MAN ON TOP: THE MALE MODEL IN ROMANCE ART
A curious facet of romance-cover art is that the male models are much more famous than the women. Consider the number of famous romance cover models who are male: Fabio. John DeSalvo. The late Rob Ashton. Nathan Kamp. Even people who are completely unfamiliar and uninterested in romance novels know who Fabio is, mostly because he built his career on a foundation of romance-cover modeling, before he went on to embrace charitable work, parody, and whether margarine is, or is not, butter. Fansites for male cover models fill the Internet with man titty and spinning, blinking animated gifs, the visual embodiment of the rabid fangirl squee.
Contrast that with the number of female cover models whose names you know. Think of one. No, we’ll wait. Still tapping your chin and frowning? So are we. It’s a fascinating reverse of the traditional model culture: for every one male supermodel in the fashion and print advertisement world, there are at least five known females. But in romance-cover land? It’s the men who get all the attention. The women are much less famous as cover models, unless the female model in question is already a celebrity, such as with Julia Quinn’s The Lost Duke of Wyndham, which featured Ewa Da Cruz, a soap opera actress with a considerable fanbase of her own.
The fact that the male cover models are infinitely more famous than the female cover models says something about the community of romance readers. On one hand, it says, “We like lookin’ at men,” apparently. Which, hey, why not? Nothing wrong with admiring the muscular male form, especially when that male form is riding a horse bareback and possibly sliding off the horse’s back end as the animal rears up to paw at the moon against a purple sunset. Males with that level of horsemanship cannot avoid the fame.
To explore the odd celebrity surrounding male cover models, Sarah chased down John DeSalvo and was on her very best behavior for an interview with him. Sarah will tell you personally: “He’s polite. And truly striking visually in person. And polite. Which is worth way more points with me than any set of cheekbones, and his are quite stunning.” Both DeSalvo and Fabio are subject to a good bit of lusty and somewhat pinchy attention from fans, and a good bit of dismissal as showboat boner ponies from elsewhere. We decided it was time to meet the men behind the mullets, the man titty, and the mythology of romance covers, and ask how being romance-cover models has changed their lives.
SMART BITCHES: In my experience romance-novel covers are one of the few areas of visual media where the men have enjoyed more fame than the women. Why do you think romance-cover models are so famous, while the female models are barely known? Is it the fantasy of “being” the romance hero come to life?
DESALVO: Well, romance novels are mostly written by women for women…. The females play a big role within the story, but I would imagine that the readers fantasize themselves in that role with the male hero. So I could understand why the male hero is really the focus of the fantasy and why the male models are much more popular.
SMART BITCHES: Speaking of that fantasy: Are there expectations that you have encountered which come with being a male romance-cover model, in that readers expect you to act a certain way, or embody some of every hero you’ve represented? Is the pressure ever overwhelming?
DESALVO: I think it’s just one of those things where people are curious what I look like in person. Do I have the presence in person as the hero I portray on the cover? It’s nice when I can just mingle into a crowd…. I’m always a gentleman and I’m polite to everyone. Understandingly, and it’s bound to happen, sometimes I find myself in an awkward position if an individual expects too much.
SMART BITCHES: When you first started doing the cover work, did you think to yourself, This might make me famous? Did you ever expect the attention and fame, or was it a surprise?
DESALVO: I’d be lying if I told you I didn’t think it might make me famous. After being on so many covers and winning the Mr. Romance competition in 1994, which happened to be a big media event that year, I knew I would be getting some attention. But what would surprise me was whether I was walking the street or out somewhere, strangers would call me by my first or last name. I would think for a second, How do I know you? and then realize how they knew me.
My eleven-year-old nephew recently said innocently to me; “Uncle John, you are kind of famous, you know.” And he’s right in the sense where I’m a celebrity and famous in a certain industry. Other than that, I would say I’m just a little popular.
SMART BITCHES: Obviously, being a romance-cover model created the foundation for your career in film and television and opened a lot of opportunities for you. But lately covers have moved into stock-image photography, computer-animated images, and art that is in the public domain, and publishers aren’t using as much original artwork as they did when you were posing. Are you still working within the romance cover-image world? Can other men looking to create modeling careers hope to emulate your path, or has that route mostly dried up?
DESALVO: Every once in a while I work with a couple of the studios. When I first started in the early to mid-’90s, the artists were still illustrating covers by hand…they were classic, beautiful, and had their own unique style. I felt honored to be painted, especially when it came to being solo on the cover.
Then in the late ’90s the transition to digital evolved, and some of the artists made the change, some moved on. After the transition, some of the covers were still colorful but more photographic. Although sometimes change can be good, I can’t say that I appreciate those computer-generated ones. I was very fortunate to be a mainstay through the peak of an era, which I believe will never be the same again!
SMART BITCHES: Your image portfolio is, in a word, huge. Is there a photographer or artist you enjoyed working with most of all? Is there a cover that’s your personal favorite?
DESALVO: Arlene and Bob Osonitsch were the veteran photographers in the industry. Bob was the best…nobody knew how to consistently light and capture an image like he did! When I came along they took me in like a son and I worked with them more than any other photographer, for over ten years. Even if they needed just a shot of a torso, an arm, or a back, they called me.…I miss them!
I’ve worked with many great artists over the years. In the beginning there was Pino (an extremely talented artist), who was old-fashioned and illustrated everything by hand. He alone must have at least a hundred portraits of me.
John Ennis, a very colorful and detailed artist, illustrated Jackson Rule, which is one of my favorite pieces. For several years he pretty much worked with me exclusively, and I remember him catching flack from a group of women for it. He went on to tell them in an interview: “You might think that we [cover artists] have a lot to choose from, but in fact, it is very hard to find someone who is good-looking, muscular, and extremely talented, and John is all three. He appears on many of my covers because the alternative is to use a model who is lacking in at least one of those three qualities.” I’ll always remember that…thanks, John!
Jon Paul Ferrara is another incredible artist who became a good friend of mine and has done many great works of art with me. One in particular that he recently did is a portrait of me as a boxer, for Beyond the Glory, which is a screenplay I’ve written. It’s really an astonishing work of art.
SMART BITCHES: I know you’re not in control of the props and fashions of the old cover shots, but do you have any thoughts about the Romance Hero Wardrobe of a shirt unbuttoned but still tucked in?
DESALVO: Looking back at them now, YEAH, they do look kind of funny. SOMEBODY CALL THE FASHION POLICE!! Well, mostly they want the body showing, and I believe that it’s more of a technical issue, to where I guess that it looks better uniform than if a shirt was just hanging out and considered sloppy looking.…A lot of shirts (especially the old-fashioned ones) really could hang as low as past midthigh.
I would also imagine that some see it as the very first step to a sexual encounter. Thank heavens that some styles do change.
At this point, our inv
estigation of Cover Art and How It Got to Be That Way turned into an investigation of how these covers are made, which led Sarah to Jon Paul, whose art you’ve seen, even if you didn’t know it at the time. Jon Paul, who along with Pino and John Ennis form the trifecta of romance-cover art, is among the most prolific romance-cover artists currently working in the field today. And he was gracious enough to tell us all about the behind-the-scenes details that go into crafting the cover art.
Painting a cover, according to Paul, is a multistep process, one of which the artist himself is largely in control. After being hired by the art director at a publishing house, the artist chooses the models, develops the poses, hires the photographers, arranges the costumes, and then, using the basic photograph, creates the full-color illustration.
“People would ask me who did the makeup. I did the makeup. The model wasn’t wearing any. I painted it in the illustration,” Paul said. Part of the challenge is working with models in an environment that is drastically different from their normal assignments: “I…have to tell them that it’s about the story, not about them. Usually models are used to working fashion assignments, where they are part of the job. This is about the story.”
Cover art, it seems, is as personal an experience for the readers as the book plots themselves, and readers respond personally in kind to the artists as much as they would the writer. Paul says he does get fan mail, which for a time befuddled him because he hadn’t signed his own cover art in years. Most of it, he says, is thanks and appreciation for the art, which is a unique experience for him as a book illustrator: “With book covers, before the Internet, there was no contact. I wouldn’t hear anything until the book came out three, four months later. But the Internet opened up contact between the readers and me as the artist that I’d never had before as a cover illustrator.” Paul says the feedback is almost always good—which is reassuring to him because the industry, he has noticed, is changing drastically. Fewer publishers use artists to illustrate their covers, and more houses, he says, are producing their art in-house, which leads to something we Bitches have noticed: the rise of the repeated stock image.
Don’t get us wrong: there’s nothing wrong with stock photography. Some of it is pretty damn evocative. But there’s a shortage of images that work for romance covers, and while there are some talented designers working in publishing houses, there’s not enough stock art to go around, and thus the repeat cover is born. Whether it’s a pair of legs in a flippy pink skirt* or a corset being unlaced from the back, seeing the same art over and over is just irritating. It reinforces the idea “These books are interchangeable! They’re all the same!” and underscores how much the publications from very disparate houses will end up resembling one another in their sales attempts.
Nowadays,† the pressure to be new and different is enormous, because everything has to be constantly updated in the search for the Next Image Trend that will sell romance, even as the industry continues to rely on the tried-and-true methods. This could mean death to the Smart Bitch Cover Snark, but ultimately, we hold on to our faith that so long as artists fire up the Poser, we’ll never go hungry for cover images that make us want to break out the eyewash station.
So what sells? Men sell. Naked guys sell. And then there’s preferences by editor. Some editors and art directors like the kick-ass female. Nathan Kamp, judging by how ubiquitous his image has become over the past two years, sells well, as do torsos, even when the hero described within the book isn’t brawny in the least, such as with Joanna Bourne’s The Spymaster’s Lady. There’s still an abundance of covers featuring couples in acrobatic clinches, with heroines displaying an abundance of cleavage—which Duffy calls the “nursing mother covers”: nowhere “except on nursing women do you see breasts that big on women that small.” Even though the wholesalers have combined and there’s very few of them now, clinch covers sell. And, as Kate Duffy said, “Covers matter.” Damn right they do.
THE ULTIMATE ROMANCE COVER AS PER THE SMART BITCHES
The purpose of the classic clinch cover is to portray turmoil. Sex turmoil, love turmoil, anger turmoil, weather turmoil, animalsfreaking-the-fuck-out turmoil: the more kinds of turmoil you can throw onto the cover, the better. Excitement and conflict sell, and the harder the covers can teabag the consumers on the forehead with how the book is Full! Of! Passionate! Love! And! Storm! Filled! Sagas! (and by “sagas,” we mean “Oh lawdy, the fuckin’”), the better it’ll be. Doesn’t matter whether it’s a rapefest full of Big Misunderstandings, screaming fights, and long separations, or a story about star-crossed lovers quietly struggling to make their love happen. The covers want to catch the eye of the consumer any way they can, and anything that makes the potential reader do a double take and pick up the book is a good thing—even if she’s doing it out of revulsion. It certainly worked with Candy for Loretta Chase’s vastly underrated The Lion’s Daughter; Candy picked it up only because the male model’s greasy Jheri-curled mullet startled her with its awfulness.
Let’s take a look at the cover we’ve carefully cultivated in our Smart Bitch labs, shall we?
1. Hair: Hair is key. The heroine’s locks must be lush and tumbling; the hero’s mullet should be every bit as fierce—the manly counterpart to her wavy tresses. Hair is culturally associated with fertility and sensuality, and when portrayed flying every which way, the hair becomes a visual indicator of the forces that bring the couple together and tear them apart. See how the hero’s hair is blowing off to the right? That signifies how the winds of Big Misunderstanding are leading him to believe the heroine is a money-hungry whore, when she’s actually a virginal heiress who rescues kittens and starving orphans in her spare time. See how the heroine’s hair is strangely still? That signifies her unawakened sensuality, the depths of which await a vigorous plumbing. Yet, of course, note how her hair is long, lush, utterly free of snarls and perfectly obedient? So is she, some of the time. Her personality is as limp and lustrous as her hair. Her ribbons floating eerily to the left? That’s the little signal that despite her reservations and her distaste for his high-handed ways, she’s ready to be led to true passion by his fleshy divining rod of love.
2. Turbulent weather or other natural catastrophes in the background: If the sky doesn’t look like it’s about to dump five different kinds of nasty precipitation at once on the our erstwhile lovers, then there has to be something else to compensate in the background. A tastefully exploding volcano? Crashing waves that would make Charybdis writhe in envy? The turbulence in the background has to mirror the (supposed) turbulence promised in the pages of the book. Here, the volcano not only indicates the passions and tempers that run hot, but its explosion promises a fiery culmination to our protagonists’ desires. Few things in nature are as subtly porny as an exploding volcano.
3. Animal freaking the fuck out: If it’s not a stallion, it’s a swan. If it’s not a swan, it’s a kangaroo. If it’s not a kangaroo, it’s a pack of enraged dolphins. (Fun fact: “dolphin rape” will yield thousands of search results on Google.) There’s no passion like animal passion, but there’s also no squick like bestiality squick, so the animals aren’t ruttin’, they’re runnin’. Witness the impassioned flappings on the swan on this cover. Its beak hisses “No!” but the way it flaps its wings is pure “Yes! Yes! Yes!”
4. Phallic monument or object: Cover artists aren’t allowed to advertise the hero’s masculine attributes in the most obvious way possible, so they go for the second-most obvious way possible: a large sword. An obelisk. A sword-shaped obelisk. Shooting white fire out of its tip. Oh, fine, that sort of phallic hyperbole is usually reserved for bad fantasy or science-fiction covers. Still, when it comes to alarmingly unsubtle representations of wangery, romance novels are a close second. Hence our manly hero has a sword that’s nearly as long as his mullet, and our heroine, she’s no dummy—she’s pushing that turgid steel lovestick way the hell away from her tender sheath.
5. Location Clusterfuck: Many an Old Skool romance flitted fro
m setting to setting as if Regency misses and their rakish heroes could charter a private plane at a moment’s notice. London! Paris! Greece! Some random desert! Maybe Egypt! Whatever the locales visited within the novel, at least a few of them will appear on the cover as part of some amalgamated geographic WTF, such as the Parthenon alongside a volcano. It works, if you think about it: explosive passion and erect columns do seem to go together in a lusty kind of way.
6. Chests, Chests, Chests: The hero sports the Required Hero Uniform of a shirt unbuttoned but still tucked in (because really, who doesn’t undress like that?). The heroine, she is about to bust out of her bodice faster than you can say “Rip ’er? I don’t have to—that bodice is ripping itself.”
7. Hairlessness: Oh, the odd and restrictive standards of twentieth-century beauty that impress themselves in razor-sharp, waxy, Nair-like fashion on heroes and heroines. They might have acres of hair on their heads, but nowhere else is there a hint of stubble. His chest is hairless, which puts him oddly in the company of professional swimmers, professional bodybuilders, and men who wax themselves bald in all places. And no romance cover would be complete without the heroine lifting her skirt to show off her oddly hairless and utterly smooth legs. No stockings needed, no, no. If this book is a time travel, her next stop is Rockette auditions.
8. Overblown flowers poppin’ out of fuckin’ nowhere: And what better to balance the testosterone-drenched sword imagery than the girly fecundity of flowers? And not just any sort of flowers—big, fragrant flowers, blooming with manic intensity? Petals, dare we say, embracing the idea of “deflowering” themselves? Georgia O’Keeffe, eat your heart out.
Controversies, Scandals, and Not Being Nice
Beyond Heaving Bosoms Page 18
