the X-Men trades on my bookshelf is a good example, so I had to go to the Internet. Probably the worst one I found was this depiction of Storm from one of the Ultimates covers. African. Yeah. (Oh, but -- random, mostly-unrelated-to-this-post geekgasm -- look what I else I found, while I was doing a Google image search for Storm. X-Men Lego rip-offs! Aren't they awesome? I WANT WANT WANT. And it actually does relate to this post, at least a little bit, because check out the two side-by-side versions of Storm in her original and new Ultimates costumes ... and respectively variable skin tones.)

Actually, in general, I think Marvel and DC have been worse with the whitewashing over the last ten years or so. Part of it is just that the coloring is less flat and more affected by lighting than it used to be (all the characters look a bit off for someone who, like me, was used to the flat four-tone colors of 1970s and early 1980s comics), but I do seem to notice, with no real empirical evidence to back this up, that the black characters, on both the covers and interior art, are often being depicted a lot lighter than they used to be. Since I haven't bought all that many Marvel and DC comics in the last ten years, though, I could really use a second (third, fourth, fifth) opinion on this. It's scary to contemplate that we might be, not only failing to make progress on visible CoC in mainstream comics, but going backwards.

Thoughts on this? I've thought about it a little bit before, in a vague and unformed sort of way, but this is the first time I've tried to organize it into a coherent post. I would welcome any more examples that others have. I know that there is quite a lot of this sort of thing going on, and I know I've seen more examples, but I'm having trouble thinking of them -- and, also, I'm quite sure there are plenty of times that I never even noticed, just like I never noticed, until having it pointed out, that Vinge's Cat is not as white as he appears on the cover of the book. (I'm also sure that it's been written about before, probably much better than I've managed to do, and if anyone has a link to other posts or articles on this, that would be very welcome as well.)

Comments

[klostes.livejournal.com]

One comment: The travesty of a miniseries that Sci Fi channel made from LeGuin's "Earthsea" series. The only casting I could agree with was Danny Glover for Ogion and Kristin Kreuk (?) for Arha. The rest of it? TOTALLY whitewashed the cast. Pissed me off from the get go, and then I heard what they'd done to the story. But the most egregious error was the casting. How hard would it have been to find a young Adam Beach type to play Sparrowhawk? A truly dark-skinned African-American to play Vetch? But nooooo, they had to go with the blue-eyed white boy as the main character. *Shrieks*

[kirei-seimei.livejournal.com]

I can't comment specifically on Earthsea because I've not read the books, nor seen the miniseries in its entirety. And I'm not defending whitewashing or whitecasting on principle (because life without diversity is dishonest and ignorant, not to mention boring).

But I will say that there's a key difference between a written/drawn series and a live-action series; notably being that you have to find a convincing actor. No, a good actor.

No, the best damn actor you can find for that part.

Sometimes (especially in adaptations), ethnicities can be tangled with if they're not deemed "essential" to the main story by the filmmakers. I'm not saying this is a good thing by any stretch of the imagination. It's not, and it should change. But it happens, quite possibly due to a lower number of performers (and heck, writers/producers/directors!) from minority backgrounds. It's the rule of 100: See a 100 actors for the role, you might find a great one. Consider only 10, chances are you'll only get mediocre.

This reminds me of a circular conversation I had with an RL friend in Melbourne, a performer whose family comes from Singapore. He complained that there are very few roles for people of Asian descent in most western performance art (plays, musicals, etc). We had a long, long conversation about whether this is because there appear to be few Asian performers around, and why it appears that there are few performers with an Asian background in the performing arts... are people who might have gone into the arts put off by the perceived lack of opportunities, or are fewer opprtunities even created due to the perceived lack of performers?

Sorry for going a bit OT there, but I think it's something that needs to be considered when we start talking about life-action.

[friendshipper.livejournal.com]

It was actually the Earthsea miniseries (well, reading and working through the reactions to it, and *my* reaction to it, and reconciling them) that made me realize why this sort of thing is so problematic. It's not that I hadn't noticed the pervasive whiteness of sci-fi and fantasy, because I had, and I'd even tried to cast my own in different ways (with mixed success). But, beyond being irritated by it, I don't think I really got why it was a problem, on all the many levels that it's a problem, before Earthsea.

[aelfgyfu_mead]

Augh! Augh! Augh! Don't mention Earthsea! Truly dreadful!

Sorry--you're absolutely right to bring it up. Ursula LeGuin herself disowned the project and has several essays online about the whole disaster, where she is far more eloquent than I. I'm usually reduced to the sounds Charlie Brown makes when Lucy pulls the football away.

[abyssinia4077.livejournal.com]

I wonder how much of these decisions is entirely artist's choice and how much is them doing what publishing companies tell them to draw?


Because, wow, yeah, that is scary.

(on that note, because my brain is too tired to be thinky, 1) X-MEN legos FTW! and 2) anytime you feel like settling down with Teal'c my offer to talk canon is open)

[friendshipper.livejournal.com]

I wonder how much of these decisions is entirely artist's choice and how much is them doing what publishing companies tell them to draw?

Yeah, I was wondering that, too. I suspect a little of both. I mean, I know that sometimes the artist doesn't even get any direction beyond "we want a painting of a knight storming a castle" or something like that. But even in a case like that, the artist's default is obviously "white" and that's a problem.

anytime you feel like settling down with Teal'c my offer to talk canon is open

Which I really do appreciate! Right now, I'm trying to concentrate as much as possible on original fic and on finishing up my outstanding obligations, but I'm still noodling with my Teal'c ideas in the back of my head.

[xanphibian.livejournal.com]

I'd love to read your thoughts on Elfquest if you ever get around to it. I haven't read them since I was about thirteen, and I wasn't aware of problematic portrayals at the time. I've been thinking of revisiting the series again soon.

I'm only just getting into X-Men comics now so I don't really have an informed opinion. Wish I could help. :\

[friendshipper.livejournal.com]

I read (and loved) Elfquest as a kid, and wasn't really thinking about any of this stuff at the time. I still admire it a lot, and it was a big influence on me as an artist at an impressionable age.

The big thing in Elfquest that bothers me as an adult, though, is how the humans are depicted as brutish and primitive and dark, where the elves (the elfin ancestors in particular) are beautiful and pale and civilized and light. It's not as if that's an unusual dichotomy in fantasy, and in a lot of ways they are drawing on stereotypes that are already out there, but ... it's there, and it's all throughout the original series. It's mitigated by the way that a lot of the casting does go against "type" -- the Wolfrider/Sun Folk dichotomy especially, with the civilized Sun Folk being the darker ones. But, still ... the dark skin on the humans is so unnecessary, I think is what really gets to me. For one thing, it's canon that the elves took their shape from human legends, so for the elves to be so pale in contrast to what the humans look like, especially with so much of the rest of their world-building being so comparatively well thought out ... it strikes me as lazy world-building -- falling back on a pervasive and problematic stereotype of "dark=primitive", "light=civilized". It wouldn't bother me so much if there was any other reason for it to be in there.

[parisindy.livejournal.com]

love your leetah avatar, i used to read elfquest all the time

[friendshipper.livejournal.com]

Thank you! This was actually one of the first icons I made when I got on LJ. *feels nostalgic*

[parisindy.livejournal.com]

but i do get your point

[ratcreature]

Word.

It is confusing on top of being racist as well. I ranted about this before, but the cover of Fire Logic by Laurie Marks is another examole, through half of the book I kept waiting for another important character to appear, because there was this white woman with flowing red hair wearing armor and weapons on the cover, who I assumed must be some important character, but the main female character I encountered first was dark skinned and also wearing many braids. It wasn't until the middle of the book that I concluded that the cover was just crap with no real relation to the content.

[friendshipper.livejournal.com]

In addition to everything else, it is confusing! I like it when the cover artist's version of the character matches closely with the one in my head and/or the one depicted in the book -- it gives me a nice visual when I'm reading. It's dissonant when the two don't match up.

[friendshipper.livejournal.com]

Um. And I just googled for the cover and, yeah, wow. From your description of the main character, I definitely see what you mean.

[naye]

It's always strange to see cover art where it's pretty clear that either the artist never got any author's notes on the subject, or just did whatever they wanted anyway. (Tangent: in Sweden, a bunch of fantasy books have been published with covers arbitrarily snatched from other English books/RPG manuals/random fantasy-ish art.)

But when someone somewhere along the line takes this as an opportunity to whitewash the characters of color present in the book, it becomes more than just "strange".

The examples above are good ones. I'm still boggling at what they did to Seyonne on the Transformation cover. And the Death Gate one - that's extra sad because all the covers do portray things from the books. Just look at Dragonwing, which has a pretty decent little Hugh on it. But, of course the "princess" has to be blond.

I'm so used to artists/editors/whoever deciding to stick white people on the cover of everything, that I actually notice when they get it right. Lately, I read Ursula Le Guin's Annals of the Western Shore books, and: look here!
Voices & Powers. (Couldn't get a larger image, but it's got Look Inside the Book, which has the cover.)

Both of these characters actually look like she describes them! (Which is very much non-white - as a matter of fact, I don't think there are any white people in those books? At least not of the blond, blue-eyed variety.) I think it says so much about this phenomenon that I'm actually surprised by this.

[friendshipper.livejournal.com]

Thank you for the cover links -- pretty! And I *do* see what you mean; when the artists get that sort of thing right (or just put something on the cover other than Random Blond White Person No. 6) it's noticable. Which is a sad commentary on how rare it is.

By the way -- along these lines, have you looked really closely at the Lies of Locke Lamora cover? Because I did, when I was skimming for examples for this post, and while it's hard to see all the details on the paperback version, Locke on the cover is ... well, I'm not precisely sure if they were going for "generic not white" or "Mediterranean/Middle Eastern" with him -- given the nature of the book, I'm thinking the latter -- but with his dark skin, straight black hair and high cheekbones, he is most certainly NOT depicted as a northern European.

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

Oooh, now you've go me wanting to go dig out my old Elfquest compendiums again... ;)

Now, I came to the series by way of the late-80s Donning/Starblaze color compilations, rather than the single issue comics, so I can't speak to the original cover art directly. But just going from the drastic shift in the art style and coloring between Book 1 and Book 2, I have to wonder if some of the inconsistency might have been a technical issue. (Umm, this being back when the whole series was four books, I think the current reprints are splitting them up into smaller volumes? but I digress) The coloring in the first volume -- not just characters, but clothes, landscapes, etc, has more of a blotchy, hand-painted sort of watercolor feel. I don't think it's a matter of print quality as this was whent he books were all put out by the same publisher, same paper quality, etc.; the style changes seemed to be down to however the coloring was done on the originals. (A switch from hand-coloring to computer, perhaps?) From Book 2 onward, the coloring was drastically different -- flatter, more solid, without that grainy painted look. Skin colors are stable from page to page and book to book. But back in Book 1, you'd see noticeable inconsistencies almost on a page-by-page basis; it was most easy to see on the darker-skinned Sun Folk, but look closely and you'd see it on clothes, backgrounds, and even the Wolfriders.

Which isn't to say that there may have been unconscious lightening going on too, of course -- particularly in the color covers, where she was working in color from scratch instead of adding color to finished black-and-white art. But the way the coloring and the art style sort of stabilizes around Book 2 does make me wonder if some of it was down to working out issues with her technique.

Since I haven't bought all that many Marvel and DC comics in the last ten years, though, I could really use a second (third, fourth, fifth) opinion on this.

I've mostly been a Vertigo/indy/manga girl myself, so I can't vouch for that directly, but I have definitely seen folks complaining about the whitening of characters recently; I'll try to see if I can track down the posts where I've most recently seen griping about the trend.

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

And on the mainstream-comics whitewashing front...I finally found the most recent post griping about such that I remembered reading recently; unfortunately, it's locked. But the particular case being mentioned here involved X-Men character Sunspot/Roberto Da Costa (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunspot_(comics)), a Brazilian mutant who's previously been depicted with a dark complexion; the poster was noting that compared to the original images like this (http://www.marveldirectory.com/individuals/s/sunspot.htm), the most recent X-men issues have him looking unrecognizably lightened, scarcely darker than the average white character. They didn't provide scans and I'm not finding anything more recent in a cursory Google, but that's one area you could check for yourself the next time you're in a comic shop...

[naye]

Since you wanted links - turned up this post from last year's ibarw in Elizabeth Bear's LJ. Which is fascinating, because she's writing from a perspective of a self-proclaimed "clueless white" person who has written books populated entirely by non-white characters.

It's interesting what she notes about the word "race", to. I can use it in English, because I've seen it about in discussions like these, but I literally cannot say "ras" in Swedish without getting a gut-deep feeling of wrong. When I talk about people in Swedish, I always use "ethnicity" or "culture" or any other word that doesn't imply human beings can be cataloged and classified and sorted into categories. (Categories where some are also sometimes understood to be "better" than others, which... yeah, there's our problem right there.)

[friendshipper.livejournal.com]

Thank you for the link! It turned out to be quite appropriate in a reply to another comment, below (where abyssinia4077 is talking Elizabeth Moon's frustration with her own cover artists).

And that's very interesting about the word "race" between languages ...! Now I'm wondering, do you think it's because the word is actually carrying a slightly different (more negative) weight in Swedish, or is it simply easier to use the same word in a different language because it doesn't carry as much emotional baggage? Like how some people find it less blasphemous to swear in different languages than their own?

[skywardprodigal.livejournal.com]

Thanks for this!

I remember reading Elfquest and loving that Leeta was 'black' but being disappointed by her being painted lightskin in the covers.

I really liked that in the black-and-whites that the sun folk were clearly dark-skinnned.

[friendshipper.livejournal.com]

Thank *you*!

I hope that smillaraaq is right and it was, at least partly, the author flailing around in the early issues trying to get a handle on portraying darker skin tones. It does seem to be the case that later covers show her more consistently dark-skinned.

[rocknlobster.livejournal.com]

Aaaaah, someone else who likes Transformation!

I reaaaally don't understand the cover choice for the American printings of those books. Some of the foreign covers are interesting (http://iriseyed.livejournal.com/10225.html?view=70129), and I guess the cover for the third book is sliiiightly less sucky? It's better artistically speaking anyway, though it still isn't what I think Seyonne looked like at ALL.

I really don't understand the whitewashing process. And also the reverse: the dark skin = barbarian. I've seen plenty of cheap fantasy/scifi covers with dark-skinned people, but they're always wearing tiny leather outfits and often holding spears. W. T. F.

And in a related way, people whitewash architecture as well on book covers! Going no further than Transformation, for example, the castle on the cover is 90%+ likely to be the castle within Aleksander's soul (that being why Seyonne has those hideous wings instead of the nice wings he should have...). In which case you'd think the architecture would reflect DERZHI style, their culture being a sort of cross between Vikings and Medieval Arabs. I.E., NOT A FRICKIN VICTORIAN LACE CASTLE. wtf, seriously. I've seen this a LOT on bookcovers, as much as or perhaps even surpassing whitewashing of characters. Many times, even if there are no characters portrayed on a book cover, the architecture of buildings/structures on the cover is lifted straight out of Disneyworld or the like. It confuses the hell out of me.

[friendshipper.livejournal.com]

The whole Transformation cover is simply awful in pretty much every way. It says nothing about the book inside; I remember thinking when I first saw it that it looked like a pulp fantasy romance, and I almost passed it up but was just bored enough to give it a try. Which I'm glad I did! But, yeah, leaving aside the whole "making Seyonne white" thing, there really isn't anything about that cover that is remotely reflective of the book or the people within it. You're right that they're starting to get better by the third book -- at least, they've managed to get all the way to "D&D tie-in novel" territory. *g* Maybe if the series had gone for another four or five books, they would have made it all the way ...!

I think part of the problem is simply that artists aren't thinking outside the box, and are drawing on standard fantasy tropes rather than going to their research books and creating something beautiful, unique and compelling. And part of it is that marketing houses think that stereotypes sell books.

[calcitrix.livejournal.com]

Hmmm....Well, as for Elfquest, if it makes you feel any better, the more recent stories skip several thousand years; in the meantime, humans have gotten relatively civilized--to about Medieval level. Those humans are definitely lighter than their ancestors, which means that Wendy may have simply been portraying the earlier humans more realistically rather than just darker. Wendy also introduces a human who becomes a main character, and is in fact adopted by the Wolfriders (as an adult, no less). Finally, this medieval era is when the Palace was supposed to land, only things got messed up and it got sent back thousands of years. So the elves were basing their appearance on sculptures and things from that time, which, it turns out, were made based on the few glimpses that humans get of the Wolfriders from time to time (how's that for a paradox?) Er...can you tell I'm a fan? I read the Marvel series first, which did portray skin color accurately on the covers. Wendy has also recolored (http://tbonecafe.files.wordpress.com/2008/03/elfquest.jpg) the first four graphic novels and they are gorgeous.

I haven't gotten many comics lately, but you made me think about the titles I've picked up in the last few years. I'm happy to say that even Marvel has been producing stories like Runaways (http://eplteen.files.wordpress.com/2008/05/runaways-32.jpg), which features a black character and an asian one (still a low %). Still, not only is the black character on the cover in the front of the group, he's also more or less their leader.

Then there's Astro City, (http://www.astrocity.us/features/gallery/astrocity_localcover.jpg) which has several minority characters. Each issue focuses on a different hero, and the stories are pretty good about fair representation.

Let's see...last good one. Tamora Pierce has a series called "Circle of Magic" and of the four characters, two of them have dark skin (three are girls). Daja (http://www.avdistrict.org/library/tpbook12.jpg) is shown on her cover not only with fairly dark skin, but also with hair that would be considered a black style. I've seen on many covers that even if a character has darker skin, the hair is short on a man or flowing on a woman (like Storm). Briar (http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/images/n5/n27547.jpg), who has a more Mediterranean background, could easily have been painted with lighter skin, but they went darker for him.

Anyway...those are the positive examples I could think of, just to recognize and applaud them!

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

Ahhhh, you're just the person to ask, since I mostly dropped Elfquest after the original four-novel series. This recent full-recolor job, is it covering the interior pages as well as the covers? Because if it is, finally getting the coloring in Book 1 to match the rest of the later volumes might be just enough incentive to replace my cherished late-80s compilations...

[calcitrix.livejournal.com]

This is not really related to my last comment, as far as comics and books go. I'm reading James Loewen's "Lies My Interpreter Told Me" about how inaccurate historical markers and statues, museums, and booklets can be. He includes a few essays about placement of minorities (natives sitting at the feet of white men, for example) and how the sculptor/artist has very specifically done this to convey the unspoken meaning of white superiority. It's everywhere! The sheer number of these things we have around the country just floor me. Many were put up in the early 1900s, when white supremacists (not necessarily in the neo-nazi sense, but in the "white ruling class" sense) wrote inaccurate history texts, paid to put up thousands of confederate markers around the country, and so on. The sad thing, he points out, is that no one has bothered to change or add to them. So school children are still getting information that was written during a very racist time in our history and not being taught that as part of the context.

Anyway...what I meant to add before getting on a roll is not only to look to see if minorities are on the cover of a book, but where they are in relation to the white characters. And to read Loewen's books for more detailed analysis...

[friendshipper.livejournal.com]

Good point. Body language and pose is very powerful. And just like written material is filtered through the writer's viewpoint, so images are, maybe even more so, a construct of the artist's society.

I do think it's vitally important to include context with the artifacts of the past in teaching children about them. What I want to say here is that the racist propaganda of the past, with explanation, is a valuable teaching tool, more valuable than if it were torn down and buried -- but I know that for me, as a white person, it's awfully easy to toss off a comment like that. I don't have to live with the pain of those tangible reminders of the past; its effect on me and my mostly-white ancestors wasn't anywhere near as cruel or long-lasting. But for whites now, I think that it can be a wake-up call to be smacked upside the head with a visual reminder of the appalling wrongness of the beliefs that our ancestors held, which have filtered down to us in more insidious form. Sometimes you have to see a thing in its pure form to recognize the more toned-down version ...

[amalthia]

I really hate when the covers of books are whitewashed because as soon as I hit the character description part I always go to the cover and then back to the paragraph kind of confused wondering who the hell the guy on the cover is supposed to represent! There are times I really don't like covers on books at all. It feels like false advertising, or another way to trick people into reading a book, and an insulting trick too.

[friendshipper.livejournal.com]

There is definitely a bait-and-switch kind of feeling. I think it's worse with race-switching because it's so insulting and marginalizing, whereas getting, say, the spaceship wrong isn't nearly so loaded. Imagine if they novelized "Alien" and made Ripley a big burly GUY on the cover ...

[the-willow.insanejournal.com (from livejournal.com)]

Hi,

Two things. The cover of Carol Berg's Transformation did in fact turn me off the book without even seeing what it was about. I'd just finished her Lighthouse Duet and was looking for more by her. But as much as I appreciated her character creation in the prior two books - one look at that cover had me thinking "oh, she's one of those'.

I completely forgot about marketing and executive influences on covers. I just figured the potential I'd seen for a new author to love had been a dream.

Second thing: The recent lightening of Vixen in DC comics and the mistreatment in Marvel of Misty Knight's hair (which also includes giving her a pixie cut, extremely pale skin and blue eyes). If you're no longer following comics you likely missed it.

I'd point you to my blog, but it's currently blarg as Google messes around. kali921 brought it up and had her entry reposted at Racialicious (http://www.racialicious.com/2008/06/10/look-whos-been-vixenified-this-time/).

[friendshipper.livejournal.com]

The cover for Transformation is AWFUL. Even leaving aside that they screwed up pretty much everything about how the hero looks, it's bad in pretty much every other way, too. But the book itself is good. It's definitely on my "keeper" shelf.

The recent lightening of Vixen in DC comics and the mistreatment in Marvel of Misty Knight's hair (which also includes giving her a pixie cut, extremely pale skin and blue eyes).

AAAAAAAAA! WHAT? NO! I love Misty Knight; though I generally tended to identify with male characters more than female ones as a kid, she was one of only a couple female characters from my 80s Marvel comics that was up there with the guys for me for sheer cool awesometastic. The tentacle-rape cover from a couple of years ago was bad enough, but ...

*looks at link*

*screams*

[abyssinia4077.livejournal.com]

!!!

So I just got back from my first day at WorldCon and I went a panel about how to write military sci-fi.

And one of the questions that came up was how to use the military sci-fi genre to address issues like sexism and racism and classism.

And Elizabeth Moon went off on this miniature rant about how she's written characters of color but can't seem to get them on the covers of her books, even the two novels where the main character was a woman of color, they were still drawn as white for the cover. And she commented how she doesn't get a say about the cover art and she understands it's a marketing decision, but it still makes her angry.

And I sat there, listening (she was AWESOME in so many ways) and thought of you and this post.

[friendshipper.livejournal.com]

Hmm, fortuitous timing! And naye linked me to a post from last year's IBARW (http://matociquala.livejournal.com/1194439.html) where Elizabeth Bear is talking about the same phenomenon -- that out of 17 books she's written, 9 of which have PoC protagonists and 3 are racially undeterminate, only ONE has a PoC on the cover.

It's really appalling that it's not only still happening, but happening so very blatantly. And I suspect that one reason why I was having trouble coming up with good examples when I wrote the above post is because, in many of these cases, like with the Catspaw book that smillaraaq pointed out, I took the cover at face value and didn't notice that the character's description contradicted it. Or I might have simply assumed that the character was white (or didn't think about it at all, not thinking to question the cover depiction) in the absence of a clear description. Because I don't have to.

I'm actually really glad to hear that Elizabeth Moon is angry about it -- I mean, obviously it's not good that it's happening, or that it's happening to her, but that she's noticed and it bothers her and she's speaking up about it ... that's good!

[wemblee.livejournal.com]

WAY late to the party, but:

(Note: I'm not touching any of the OTHER issues with Elfquest's color-coding and exoticism here. There are areas where I think they did very well and areas that make me wince, but that could be a whole post all by itself.)

...I would love to see that post.

[friendshipper.livejournal.com]

Hi! It's never too late to come to the party. I've been spending the evening link-hopping IBARW posts as well, from oyceter's roundup.

I really *should* write that post, although the comments ended up touching on it somewhat anyway: the biggest problem that I have with the color-coding (now that I'm grown and thinking about it more analytically) is the contrast of the ultra-pale, Aryan-looking elves (representing technological and spiritual advancement) vs. the relatively darker, primitive humans -- and it gets worse when we glimpse the technologically advanced future, in which the relatively dark humans are now very *pale* humans.