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Now a familiar name to science fiction and fantasy readers, Darrell Sweet was at the time of his YW work just getting started on a prolific career. Then busy with work for everything from Dell and Bantam Books to the Reader’s Digest, he went on to do covers for books by Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Stephen Donaldson, as well as one of the Tolkien Calendars (1982). He is now probably best known for his work for Del Rey Books. A gallery of his work can be seen here.
Delacorte commissioned Sweet to do the cover for Deep Wizardry in 1985. Two of his great loves — vivid color and unusual lighting — both show up in this cover. What’s a little uncertain in this rendition is the draughtsmanship, which betrays an early weakness which turned up in some of his other covers — Sweet’s characters’ heads sometimes seemed a little too large for their bodies. This problem, already fairly noticeable in his renderings of adults, became really noticeable in his paintings of children.
Once again, after this cover the art director at Dell changed his or her mind about what kind of style was needed for the books. (Or perhaps the art director himself/herself was what got changed: it’s impossible now to find out what kind of personnel changes might have been going on behind the scenes.) At any rate, a decision seems to have been made at Dell that, for the YW hardcovers, anything even faintly photorealistic should be avoided. But — strangely — this choice seems not to have been applied to subsequent paperbacks. The first Deep Wizardry paperback featured work by another artist entirely.
Not shown here are covers for the Bantam Books 1998 paperback edition (ISBN: 0440200709) and the 1992 Random House Children’s Books editions (ISBN: 0440406587).
