@jack of shadows

What about a ranking of god-awful WOT covers? I'll start:

1. Lord of Chaos. This is the worst cover, hands down; the figure of Rand is grotesque, with the proportions, perspective and posture all horribly wrong, on top of which is the fact that (a) he doesn't look the way he's described in any of the books and (b) he doesn't look the way he does on any of the other covers, before or since. The Aes Sedai's pose is cartoonish, and her facial expression is weird, and the Flame of Tar Valon emblem on her back is jarring, distracting, inappropriate, and unsupported by anything in the text. The draghkar is all wrong, besides not belonging there in the first place. There is much, much more that is bad about this cover, but the two central human figures are so bad that everything else fades to insignificance. This cover sucks wind, big time. It's actually painful to look at.

2. The Gathering Storm. The Rand figure is weird, but not as weird as in the LoC cover. Proportions are screwy, as usual - Rand's head is too big and his arms are too small; the woman's head is too big. Again, Rand doesn't look anything like he does in the other covers. (Not that this is entirely a bad thing - on the cover of tEotW, he looks like a profoundly mentally impaired cross between Rick Santorum and Mr. Greenjeans.) The hole in the house is completely unrealistic, and the piece of cloth draped over Rand's bad arm is all wrong. From a purely technical standpoint, there is better art than this pouring out of the middle schools of this country on a daily basis.

So glad to see a great cover - finally! I was never a fan of Darrell K. Sweet's work. His humans almost always looked just plain wrong - disproportionate, oddly posed, and generally drawn badly. I've never understood how a commercial artist could have such a long, successful career without being able to draw humans. He produced some beautiful backgrounds, his composition was generally good, and he had some truly awesome concepts, but he drew really, really crappy people. Not only was his perspective weird, but his proportions were just flat wrong, and he had real trouble drawing hands.

What's with all the women with vapid looks on their faces fluttering their weirdly tiny hands about, and why is most everyone standing or sitting in strained, unnatural poses? Why does Rand look like a completely different person nearly every time he appears - and not in a way consistent with the story, but as though one model was switched out for another? In the two where he actually looks like the same person, he resembles the late character actor J.T. Walsh, which I can't imagine is the way anyone envisions Rand.

And, of course, there's always Perrin as Gimli the Dwarf (WH and KoD) and pissy-powerwalker Rand (CoS), along with Mat as an Indian brave in a Zorro hat. The worst, I think, was the cover of LoC, which was simply god-awful in every possible way.

I wish Michael Whelan had been the artist for all the covers.

Oh, and, yes, that is Nynaeve there in the yellow and green.

I've always hated Darrell K. Sweet's covers. I've never understood how a commercial artist could have such a long, successful career without being able to draw humans. He produced some beautiful backgrounds, his composition was generally good, and he had some truly awesome concepts, but he drew really, really crappy people. Not only was his perspective weird, but his proportions were just flat wrong, and he had real trouble drawing hands.

What's with all the women with vapid looks on their faces fluttering their weirdly tiny hands about, and why is most everyone standing or sitting in strained, unnatural poses? Why does Rand look like a completely different person nearly every time he appears - and not in a way consistent with the story, but as though one model was switched out for another? In the two where he actually looks like the same person, he resembles the late character actor J.T. Walsh, which I can't imagine is the way anyone envisions Rand.

And, of course, there's always Perrin as Gimli the Dwarf (WH and KoD) and pissy-powerwalker Rand (CoS), along with Mat as an Indian brave in a Zorro hat. The worst, I think, was the cover of LoC, which was simply god-awful in every possible way.

I wish Michael Whelan had been the artist for all the covers.