30 Covers, 30 Days 2011: Day 29

It's the second-to-last day of November! Good luck to all of you who are sprinting towards the finish line, and a huge congratulations to everyone who's already won. Today's cover was created in 24 hours by the first-class Charlotte Strick:



By Example by Puella Hilare

Gayle Cord never thought that super powers were real-- until she survived an insane accident and found herself with powers that boggled her mind, among them (and her favorite) the ability to fly! 

Fortunately, her father had been a big comic book fan (as well as a cop) before he died, and had passed that love on to her. They'd had long, rambling talks about the things in comics that would never work in the real world, so when Gayle decided to put on a costume and play superhero, she did things in a smart, thought-out fashion. 

She hadn't realized, though, how her heroics would affect the world around her-- and how that would affect her. A secret identity turned out to be a pain in the neck-- but worse was her growing conviction that she couldn't possibly be the only person with super-powers for very long. Surely someone else would get powers-- and then things would be very different. 

In fact, things were different already-- and as she struggled with how much of the truth to give the public that wanted to know as much as possible about the masked heroine Gayle Cord had become, she realized something very, very important: 

When you are the first of anything, you have to lead...By Example.



Charlotte Strick is the Art Director of Faber & Faber, Inc. and the Trade Paperback division at Farrar, Straus and Giroux. She's the an award-winning designer known for creating the jackets for books by Roberto Bolaño, Lydia Davis, and Jonathan Franzen, among many others. She is also the Art Editor and designer of The Paris Review, and the mother to twin boys who turned one just yesterday. Until she finally gets around to designing her very own website, you can view some of her work here: http://designrelated.com/profile/pickupstrick

Fantastic synopsis and cover. I'd love to read this book!

I like it.

I like the synopsis.

I'm not sure how I feel about the cover. On the one hand, the Moirre pattern dots (?) are the quickest way to signal 'comic book.' On the other hand... comic book art hasn't looked like that for at least 30 years. (Even the older style is off on this figure as she has no outilines!) I feel like if you want superheroes to be taken seriously, the design used to represent them needs to be updated to be closer to modern comic styles or a more professional-looking illustration style.

I guess I feel like the cover artist should have committed more to one style or the other. Either go all-out with the dark outlines and very illustrated style of the 50's comics to properly match the background, OR go with a sleeker, modern illustration; still stylized, but not so reliant on the dot pattern. You don't NEED that to let us know it's a superhero story. A girl in a cape will still get across the idea. (I could also see this cover being done with just a cape hanging on a wall or something less obvious.)

I admit, as an illustrator myself I would like to see some of the 30 Covers in future years feature actual *illustration* and not all this stock-photo design stuff. I think it would be nice to have the additional spectrum and a wider variety of art styles would show off people's novels to a better extent.

Cool cover. Anyone else notice that Tim Kim did like... 30k in ONE DAY?! Mistake?

I would totally pick this up and read it.

LOVE it-- both the cover and the synopsis! I wish it was already published-- I SO want to read this one!! :)