wotwiki
Interview #976: Talking With Tom: A Conversation Between Tom Doherty and Harriet McDougal, Entry #20
Harriet McDougal
I get a lot of questions about Dannil, the character who was cut out of The Eye of the World . Dannil sort of figures in that cover painting. [Referring to a painting of an Eye of the World poster in Tom Doherty’s office.] There’s an extra character in there. He has a ghostly life.
Tom Doherty
Darrell Sweet was doing many of the biggest fantasies in the 1990’s.
Harriet McDougal
Yes, using his work was a big expense for a little company. It was one of the ways in which you did such a superb job of publishing. Also, what’s so nice about the gorgeous Michael Whelan cover for the last book is that it’s obviously a Michael Whelan, but he very tactfully made it so that when you rack them all out, they look like family. That was a lovely thing he did.
Irene Gallo
It is. He did a good job. The palette and compostion really works with the other covers. I didn’t envy him the job and he turned it into a nice tribute as well as a conclusion.
Harriet McDougal
And Sam Weber is so nice. I keep trying to call him Sam Weller because of Dickens. He said Whelan called him once and asked: “What’s a ter’angreal ?”
Looking at The Way of Kings , I had an extraordinary coincidence. A friend of mine’s former wife is a curator at the Phillips Collection in Washington. She’s a descendent of John Martin, an English painter also known as Mad Martin . He was the highest paid artist in Great Britain in the 1840’s, and then he sank into total obscurity until a couple of war refugees rediscovered and resurrected his works after World War II. One of his paintings is the cover of The Way of Kings , except that there’s a big pantheon where the guy is in the distance.
Irene Gallo
I’m going to look that up.
Harriet McDougal
His skies are very much like Michael Whelan’s. He was doing all that stuff way back then. I don’t know if Whelan’s ever looked at him, but it looks as if he has. Those fabulous skies of Whelan’s.
Contributing
If you are viewing this on github.io, you can see that this site is open source. Please do not try to improve this page. It is auto-generated by a python script. If you have suggestions for improvements, please start a discussion on the github repo or the Discord.