Lit Art vs Text: Times when the official visual depiction probably wasn't what the author was going for

I think I may have brought this up before, but: I'm assuming most people in Lit are familiar with this image, where a giant chicken shakes appendages with the head of the New Republic to end the Galactic Civil War:



But while that's characteristic of the official visual depiction of Calibops, I think the text of the HOT duology very much suggests that it's not what Zahn was actually going for, and a recent reread confirms it to my mind. Ponc Gavrisom is described at various points as "whinnying", "trotting", and "shaking his mane". He has a "long face", "long flank", and "withers". The only avian thing in the text, in fact, is his prehensile wingtips. I think it's pretty obvious that Zahn actually intended Puffers, and Calibops in general, to be space pegasi, not bird-people.

Anyway, this little analysis, together with some recent passing discussion in the Fleet Junkies thread, has made me wonder: how many other cases can people think of this sort of thing happening, or at least possibly happening? Where the text gave you a very different impression for what the author was intending than the actual final canonical picture indicated?

 

The K-Wing is notorious for being very different in layout in the BFC trilogy from its final official depiction.

 

I never thought visual depictions of the Bothans, in any of their various EU forms, lined up particularly well with how Zahn originally described them.

 

What do Bothans and Calibops have in common? They were first described by Zahn. I think the thing here is he's not very good at holistically describing new species--he just gives little details here and there that are hard to add up.

 

Pelly had a mustache in his illustration in the Heir to the Empire Sourcebook, released in 1992.

That tendency has carried into canon with the Grysks - most of why folks are excited for the Thrawn: Alliances comic adaptation next year is because we finally get to find out what they look like.

 

Yuuzhan Vong. I like their depiction on the covers of SbS and TUF, but that's it. Everything else is comically ugly.

 

I mean, the odd thing is that while this is true in general, I do think it's actually rather obvious that Gavrisom's details add up to "horse with wings" much more than "Big Bird", and I'm surprised the artists missed it.

 

Most instances of the Noghri in visual mediums.

 

Some human character depictions vary so widely, it is a wonder one recognises them when not in their usual clothes. Like look at how many variants of Nomi Sunrider are around... Essential Guides pretend she is Ripley, comis alone give her three+ different faces and looks with covers not even synched with interior art.

And what about Corran being a shapeshifter too apparently face-wise? Sure generic book characters without a fixed actor look.. but yeah. Which is your prefered version anyway? Authors cosplaying their characters? cover art? comic version? etc.

Same for others.

 

I feel like there were some bits in the manga version of lost stars that looked different than the descriptions given in the books, though I can't think of anything specific...

And famously the New Class ships from Black Fleet crisis - not because they are "ugly" or whatever, honestly I rather like the designs - but it is mentioned in the original source that they made in pairs with each pair sharing the same basic hull, which is noticeably not visible at all in the visual depictions, save maybe the star destroyer and heavy carrier if you squint.

Mara Jade in the Thrawn comics with the skintight sleeveless catsuit despite the book repeatedly mentioning her sleeves and otherwise hiding stuff in the baginess of her clothing.

Honestly, the Grysk still get a bit more description that most species he introduces. Many just have a single physical trait described - for instance the important navigator character who has cheek winglets and no other mentions of his appearance - while some don't even get that many.

 

Yeah, still wondering which depiction of them in the comic adaptations of TTT should be canon for Legends. I still like the one from Dark Force Rising the most.

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I've seen a lot of very divergent official Mara art. I'd have to go and check on some of the distinctions-but everything from height to facial features often vary quite a lot.

 

I saw them in the Star Wars Supremacy video game (released as Star Wars Rebellion in the US) before I saw them anywhere else, and it was that which tended to shape my concept of them:

 

We never got too many images of Abeloth, but the big one we did get didn’t really capture the full extent of her appearance:



In the text she’s described as having long yellow hair that falls all the way to the ground, arms that split into tentacles only a few inches from the shoulder, a full-lipped mouth with edges reaching near her ears, and deep-sunken eyes that look like single stars in a black void.

She is a shapeshifter, so you could argue she’s mid-transformation in that image. And the artist did make her look like Callista at least. But it still felt like it didn’t capture the main feel of how she looks, which in retrospect reminds me more of some ghosts from Japanese folk tales than anything else. Something ethereal and both very feminine and also monstrous and inhuman.

 

Pretty sure the Noghri in DFR comic is most accurate, but there's a tendency to try to take that mor slim, dwarfish appearance and mash it up with the more hulking versions in HTTE and TLC in other sources.

 

Wasn’t Vergere also described very differently in the books? I don’t have my copy of Traitor with me, but I seem to recall the textual description making her sound more feline or elfin than what we got. The first art depiction of Vergere from the New Essential Guide to Characters did replicate some of those features, but I’m not sure how accurate it was. It definitely defined the look of the character, though.



That also reminds me that Muun noses are somewhat relevant here, at least when it comes to Plagueis. But this seems to have been based on different or changing designs for Muuns in the movies. The movies and most art don’t give them noses. TCW and the Plagueis book do give them large flattened noses. This is a minor case, and likely more due to changes in designs. But I had to mention Plagueis’s nose. It exists!

 

One obvious one is from The New Republic: Kueller's mask is described as looking like a skull, but also as moving with his face, so that he looks like a literal talking skull. It seems obvious it's intended to be a sort of skintight, high-tech false-face mask. Not . . . a big metal skull helmet, a knockoff Darth Vader with horns thing.



Another one that tends to fly under the radar: everyone has gotten Mara Jade's hair wrong. She's almost always depicted as a bright, striking redhead. But Zahn consistently describes her hair as "red-gold." I think he's trying to describe her being strawberry blonde without being able to use the word "strawberry." He's not constantly trying to use some fanfic adjectives to describe a redhead whose hair is just so perfect and golden and special; if he wanted you to think her hair was red, he'd just say it's red. He says red-gold because he wants you to actually think of both colors instead of just fixating on one: reddish-gold hair, strawberry blonde.

And another one from the Zahn files: Karrde is specifically described as having "short" hair at one point in DFR. Virtually all depictions have followed the TTT comics and WEG sourcebooks, however, in giving him long hair, though even those sources diverge. The WEG sourcebooks favored a foppish, aristocratic Karrde in fancy clothes with a dainty goatee and flowing hair, suggesting his status as a refined smuggler-lord. The TTT comics made him look like he led a biker gang, a tough smuggler boss in the harsh forests of Myrkr, with shaggy hair, thick biker mustache, and a rugged sleeveless vest (the TLC comic did him a significant favor in softening the image slightly by turning it into a bomber jacket instead of a fleece-lined vest, and uniting the fu-manchu-and-van-dyke into a solid goatee). Most subsequent artwork has followed the TLC comic version of Karrde. My favorite depiction of Karrde, and the one I think is most accurate to Zahn's intent, is actually the one-off artwork from the Essential Guide to Characters (basically duplicated in his Rebellion portrait, but that's it), in which Karrde is depicted with short, neat hair, a rakish but not dandyish goatee, and a functional smuggler outfit similar to Han's but looking slightly more elegant. It projects a character who is refined, but hands-on and not foppish.

I don't think there's anything that says specifically he was clean-shaven, but his mustache isn't mentioned in the books, and yeah, the comics don't have it. It was the sourcebook artwork that introduced the mustache, and it just seemed to fit so well that it proliferated from there.

 

I think some of the descriptions come across that way yeah IIRC. The avian look is pretty well established by every sourcebook and official art of Fosh, but I don't recall Traitor in particular really emphasizing "bird like" the way all subsequent depictions have.

Abeloth is difficult to portray in art because she's a shapeshifter. You either get "evil lady monster with tentacles" or try to go for some sort of long teethed manga demon. In this particular image, I don't blame the artist too much. Its a battle scene with Abeloth further back in the frame.

 

I feel like characters or things with wildly differing appearances between sources is a whole second topic, TBH. Reminds me of "isitabothan" back when both that and Twitter still existed.

Which is one of those cases where I think Zahn does bear a lot more responsibility for it than Big Bird Gavrisom, actually. I don't think there's really anything in TTT to define them beyond "humanoids with expressive fur".

 

I love how 90% of this thread comes from Zahn never actually describing what characters look like, each of the three comic adaptations of his trilogy having a different artist, and the West End Games sourcebooks of the nineties being highly visual, meaning we ended up with four different takes on nearly every single character and species that he invented in those first three books.

Seriously, I picked up Cobra at a used book shop and started it today. After fifty pages, has a single word been dedicated to a character's physical appearance? Of course it hasn't!

 

I distinctly remember Vergere's face being described as "simian" in at least one NJO book. I can't even remember when she became a purple chicken. In my mind's eye the simian Vergere was almost more like the Grinch.

 

Thank you! The keywords you provided helped me find an older iteration of this thread. The first post includes textual descriptions of Vergere, where her face is indeed described as simian, with lips and all, though not humanlike at all. The user who made the thread even speculated she may have been an intentional homage to Dr Seuss characters.

 

Holy crap, Trip even called her a purple chicken! Hahaha

I don't think I ever read that thread.