r/badscificovers

Let’s start running, literally! I wonder what Stephen King thought of this cover.

Sorry for the crunchy image. It was the biggest, clearest one I could find.

The cover is great and then this guy walks on stage right.

I love The artwork. Those green guys are cool and I nearly put it on the other subreddit. But the bright coloured bands are jarring, spoils the art.

Art director: "Can you make him flex so hard he looks like a toddler shitting himself?" Melvyn Grant: "On it."

To be clear, I think David Mattingly's art here is pretty cool. They kinda ruined it on the actual book cover though, running it thru such heavy filtering that it looks like cheap CGI.

On his substack, David Mattingly writes about the weird experience he had with the model: https://myadventuresasanillustrator.substack.com/p/my-weirdest-experience-with-a-model

The Empire is back… and someone is launch naked babies at Romans

Okay, this cover needs a little context too...

In 2008, “Stalker: Shadows of Chernobyl” was released. Riding on its popularity, a book series of the same name was also launched. And based on its popularity, alternative multi-author projects were also launched, which not only followed a similar structure but also featured setting elements similar to those of the Stalker series. Such projects were called “stotchkers” (a rough adaptation from Russian to English—“pointers”) because the titles of these series were written with a period between each letter.

One such project was “The Death Zone”—a Stalker with the numbers filed off. Instead of radioactive mutants, there were robots and military equipment mutated by nanomachines.

The result was a cover featuring Miles Quaritch with an M41A pulse rifle, who had just taken down a T-700 and was now clearly about to beat the crap out of Starscream, who for some reason was wearing a T45D power armor helmet.