The Faces of Glory - Glory Preview, September 2001 [Temple Variant, Avatar Press]

Avatar really are masters of the variant cover. I guess it pays to know your audience, and theirs seems to be a strange mixture of horror and cheesecake art fans. People who are a little darker than Chaos! Comics fans, perhaps. Sorry, that was pretty referential.

I'm often torn about Marat Mychaels. His work is good, but it doesn't flow right for me. Whenever I encounter something like this, where I can see that it's good but it doesn't do the thing for me that good art usually does, I think of a Philosophy of Aesthetics course I took in my undergrad. The central question we wrestled with is how one can define, or quantify, beauty. It's a lovely line of thinking, and I really enjoyed the course.

This is one of the two covers for this Avatar Press preview. According to the cover it was limited to 1500 copies, though without knowing how many of the regular edition were printed, that means nothing to me. 1500 was a large enough number that it wasn't distributed with a certificate of authenticity.

Moving forward I'll be randomly posting one of the covers. And the hunt begins this weekend at the Purple Gorilla!