Allow me to get up on my soap box.
There was a golden age of cover art. It is past now. There was a golden age of animation. Once Hayao Miyazaki dies or retires, it will also pass. I am sad for the loss of both golden ages.
I'm an artist, although not an especially good one, and not a professional. However, I have a very large family and a good chunk of my clan are professional artists of one type or another. My father and grandfather were both quite well-known painters who made comfortable livings from their art. I miss the golden age of illustration, not only because of the fresh, vibrant, and unique covers, but because it represents the decline of an entire profession. To me, who was raised in a family dependent upon this profession, this represents a loss of livelihood for real people. It's not just the authors who suffer when their unique, hard-won books come from the publishers looking like cookie cutters.
It used to be that publishers staffed or regularly contracted with hard-working professional artists who devoted entire careers to creating gorgeous oil paintings that would be used for one book cover alone (although some did get recycled, especially in the romance and pulp sci-fi publishing world.) These were artists with a great understanding of anatomy, of color and composition, and of action. They were paid enough to make a passable living off their work. They were respected.
Today, it's stock, stock, stock. And most of that stock comes from small stock web sites like shutterstock, where the photographers are paid dismal wages for the use of their images. There are very few photographers who can make all of their living -- or even a significant part of their living -- from shooting stock. I once tried to shoot stock photography to make a little extra cash here and there, back when I was working as a wedding photographer. It was so hard and expensive to get images sharp enough, interesting enough, and well-lit enough to make the cut even onto the cheap sites that payed squat that I gave it up in disgust.
So authors lose, artists lose, and photographers lose. The publishing houses save money, but they produce a product that looks careless because it resembles other products. It's lost its shiny, exciting wrapping. It's just another book on the shelf. The process hurts the economy, because less money goes into the hands of artists and photographers, and when you don't pay artists and photographers, the terrorists win!
It's just like the unrenaissance that's happened in animation. Look at the old Disney classics. Look at Dreamworks' stuff from the early 90s. Don Bluth. Nepenthe Productions. Studio Ghibli. This was all living, breathing, moving art. The product was exciting, moving, and different from other products. It was unique. Now you look at the stuff that's coming out of animation studios and you see the same thing everywhere. The same textures, the same colors, the same creepy children with freckled skin straight out of Uncanny Valley, the same same same same. CG animation is loads cheaper to produce than traditional animation, so that's what the studios crank out. And it feels cranked out. It feels cheap, careless, and disposable. There are a few exceptions like Finding Nemo and Wall-E, but these are largely saved by good writing, not by art. It's sad. It's really, really sad.
When you throw away unique, beautiful art forms like cel animation and individually illustrated book covers, we all lose. And Libbie cries inside.
I am now removing myself from my soap box. Thank you for reading my melancholy rant.
(MAROOOOONED!)
