This week, we’re taking a look at some reader-submitted stepback covers. So nice when the cover is rather bland and then you open the flap and HOLY CANOLI are those REAL?!
Our first stepback: Patricia Pellicane’s Sweet Revenge
Sarah: “The sea is rising up behind me, and here, I have this dead girl with giant silicone boobies. Aren’t Coast-Guard-approved floatation devices made of silicone? I sure hope so!”
Also, can we talk about how disturbingly long her first two fingers are? What does she DO with those fingers?! Prostate exams… on giraffes?
Candy: “Non non non, ma cherie…You keep your knees bent, lift your breasts UP and suck that stomach IN. Like so, comprends?”
Or maybe he’s demonstrating the newest Aikido throw to the little chickadee?
Under the Wild Moon by Diana Carey
Sarah:“Darling, I don’t think it’s going to work between us. First, I have to go fight those monks over there. But more importantly, you have jaundice, you aren’t able to stand up, and one of your breasts appears to be coming out of your shoulder. And, now you’re melting into a puddle. Don’t you see? It’s not you. It’s me. I can’t handle your specialness.”
Candy: YAY medieval mullets! Very authentic.
Side note: All these bitches need to look into knee surgery or something. The premature kneecap failure rate among these models must be appalling.
The Dark Horseman Marianne Harvey
Sarah: You know the horse is thinking, “Ok, I’m about to go over the cliff because Lord Bozo doesn’t look where he’s going, AND I have to pull the weight of this doofy dead woman ol’ Bozo insists on dragging everywhere, even though she’s beyond rigor mortis and her dress is clearly from three seasons ago. And NOW there’s some big fire burning over there and what is he doing? He’s looking down her cleavage again. Maybe I can throw them both over the cliff.”
Candy: Riding a rearing stallion with a shirt mostly unbuttoned is eminently practical and a sign of excellent horsemanship. Also, allowing your stallion to rear so wildly about 2 millimeters away from the edge of a cliff. Between that and the chick with the mean crick in her neck, I say this tableau looks like a Darwin Award waiting to happen.
I was fine until I got to The Doofus Horseman. That poor horse! We can’t tell from the picture, but with his luck he’s probably a gelding too.
Never mind the stupidity of trying to KISS a man on a rearing horse, but doesn’t she seem to be pretty tall in regards to the horse? It looks like her waist comes to the top of the horse’s back, which makes it a pretty small horse. Lord Bozo looks in proportion to the horse, so I think if he was on the ground, his head would come to her chest! In order to look manly, he HAS to be on the horse to be taller. I just discovered your site a few weeks ago, and I love it!
Now see, I thought that was Robin Hood fighting Friar Tuck in the background of the second one, but monks might make more sense (or less, since none of these make sense). But the knee surgery comment was the one that had me rolling.
I have only recently taken up the habit of reading certain meat-puppet romance novels, and I have come across similar covers.
The tendancy for puny human publishers to put humans of indeterminate (and often unhealthy-looking) skin colour into bizarre (and always unhealthy-looking) positions groping each others overly large (but probably very tasty)jutting pieces makes it clear to me why we Nolorcs never have too hard a time conquering bald-ape territories during our reigns of terror.
Jutting pieces? Is that the right word? You humans have so many words for genatalia. We Nolorcs only have one: “Prugg” – which translates to “baby-maker”. There – very simple.
In that top picture, that guy’s totally going for third base right through her dress. Creep.
That boat sticking out from his head is at a more natural angle than his head.
It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s shipman!
Neck, I meant sticking out of his neck—that’s what happens when I hit submit instead of preview!
ROTFLMAO! WHY? Can anyone explain to me why the women on most Romance covers have to be swooning over a guy? The knee surgery comment was right on the money! Give me a heroine who can stand on her own.
I made the mistake of looking at these on my PDA at work today. There’s no telling what my coworkers thought was going on.
The perspective in the first picture is really messed up. The ocean appears to be bulging from within, and I think his ass is causing some kind of eddy in the water. Seriously, if you look at the picture blown up, there is this little splashy area to the left of his butt. That business of pressing his palm down on her abdomen while grabbing her tit looks like some new chiropractic technique.
In the second one, the woman looks like she’s phosphorescent, and the hair and the gown are basically the same color.
The hero in the third
does
look like he’d be at least a foot shorter than the heroine.
“Between that and the chick with the mean crick in her neck…”
…and two dislocated shoulders! Sheesh. How does she do that?
Maybe she doesn’t have a spine.
Hmmm. Did they practice yoga in Civil War times?
sure. Blame the girl. It’s always her problem and she’s got melty knees.
look at that girl in number one again. Her teeth are gritted for a reason. And number two’s green because she’s sick.
It’s Hero Halitosis, I tell you. the women are all being polite and looking the men in the face as the men jabber on about their exploits but fact is, these guys do NOT visit the dentist . . . whooowhoo yick. And the guys are always too busy for the personal hygiene in other ways as well. Number three woman is trying to get upwind. Yeah, she might go off the cliff, but anything’s better than getting another puff of his hot air.
I think the chick in the second one has been spending way too much time partying at the nuclear waste dump and is seriously radioactive. I’m tellin’ ya, stuff is about to start falling off her. There…see! The bottom half of her legs just fell off!
LOL, with so many instances of jaundice on these covers, I’d demand a press check with every printing.
Never noticed the tsunami in the first one until I read the snark. You two always hit everything right on the nose! 🙂
Reading over the comments, it occured to me that there might be something in that ‘spineless heroine unable to stand up for herself’ theory that people have bandied around about romance novels.
Do the covers reflect this? Or are spineless, weak-kneed women personal preferences for many cover artists and publishing art directors?
I am amused by the fact that romance cover heroes appear to believe that a lady makes babies in her belly button.
Ooh, good point, Jennifer. Either it’s a subliminal message about woman’s inability to be without a man, or it’s the result of secret lobbying by the chiopractor industry.
You make the call!
I met a SmartBitch from a novel land
Who said: Two mammoth, firm and manly breasts
Adorn a torso; stroking them, a hand
Half-shrunk, enhances size more. ‘Tho no vests
Do mar the sight of skin in odd hues tanned,
With sharply-drawn half-crescent shadows streaked
‘Neath muscles bulging, peaked by whorly buds
The tightest trousers that the fluffer tweaked.
And in a voice like thunder he did boom:
“Babes, you can call me “Manlinessâ€, King of Studs,
Look on my pecs, so mighty that you’ll swoon!â€
But beer can holding yet will have its day,
In waning breezes of the afternoon
His pendulous man-boobs, stretch-marked, do sway.
usual apologies…
EAP? I think that whirring sound is Shelley spinning in his grave.
Well done!
My offer to make sweet lesbian babies with/for you still stands, EvilAuntiePeril.
We can’t tell from the picture, but with his luck he’s probably a gelding too.
Actually, geldings are usually pretty happy campers. They’re free of all the hormonal crap that mares and stallions deal with.
Anyway, I’m hoping the rearing horse brings his hooves down on idiot woman’s feet.
Just finished blogging about all the stupid things writers write when they don’t know about horses. Guess I should add “artists” to the list of people who don’t know shit about horses.
falls down and worships EAP
For some reason, seeing these covers all in a row brought up something completely obvious (yet which I never noticed before) to mind: in nearly all cases where a cover features a male and a female, the female is in a physical position that is “submissive” in comparison with the male who appears “dominant”. This isn’t a 100% rule, but it seems to me that when you do see a woman in a posture that reflects an attitude of strength and self-confidence, she’s alone in that picture (e.g. if she appears physically larger or on top of the man she even still doesn’t appear “dominant”).
This whole statement is pretty much coming from memory only, not any hard and fast evidence and I could be completely full of it—so I’m wondering: has anyone else has noticed this?
I suppose in the case of historical romances, this shouldn’t be bothersome because it’s true enough that women were in a noticeably subservient position in society (though of course in these books, the women in question were all exceptions to that rule or found a way to use society’s mores to their advantage), but I find I’m bothered all the same.
Egads! has anyone else has noticed this? Sorry! I meant something more lucid like “has anyone else noticed this?”
Also, apologies for being such a downer. I just reminded myself of the Womynists from PCU. Next thing you know I’m going to be asking in a judgmental tone, “You participated in a phallus naming?!”
Actually, you bring up an excellent point, fiveandfour, and I’m bothered quite a bit by it, too. Though women may have been more overtly oppressed in Ye Badde Olden Tymes, most modern romances attempt to show that the hero and heroine are equally matched. This is not at all reflected in the covers, but then not much tends to be, unless it’s the sheen of freshly-shaved man-titty.
In the few instances in which the woman is on top on a cover, it’s usually in a sexual position, and usually she’s pretty vulnerable-looking, too—usually the guy has a hand tangled in her fiery locks to pull her down for a soul-shattering kiss and the like.
Once again your cover mockeries reduce me to fits of helpless laughter!
You’ve probably seen this already, romance mavens that you are, but I found the website of the person who painted one of these covers. She seems to specialize in the wilting-maidens-sans-kneess genre! How creepy would it be to live in a house full of the things, though?
Oddly enough, she also did some pictures of the models themselves, and deprived of goofy backdrops and unbuttoned shirts and swooning poses and the like, they look…well, almost normal. Even a tad dignified. It’s kind of soothing.
:smirk: And nobody else is even curious why that man sees fit to trample the cliffside pumpkin patch?
I do my attempts at art with a CGI program called Poser, and that has its own weirdnesses in the results, such as peculiar bending of elbows. It started life as a sort of digital equivalent of those wooden artist’s mannequins.
But things like the weird perspective, the strange relative scaling, broken fingers and weird skin; they happen in Poser pictures too. And everyone seems to have the same face.
So why does it happen on these cover pictures? A lot of the sites crammed with Poser pictures have NO editing (Self-evident, they let me post my work) but doesn’t a publisher employ anyone competent to pick the covers?
I think that part of the problem with Poser covers is also the author’s fault—not all, but part. There have been covers snarked on this site from both of my publishers who use Poser, but I have so far escaped total hideousness in my Poser covers. Why? At least in part, it’s because I SPOKE UP. One of my covers went through 8 drafts before I gave it the okay. Shrink her tits, uncross her eyes, un-Michael-Jackson-scary-point her nose, etc. And you know what? The cover artists haven’t yet said, “Oh shit, that Amelia bitch is at it AGAIN, why doesn’t she just shut the hell UP already???” (At least, they haven’t said it where I can hear it.) Point being, I think a lot of authors, especially new authors, are too shy to say, “Um, I’m sorry, Mr or Ms Artist, but my hero appears to have mange and my heroine’s neck can’t turn that way unless she’s got multiple fractures. Can you tweak this a bit?”
Now, the one cover of mine that I absolutely hate, I had no say in. All stories of that length for that publisher have the same cover, and alas, the only customization is putting a different author and title on it. Do I hate that cover? Yes. But, it took me 5 Poser covers to get one an ass-sucky one, so I guess I can’t complain.
Not that it stops me, though. Snicker.
Good Lord, that horse in the last one has some teeny little legs, too. It’s like if a regular horse mated with a Shetland pony and the offspring got Daddy’s regular-size body and Mummy’s eensy ickle Shetland legs.