The last of the Dell YW artists, Neal McPheeters was working on covers for books by such authors as George R. R. Martin (Sandkings) when he was commissioned by Dell to do the cover for the 1986 mass-market format paperback version of So You Want to Be a Wizard. He later went on to illustrate such books as Jahnna Malcolm’s “Jewel Kingdom” series, and numerous books and short story collections by the writer Jack Ketchum.
His work on the So You Want to Be a Wizard cover was popular enough that Dell also commissioned him to do a cover for the 1988 mass-market paperback of Deep Wizardry and the 1990 cover for the hardcover edition of High Wizardry.This last cover suffers somewhat in comparison with the other two, the paperbacks being in a style both much more precise and much more relaxed. The High Wizardry cover has problems with perspective which even McPheeters’ talent seemed unable to overcome. This may have been one of those situations in which an art director insists that an artist execute a vision that doesn’t quite work. The two earlier paintings for the paperbacks remain among the author’s favorites.
It would have been interesting to see what McPheeters would have done with the mass-market paperback edition of High Wizardry, but no Dell mass-market of that book was ever published. In 1992 a management reshuffle at Dell resulted in Delacorte dropping Diane Duane (along with many other much higher-profile writers such as Jane Yolen) and whittling their “author base” down to only what were then their best-selling authors.
Not shown here are covers for the 1992 Bantam paperback edition (ISBN: 0440406803) and the 1999 Bt Bound edition (ISBN: 0613127366).
