Stormchaser: A Comparative Book Cover Analysis

 Stormchaser is the second book in a series called The Edge Chronicles. I may or may not have been obsessed with this series as a kid. Ok, I absolutely was obsessed. It was weird, imaginative, fun, and no one else I knew was reading them so my Inner Hipster Demon felt really Cool and Special.

I did a book cover analysis of The Two Towers a while back and I wanted to try another one. I only have a copy of the first cover I’m going to show you (It’s a first American edition, printed in 2004, so it’s not the first cover ever), but I remembered having Thoughts about this second cover when it was released. I’m going to take another look and give a Designer’s Opinion on it and on another, newer version of the cover.

Here is the first cover of Stormchaser:

Iconic. Maybe that’s the nostalgia talking, but I really do love this cover. The fake distressing on the edges, the swirly cloud background that looks like old, stained paper, the fluttery scroll of the title. The hard cover is textured, with raised bumps and edges of the paper scrolls and the blue binding and accents. The pages of the book itself are rough-edged, and kid me loved that. Book design like that really takes you a step further into the world, gives a hint of maybe this is real, like the leaf and paw imprints in the concrete roads of Walt Disney World.

This cover also shows off the fantastic art of Chris Riddell, and you can’t go wrong there. The oval frame in the center shows us two of the important characters of the book, Twig, and his father Cloudwolf, who is captain of the sky ship Stormchaser. One of the focal points of the story is the relationship between them, so I think that makes them a great choice for a cover. Also, I just love the way his hat sticks out of the frame.

The series title and book title seem understated in comparison. The book title and the authors names are the same size and everything is stacked center, which is kind of boring to be honest and doesn’t have a clear hierarchy. The orange 2 at the top is throwing me. Why is it orange? Why is it a single 2? This is to indicate it’s the second book in the series, but I will say right now that it doesn’t do a good job because kid me had no idea there was a book before this until I had finished reading it. We’ll say that’s a testament to their writing skills that I wasn’t completely lost.

This is the second cover:

As a kid I was not impressed. I thought it looked dumb. It didn’t have the same energy as the first cover, which I still believe matches the book the best. Grown-Up-Adult-Almost-Graduated-From-Graphic-Design-School me can see this is actually a really good design. It’s eye catching if nothing else.

The other books in the series are all different colors, so when they’re lined up it sort of reminds me of those tiles of Marilyn Monroe heads. The hierarchy of titles and names is clearer, with the series title being much larger and the authors names being a different color than the book title. I love the guy hanging in front of the title at an angle. It breaks up the design in a fun way, but it also assumes you’re already familiar with the series as most of the title is obscured. This one gives no indication of which book in the series it is.

It does get a bonus point for still featuring art from Chris Riddell. The sepia knight is not a prominent character in the story, rather someone they stumble on to for about a scene, but it showcases one of the weird creatures of the world and gives more of an idea of the bizarre, dark tone of the story. It’s not all fathers and sons sailing in the sky together smiling. Sometimes there are rotting-but-still-alive knights hanging from trees, lost in a dream for fifty years because their entire crew died while trying to bring home shards of lightning.

Let’s take a look at the last cover.

My initial reaction was “Noooooo! What have they done?”

My second reaction was “This is really good, actually.”

As an update to an older series, to give it a fresh, modern look in the style of a lot of fantasy series these days it works. The art is beautiful, it feels shiny and dark. I would pick this up without any previous knowledge of the series. I know exactly where to look first, and which book in the series it is. I like the addition of the Book 2 of the Twig Saga, because the order in which the books were written and published is absolute nonsense. The first three follow Twig, the fourth book is about his father as a teenager, the next three books are about Twig’s grandson, and then the next two are about his father again. There is another four books now I think, that follows a descendent of theirs, or maybe all three of them because they were possibly resurrected from the dead? I don’t know. I didn’t read those ones. I’m getting off track. It’s a good addition because now you know right on the cover who you can expect to read about.

This cover now features Stormchaser the sky ship, which I think is a fantastic choice given that it’s also the name of the book. It gives off a steampunk feel, and I think I would assume it as such if I didn’t already know that sky ships operate based on the temperature of the floating rock at the center.

My final thoughts on this cover are that it’s very beautiful and stands on good design principles and fits in well with modern fantasy cover designs, but I don’t like it. It’s fantastic, but it feels like seeing a beloved book get turned into a flashy movie adaptation where they spent too long on visual effects and not long enough on script writing and they also threw in a love triangle that didn’t exist before. It feels like I would open it up and Chris Riddell’s illustrations would be missing because they wanted to reach a different audience.

Conclusion: A book cover may be perfect by design standards, but might not fit the tone of the book. Don’t judge a book by it’s cover, but by all means, judge the cover.

“It’s the job that’s never started as takes longest to finish.” J. R. R. Tolkien