The Great Discworld Retrospective No. 9: Eric

So after eight books, it was pretty apparent that Terry Pratchett and Discworld were becoming a major success. And Josh Kirby’s fabulous covers did play a sizeable part in that success.

So let’s go back in time to an age when cover illustrations were a pretty big deal. For a lot of people, the front cover was where you got most of your advertising in. I know that people say not to judge a book by its cover but, frankly, nobody ever told that to anyone in publishing.

In any case, every genre had its own particular tics, highlighting a lot of their prominent symbols: a lot of horror would have gatefold covers (revealing something that had been previously hidden) or lots of shadows and light or, frequently, eyes; westerns would show broad landscapes dominated by a guy on horseback in the foreground looking pensively at something in the distance; romance novels would often feature the heroine and hero clamped in a reluctant embrace; spy novel covers usually had flags, guns, and important-looking envelopes; science fiction used spaceships and alien/futuristic landscapes or technological imagery; detective and police fiction would feature badges, blazing guns or pictures of grimy architecture; literary fiction would have a some kind of simple picture that highlighted several of the symbols in the book.

And for a long time – at least since the 1920s – what cover art also featured were men and women in ridiculous poses, with the women frequently in a state of modest undress. In detective fiction, women would be femme fatales or damsels in distress, the slinkiness of their attire becoming less obvious the further along the scale from whore to virgin you got. In science fiction, men would be clothed in sensible space suits while women cavorted in something transparent.

In fantasy, though, there were only three words:

Chain.

Mail.

Bikini.

They were often painted exquisitely by people like Frank Frazetta, Boris Vallejo and Margaret Brundage but still majorly impractical for the kind of excursions and conflict the women were facing. By the 1980s, however, publishers had begun to realise that women bought books as well (in numbers well in excess of men, in fact) and had begun to steer away from that style of illustration in exchange for something a tad more aesthetically pleasing which didn’t make you feel ashamed when you read it on the bus. Hence, in fantasy at least, the landscapes.

Because the major iconography of fantasy during the 1980s was the landscape, often with a couple of people striking a pose in the foreground, almost always diminished by the colossal geography that surrounded them. How big the people were frequently depended upon the scale of the story. For an epic fantasy, the people would be tiny. As the story approached closer to heroic fantasy, the people would become more dynamic and loom larger in the illustration. If the author was committing Sword and Sorcery you would often find some kind of demonic-looking megafauna sharing the cover with them.

Josh Kirby’s cover art for Terry satirised a lot of the artwork of the 1970s and earlier. The Colour Of Magic’s cover illustrates a scene from the first part of the novel, where Twoflower is rescuing Rincewind from his captors. It captures the spirit of the scene quite nicely, although it is let down slightly by the details: Twoflower, it is explained early on is wearing a device on his face that makes it look like he has four eyes. Most of us would recognise these as glasses. Kirby had some fun with it and actually gave Twoflower four eyes.

The later books mostly featured characters and places from the story in a vast splash cover reminiscent of team-up issues of superhero comics. But Kirby’s creations only very basically resembled the physically perfect beings found in comics: his characters were gritty and rugged, with features chiselled roughly from the very elements themselves.

Except for the women, of course: they were frequently ethereal and nubile, clothed – barely – with diaphanous gowns and shifts, or even lengths of gauzy cloth. But more on this in a bit.

For those of us who had grown up on books from before the 1980s, it was clear that he was just taking a comedic approach to a style of cover art that had been popular and profitable since the dawn of publishing.

They were fairly profitable for Kirby, too: for years afterwards, whenever an author came up with something that could be marketed as comedy, he was usually approached for the cover. And for many years, Kirby’s Pratchett cover style was emulated by those who thought they had something funny to sell in speculative fiction.

Anyway, to bring it back to Discworld, Gollancz (Pratchett’s publishers) asked Kirby and Pratchett to collaborate on a short story that could be illustrated with some of Kirby’s pictures.

The result was Eric. It’s a story about the Disc’s first demonology hacker, a young boy (Eric Thursley, aged “nearly 14”) who is trying to summon a demon to grant him three wishes.

What he gets, though, is Rincewind.

And the Luggage.

But Eric isn’t convinced that the sloppily-dressed character in front of him isn’t a demon. And Rincewind, glad to have escaped from the fate worse than death that we thought he had suffered all the way back in Sourcery, is also nonplussed to discover that he – because of the spell used to summon him – is actually capable of granting the said three wishes.

What follows is a short adventure across the history and geography of Discworld, with a prolonged sidestep into that world’s version of Hell.

It’s hilarious. And lavishly illustrated by Kirby as well.

It is, however, overly generous to call it a story: it’s more of a collection of setpieces held together by a flimsy framing device very loosely based on The Tragical History Of Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe (which is merely the most famous iteration of the Faust story, although fans of Goethe might disagree).

But it does allow Kirby to show a side that we don’t normally see of him in this branch of his work. Most cover art has to fit particular parameters: you need to leave a space for the title, the author’s name, a blurb – and you can’t have anything interesting happening right in the middle of it where the book’s spine might go… that is, of course, if you’ve been commissioned to illustrate front and back covers.

The illustrations in Eric are designed to go with particular scenes from the story and they look fabulous. The double-page spread of the Discworld as viewed by Rincewind and Eric from space is particularly gorgeous, as are the various paintings of Hell.

As a novelty spin-off, it was quite well-received. As a Discworld novel, your mileage may vary. It was around this point, though, that there started to be a bit of hostility generated towards the work of Kirby, specifically the way he drew women. There are very few women in this book and it’s the portrayal of one of them, the Helen of Troy counterpart, Elenor of Tsort, that rather ruins the tone of the book. To be fair, Pratchett’s description of her is written in a style that was about ten or fifteen years out-of-date compared to the rest of the comedy he was writing, but Kirby takes the idea and gallops with it, giving us an illustration of a women who has aged but is still wearing the clothing of her youth. It’s sexist and unfair to the character and, given that she’s the only female character in the book with more than one line, reflects poorly on author and illustrator, although Elenor is at least given a little more agency and depth than many other female characters written around the same time. But again, attitudes towards this sort of illustration had been changing and while Pratchett had portrayed a lot of his female characters as sensible and sensibly-dressed, Kirby was still having fun with his parodies of covers for books that weren’t widely read anymore.

Despite this, I have a soft spot for Eric. The illustrations combine with the story brilliantly to give us an ultimately disposable yarn that has its only really lasting achievement the return of Rincewind to the land of the living (although it would be another five or six years before we got another book featuring him). The jokes literally fly off the page, despite being a lot broader and a little more cynical than in previous books. It was disappointing, and quite hilarious, when throughout the 90s and into the 2000s, the story was rereleased as a regular-sized paperback WITHOUT THE ILLUSTRATIONS, possibly so it was cheaper to produce and would sell more copies. Honestly, I think that’s where another part of this books poor reputation among fans might come from because the book reads a lot better when it’s paired with the pictures: they help to gloss over the deficiencies of the story.

I was still at university when this came out. I was out with a mate one Friday night on a pub crawl and we went past a bookshop that was open at the ludicrous time of 8:30 p.m. This was unheard of in Hobart in 1990, so we decided to pop in and take a look. As we were both Discworld fans, we ended up walking out with a copy of Eric each. It was twice the cost of a paperback, while being half the length of the usual Discworld novel, but we couldn’t resist: it looked amazing and it was new, and because it was those primitive days before the internet, we didn’t even know it was coming out which made it a very pleasant surprise. We also still had a couple of pubs to visit but that didn’t matter. Looking back now, it was the first time I had queued up and bought a new Discworld novel in the company of other people doing the same thing. The moment had a bit of a buzz to it, although that could have been from the pub crawl.

However, it was something that would take a few more years to repeat itself.

Coming up next: In a world gone mad can Victor Tugelbend save the Discworld and the girl he rather likes? Find out in Moving Pictures.