Entry posted by Nhaz
231 views
I don't usually feel strongly about any celebrity or author. When people vent about someone famous saying or doing something which left them dejected or angry, I always just shrug and wonder how it's possible for anyone to be affected by the actions of some person who's worlds apart. Well, it happened to me now.
Last week, in honor of HP's 20th anniversary in Bulgaria, the country's foremost publisher, Egmont, revealed that they finally produced original cover art for the Harry Potter books done by a Bulgarian artist (up until now our books used the American art). Lyuben Zidarov, a renowned painter, was hired for the task. Here is a list of links to the cover art:
Reactions were... not positive. Most Harry Potter fans exploded in rage over the cover art, calling it ugly and unbecoming of their beloved book series. Despite that, it was a comparatively normal and healthy debate until Zidarov went full Michael Gambon and declared that he had only partly read the first book and that the books in general were plebeian works whose fans should not criticize an accomplished artist like him. Immediately, numerous editors and art critics assumed a very conceited stance, defending him against the "plebeian" fans and calling the Harry Potter books kitsch which has yet to withstand the test of time. Other said that if between Zidarov and Rowling anyone should feel honored, it was her.
Lyuben Zidarov has been drawing children's book illustrations since way before I was born. Personally, I like his illustrations of fairytales and other children's stories that I grew up with, such as Hans Christian Andersen's tales or Tom Sawyer - maybe it's childhood affection talking, but they have some charm. But while his highly stylized paintings do, in my opinion, fit such simplistic stories, they don't do justice to the complex multi-layered world of Harry Potter (okay, I do like how he drew Umbridge, for example).
Then again, people from older generations (even my mother) love to dismiss Harry Potter exactly as a derivative, talentless fairytale, even if (or perhaps especially if) they never bothered to read it. It's a combination of various prejudices people have against fantasy (childish), new media (unoriginal) and, in Bulgaria, Western media (eye candy and mindless action with no real drama beyond a naïve "good vs evil" plot). That's without going into how Zidarov's ignorance of the source material led him to portray some scenes unrealistically (looking at you, Deathly Hallows cover). I maintain that his cover art and his style in general isn't as ugly as people make it out to be - hell, the little doodle you see on my profile page was something I made with his drawings in mind - but I still can't see how this art won a contest for Harry Potter covers. (Well, of course I know, this is Bulgaria, public contests simply get rigged.) Plus, they seem a tad derivative from other HP art (the HBP cover, for example, features Dumbledore conjuring a firestorm that looks like it's lifted straight from the Bloomsbury edition when no such thing was described in the book; another example is Dobby who's basically the movie version). This from a painter who is often praised for his originality.
The geruntocratic elitism of Lyuben Zidarov's defenders does not surprise me - in my country, especially in the intellectual sphere, art and science, the people at the top see anyone not accepting them as a "plebeian" because they cling to the times when membership and a high position in a state institution meant that their prestige was a given and any criticism would get silenced by the state. Left without the political support of their dogmatism, they now spit on everyone else since they can't handle the fact that they're behind the times. But what really threw me off was that an author who I believed loves what he draws (because really, that's what I used to get from his illustrations) immediately puffed up and called the books kitsch that he didn't even bother to read.
The inability to handle all the criticism I understand - after all it was extremely vicious, with people calling the covers all synonyms of "ugly" and Zidarov a "socialist dinosaur" (in Bulgaria, "socialist" has much the same connotations as "boomer" does in the US). But I guess what upset me enough to even write this post was that I always felt that the illustrations of my childhood had soul in them, the soul of an artist who has read the story, experienced and loved it - which apparently isn't true. And, like we'd say in the HP fandom, the charm is now dispelled. Finite incantatem.