Book Cover Smackdown! ‘Railsea’ vs. ‘The Six-Gun Tarot’ vs. ‘The Pirates Wish’
They say you shouldn’t judge a book by cover…unless it’s an SF Signal Book Cover Smackdown!
It’s time once again to have your way with some upcoming book covers, this time with a new trio of November fantasy releases.
Here are today’s contenders…
Your Mission (should you choose to accept it): Tell us which cover you like best and why.
Books shown here:
- Railsea by China Miéville (Macmillan Children’s Books) [via Staffer’s Book Review]
- The Six-Gun Tarot by R. S. Belcher (Tor)
- The Pirates Wish by Cassandra Rose Clarke (Strange Chemistry)
NOTE: Bigger, better cover art images are available by clicking the images or title links.
Pirates’ Wish. Desert, monster, interesting typography…
The Six Gun Tarot. It’s that eye. It just grips me.
The Six Gun Tarot also sounds freaking awesome.
Grrr! I need to remember to start including book synopses to maybe help frame the art.
That would be majorly helpful.
Six Gun Tarot, definitely. If Railsea had that cover originally, I don’t think I would have read it. Good book, but that cover looks lame.
Definitely the Six Gun Tarot one. The cover just kind of grabs you. It’s very sleek, and that eye is just… well, quite eye catching. 🙂
gotta go with manticore and Pirate’s Wish (Assassin’s Curse in the same series also gets a 10 of 10…)
draw- they’re all entertaining in a stylish, clichéd sort of way. The middle one is most beautifully drawn, but its design is not immediately eye-catching. The Railsea one is obviously deliberately over the top and the image itself is very fun, although it is a bit stupid. The Railsea one is most amusing but also pretty stupid. The one on the right is just a fairly good example of an arabian fantasy design.
I thought I had deleted one of the two sentences with the same content…
Pirate’s Wish. Hint of the exotic. Strange lands. Cross between a video game interpretation of a Saudi Arabian place with a Sherlock Holmes “he spent time in India….” tale.
Railsea, hands down. Although I think the title “The Six Gun Tarot” is cool, the cover… isn’t.
The Pirate’s Wish. Continues on in the same style as The Assassin’s Curse and the red is very bold and luring.
Pirate’s Wish, all the way. I can’t get enough of that Arabesque style calligraphy / brushwork, and the archway, I just love it.
and wow, that Railsea artwork. I am SO thankful I picked this up when it first came out and got the original cover art. the new artwork looks ridiculous.