What Ever Happened to Those Crazy 80s Book Covers?
Have you ever wandered through a Barnes and Noble wondering what the hell half the books were about because all of the covers were just vague designs and pictures of ordinary objects? A hat. A striped pattern with cut-out letters layered on top. What information exactly are we to glean from such lazy graphic design? It just makes you miss the days when covers were a little more on-the-nose, you know? Here’s why I think things will never be quite the same as the time of 80s fantasy covers.
Why Were the 80s Such a Heyday for Fantasy Cover Art?
Sometimes art, technology, and culture converge into a perfect environment for creativity to arise. For book and poster art, the 80s (and late 70s) were such a time. While previous decades were still experimenting with clunky color photography and print methods, the 80s had nailed color in film, photography, and printing. Later decades would rely overconfidently on computer technology, resulting in an abundance of crappy attempts at 3D rendering and graphic design.
There seem to be a few reasons things were so good for a short time:
Improved Cultural Imagination
By the 80s, creative society had long been limited by black and white mediums. Television, news, and radio were relatively dull, and only the most imaginative storytelling or journalistic efforts managed to viscerally convey the subjects they presented.
As popular culture exploded into existence, so too did new ways for artists to express themselves. Films like Alien depicted monsters as believable beings rather than exaggerated caricatures or humanoid doubles. LSD-riddled Musicians pioneered heavy rock and metal genres by imbuing music and accompanying media with occult and fantastical imagery. Writers imbibed new media forms and presented the public with new sources of inspiration. In time, a creative feedback loop developed.
For a time, alien beasts and mostly-naked models were in
In the same way the scientific community had learned to use journals and publications to advance intellectual debates, wider cultures used mass media to advance fiction. One of my favorite examples of popular culture communicating with itself is Led Zeppelin’s The Song Remains the Same, a lengthy concert recording interspersed with cuts of the sky-high Zeppelin members running around with swords, climbing mountains, and meeting with time-wizards.
Robert Plant was known to sing about The Lord of the Rings every once in a while, but he wasn’t writing any fantasy novels of his own. Instead, he and the other band members used the medium they had access to create a story in the best way they could. As I did years later, thousands of young people moved by the music must have then taken an interest in the subjects the band had featured, thus completing a cross-media feedback loop.
No Simpler Design Options
From ancient times until the modern era, painting and drawing were sophisticated art forms that only those who didn’t need to be plowing fields or laying bricks could afford to partake in. Today, a busy graphic designer can churn out reasonably high-quality illustrations in much less time and for much less money. While some would argue that we have it better now, others might say that nothing really beats creating something with your hands.
As nice as computer illustrations can be, it’s hard to mistake them for real paintings or drawings. Subtle mistakes and signature marks inevitable when working in physical spaces create a unique quality that the digital world can’t replicate. Since the 70s and 80s were devoid of graphically sophisticated computers, they were perhaps the pinnacle of cover design.
Photorealistic? Not really. Good? Yes.
Few Ad Options and No Internet = 80s Fantasy Covers
These days, a book can become wildly successful without even having a cover. If you gather enough five-star reviews on Amazon and build enough of a buzz on the internet, someone is sure to buy your work. Recall — each of the books in the Game of Thrones series is printed with a title, the author's name, and a single item set against a colored background. Still, these books managed to become incredibly successful. Would they have been without the help of the internet? Who knows. I think not.
In The 80s, book covers were the best ads you could get. They served as plot summaries and book reviews all at once. I used to go to my local library in the 90s and spend what seemed like hours staring at a rack of fantasy and sci-fi books from a decade earlier. These books must be incredible if the cover artists are so talented, my growing mind told me. Of course, at least half of them were probably terrible and those I read all the way through didn’t stick with me through the years.
For me, the cover art was half the experience of getting into a new book. It gave my imagination something to work with as I scanned through the first formative pages. They say you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but I definitely did, and Im pretty sure the saying wouldn’t exist if others didn’t too.
This book pretty much sells itself.
Increased Genre Popularity
From the 1700s to approximately the mid-1900s, the more imaginative literary genres existed on the fringes of fiction. Most works of fiction were mundane descriptions of everyday happenings, as in J.D. Sallinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. In standard fiction novels, interpersonal drama was usually the main subject. While supernatural folk takes had been popular for centuries, they were still being passed down in isolated patches throughout Europe and elsewhere.
It was only after globalization had earnestly begun that serious fiction and folk fantasies began to converge. After World War I showed the world the terror of unmitigated conflict, unprecedented communication between nations came into being. Fantasy and science fiction magazines provided platforms for creative young writers to express themselves. In time, sword and sorcery stories from disparate places congealed into a single genre with a few recognizable elements.
By the time J.R.R. Tolkien had written The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy, fantasy had become an unstoppable force. Numerous opportunistic authors offered their own cheap copies, but others wrote novels that were worthwhile in their own right. While authors would arguably never add so much to the fantasy formula as had been invented in the 1950s, the fantasy template primed readers for what they would encounter as they turned the pages of new novels.
In the 1980s, books featuring classic 80s fantasy covers soon proliferated to an almost ridiculous degree, far surpassing those with muted science fiction art. This trend declined in the years beyond, however, as Harry Potter and other mega giants skyrocketed into the popular stratosphere. Looking for ways to modernize themselves, authors did away with fancy covers in favor of toned-down, stylized looks. Today, this is mostly what you'll find on bookstore shelves. You can still find the odd retro cover, but such encounters are sadly rare.
For more metal art, literature, history, and music, keep browsing This Is Metal Blog. For some classic, long-form reading, check out my book projects.