Cover Search Reaches a Turning Point (September 3, 2018)

[Bandit LOAF]

The first three German translations of the Wing Commander novels used the same Paul Alexander paintings commissioned by Baen as their covers. Starting with Heart of the Tiger, however, the publisher began using 'slush' artwork that they happened to own the rights to reuse. As a result, four books were published with covers initially used by (and created for) for other works. The first two unlikely sources were discovered in 2015 and now a third has been located!

The German cover to Heart of the Tiger (Book 4) is a painting by Romas Kukalis originally appeared in 1993 as the cover to Turning Point by Lisanne Norman, the first book in the Sholan Alliance series. The German publisher mirrored the image, making it more difficult to search for mechanically! With this discovery, the remaining unidentified cover is the translation of the Peter Telep film adaptation.




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Original update published on September 3, 2018

 

[FekLeyrTarg]

With this discovery, the remaining unidentified cover is the translation of the Peter Telep film adaptation.

I think I found it by mirroring the cover and use Google's reverse image search.
The cover of the German WCM-Novel is from a Russian novel by Vasily Golovachev called "Counterintelligence" ("Контрразведка"):
https://books.google.at/books/about/Контрразведка.html?id=_bmeAAAAQBAJ&redir_esc=y

 

[Bandit LOAF]

That's a good find! But I think there's another source. We've found that the painting was by DAVID MARTIN and licensed to Bastei Lubbe for the Wing Commander novel. David Martin is a prolific SFF artist who has painted a great many covers for magazines, RPG supplements and novels. I'm betting the point of origin for this is a Renegade Legion booklet or a Starfleet Battles supplement or something along those lines.

 

[FekLeyrTarg]

I doubt that this cover was made for any Star Fleet Battles/Star Fleet Universe product, as SFB is based on "Star Trek: The Original Series" and all graphics stay true to the TOS-style.
However, it is still possible that David Martin worked for Task Force Games or Amarillo Design Bureau.
If that's the case, perhabs Steve V. Cole or Stephen Petrick could shed some light on this.

Personally, I wonder why Bastei Lübbe decided to use covers from unrelated works instead of using the original Baen ones like they did with "Freedom Flight", "End Run" and "Fleet Action".

 

[Bandit LOAF]

I suspect that there were rights issues surrounding the Heart of the Tiger and The Price of Freedom covers. Baen had commissioned the paintings for the first three novels and could license them easily... but the key art from the games used for the novelizations belonged to Electronic Arts, which may have been complicated. (Of course, that explains two of the books... for the movie book there was no painting to begin with... but that still leaves Action Stations!)