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

Didn’t Zahn eventually say that the description of the Noghri was meant to evoke the design of Vader’s mask? The suggestion was that he had fashioned his mask based on their faces, which made more sense to Zahn back when he wanted the Noghri to be the Sith to explain why Vader was caller the Dark Lord of the Sith. I’m not sure what that would look like, though.

 

Considering this, I think the DFR comic versions looks the most like Vader's mask from all of the seen iterations of the Noghri we've seen over all the years imho.

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...Whoa, Vergere not being intended as a bird is an even bigger trip than when I first realized it was the case for Gavrisom.

Kinda weird this has happened in that exact way twice.

 

If I had a nickel for every time an alien was mistaken for a bird furry, I would have two nickels.

Which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice.

 

Ssi-Ruuk looking like Raptors.

Just lame. But it may have been what Tyers was going for.

Still, when the pictures looked like cut and paste from Jurassic Park art. STOP IT!

 

The Tiss'shar got a makeover to look much more like raptors in the Star Wars: Empire comics:

https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Tiss'shar



I don't remember the Ssi-Ruuk ever looking as raptor-ish as that.

 

For reference, here's what the Tiss'shar looked like in their first visual depiction, before being raptorized:



Which could itself be another example of when art doesn't necessarily line up particularly well with authorial intent - here's Daley's original description of Uul-Rha-Shan:

He was a reptilian creature, slender and quick of movement... Han was eyeing the reptile, whose bright green scales were marked with diamond patterns of red and white, and whose big black, emotionless eyes were studying Han. Uul-Rha-Shan's jaw hung open a bit, exposing fangs and a restless pink tongue.

 

I’ve got another good one from the canon books: the Inquisitor sometimes known as the Sixth Brother.

His first appearance was as an unnamed inquisitor in the 2016 book Ahsoka, where he is described as follows:

“She studied the creature before she walked out to meet him. He was tall with broad shoulders, and of a species she had never seen before. His face was gray, and it didn't look like the color was natural. There were other markings, too uniform to be scars, on his cheeks, nose, and chin. They gave his face an evil look, though Kaeden imagined that without them, and without those piercing ice-blue eyes, he wouldn't be so intimidating. As it was, he was intimidating enough. He wore a gray uniform, too, but not a typical officer's. There was no rank insignia. It was like he had been designed to be as unremarkable as possible, except for one thing: he held a massive double-bladed red lightsaber.”​

Then in 2017 an inquisitor appeared in the Vader comic series who was referred to as the Sixth Brother and was supposed to be the same character as the inquisitor in the Ahsoka book, though he didn’t really match the description:




Finally, in 2023 the animated shorts titled Tales of the Jedi featured some of the same scenes from the Ahsoka 2016 book, but the inquisitor in this show looked completely different from either the one in the book or the one in the comics:




This last depiction is so different that Wookiepedia editors consider him to be a different character from the Inquisitor in the Ahsoka book and Vader comics. Even the book’s author said she assumed them to be different characters. But Filoni confirmed the TOTJ inquisitor is the same character from the notes on which the Ahsoka book was based on. The animators simply superceded both the book and comic books, though they have not explicitly admitted to it.

It’s clear why, too. The inquisitor in the Ahsoka book is specifically nondescript. He looks almost like an Imperial officer, which makes sense for an assassin who’s not supposed to stand out. But visual media like the comic book and animated show needed something more dramatic. The comic book’s depiction is honestly as different as the one from the show, so it seems odd that Wookiepedia editors have an issue only with one and not the other. In any case, it’s a character with very little visual continuity from one medium to the other.

 

Lost Stars manga was a big thing for me.
Muunyaks became banthas and the MOA became a YT-2400.

 

The Bimm are described as "half-furred" in Heir to the Empire, but they look human in the Heir to the Empire Sourcebook and furry in the Heir to the Empire comic adaptation.

 

That confusion actually caused there to be two different species called Bimms, both from Bimmisaari.

 

Borderline example with the Sun Crusher. Pretty much all visual depiction portrays it as this:

https://spacestationwagon.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/suncrusher-external.jpeg?w=665

However, the cover of Dark Apprentice portrayed this:

https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/s...Crusher.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20051218211740

(Not that it was ever stated outright what ship that was, but it was often assumed to be the Sun Crusher).

 

I don’t have any quotes on hand, but Scout, the young padawan from Yoda: Dark Rendezvous. I was so utterly disappointed when I saw her official art, with the full face of makeup and every hair in place, the artist gave her a way too feminine and glamorous look. A lot of the visual art of book characters can suffer from that tendency to make them look too generically/conventionally pretty. Scout’s fighting in the clone wars, she should at least have her hair pulled back into some kind of style. She doesn’t even have a padawan braid.

Spoiler: for reference

I don’t care for the other one in her article, but at least it’s less model-y

 

I’ve been rereading Traitor recently, and I’ve been paying attention to the discrepancies in how Vergere is described compared to how she ended up being illustrated in the New Essential Guide to Characters and all subsequent EU books. These were pointed out earlier in this thread and in an older thread on a similar topic.

Stover does describe Vergere as “avian” a few times, but other descriptions, such as of her big black eyes, her inverted knees, and her oddly shaped head, don’t quite match up. I was revisiting this topic because I kept wondering if the original intention may have been for her to be a more elfish or pixie-like creature. The descriptions from other books, reproduced in the older thread, consistently give a more alien picture, though. So what, exactly, is her origin from an out-of-universe perspective? What is she inspired by?

I found a transcription of interviews with James Luceno and Sue Rostini from that time where they said the intent of Vergere was to have her be a link to the Jedi of the Old Republic. This made me wonder if perhaps Luceno had based her original look on an alien or at least a concept design of an alien from the prequels, specifically Episode 1, which would correspond to the time period. He has certainly done this sort of thing for other books, so it made sense to me.

In the past, some users described the textual descriptions of Vergere as being somewhat Grinch-like, and that always struck me because I seemed to recall visuals that felt along those lines being part of Star Wars in the past. And so they were indeed. Episode 1 concept artist Teryl Whitlatch created a whole bunch of creative creatures and alien beings during the development of Episode 1 that have a certain “Dr. Seuss” quality to them. Perhaps there are some concepts out there that Luceno used as inspiration for Vergere?

For example, there was one piece of concept art (below) that fit a lot of the textual descriptions for Vergere, in my opinion, which was for a pod racer who became known as Ebe Endocott in the final film. But perhaps something like this alien was what Luceno was picturing when he first described Vergere? If there was a piece of concept art that they based her on, that could’ve been shared with other authors too, which explains why they tend to provide very specific details about a fairly odd-looking alien.



And here are some other aliens designed by Whitlatch, to showcase the “Seuss”-like quality of some of her designs:



(Mods, I’m not entirely sure how to resize an image so that it doesn’t appear too large on screen, so apologies ahead of time.)

 

I always assumed that this was simply a case of the ankle joint being so high up as to give the illusion of being a reversed knee joint, just like on real birds.

Compare to a flamingo:

 

I'd read the description of the K-Wing on Macdowell's FAQ page quite a while back.
After that I tried making a Lego model roughly based on the description.

It had a chisel-shaped nose (three slanted slides white 4x3 piece I believe) two man cockpit similar to a Snowspeeder, three rear engines (one tucked right below the upper two) and front-swept winglets on pivots, connected right to the cockpit.
With longer, straighter wings running across the engine block, each leaving room for a rack and 'bombs' beneath (1 piece black with hole on side as a mounting point, and aft cylinders). I kinda liked it.
Looked like a capital K from above, and from in front (fore wings down)

 

Oh, my bad, I meant that the description didn’t match up with how Vergere was depicted in the New Essential Guide to Characters. I agree that her knees are likely birdlike in the sense you described. She’s at least partly avian based on the presence of feathers and on descriptions of her hands and legs. Her demeanor and movement are also described as avian in a few different places.

But her face is not really described as being too birdlike at all. She has “long bright eyes the shape of teardrops, a spray of whiskers around a wide expressive mouth” that “resembled a human smile.” She does have “a crest of iridescent feathers along her cranial ridge […] near the rear of her oblate skull,” which she uses a lot for nonverbal communication, so that is somewhat birdlike. But she’s also described as having lips several times, and in other books her face is described as “simian” and “concave,” which brings to mind the features of some apes. Additionally, there are references to her folding her arms and legs in repose like a feline, so she’s clearly an amalgam of different creatures.

Later depictions of Vergere in the EU did correct some of the discrepancies. Jan Duursema’s art of her in Legacy specifically provided angles that reconciled the more avian design with some of the elfish, feline, or simian descriptions. But I still feel like that design from the Essential Guide may have been a departure from what was intended, not unlike Darth Bane’s face cage.

If Luceno and other NJO authors didn’t base her look on existing concept art, then they may have fused various trickster figures from literature and mythology, such as the raven or the Cheshire Cat. But I still favor the theory that there was some concept art that served as inspiration. In fact, looking at my art books, I’m reminded that the Sith Knight designs behind Darth Maul’s development originally involved a lot of organic armor, and between that, his tattoos, and some self-mutilation (Maul’s horns were originally intended to be feathers tied to his head with wire), I’m wondering if even the Vong were partly inspired by Episode 1 concept art:

 

Bringing this thread up again for a different reason. I’m rereading the Essential Legends edition of Darth Bane: Path of Destruction from my local public library. I love the new cover art, as well as the art for the sequels. But it reminds me of the weird evolution of Bane’s look in Legends. I’m not talking about the face cage, I mean the eye markings.



These markings also appeared in Legends reference books:





The actual novels never made any reference to facial markings, as far as I can recall. These seem to have first appeared on the original cover of Darth Bane: Path of Destruction by artist John Jude Palencar:



This artist, in turn, was likely interpreting the shadowy look of Bane’s eyes in the comic Jedi vs. Sith and in the short story “Bane of the Sith,” though I never thought those were supposed to be literal facial markings any more than I thought Bane literally had blank eyes:





Did we ever get any official comments regarding Bane’s facial markings? I still consider them to be stylistic rather than literal when I read the books. But I wonder if they became a solid part of some reader’s imagining of Bane.