Regarding the questions raised here:
The polar bears look very impressive, as they would. The fact that they're acting as a pack when they're not really pack animals I attribute to their driver being that much of a badass. Maybe the harnesses are very subtle and white so you can't see them? But I can't excuse the man's armor, which is eight awful ideas soldered together. And the sled looks like some unfortunate jeweled jet-ski dragooned into service on the snow.
I don't care if dragons use telepathy or speak English. What are they saying? That should be the focus, so minimize the setup.
Fantasy should always be moving towards what is affecting and/or interesting, away from that which is not. This is good advice for fiction in general.
2 comments:
I think it was always called artistic licence. Do you suppose the writer ever heard of Salvador Dali or Picasso? Many artists have dealt with the issue of how to portray reality in new and interesting ways - expecting the viewer to figure out the meaning of a made image. Magritte famously titled a painting he made of a pipe 'This is not a pipe' - meaning the picture of something isn't the thing itself.
Frazetta was a very talented pulp artist, someone who made what was unreal in the world appear believable in his artworks. Of course there were no harnesses but why not imagine they were invisible or that he had a psychic connection to the polar bear team? It's about context - if the lot of them showed uo in town they'd look ridiculous.. well, unless the bears were hungry. But Frank Frazetta was successful because he gave his audience enough reality they were able to step outside the confines of day to day life.
When I read Tolkien's Hobbit it seemed perfectly logical to me too that it doesn't matter that Smaug spoke perfect English.
I think what we look for in fantasy is internal consistency. Tolkien's Ring books are perfect and perfectly harmonious and consistent. Trouble comes when adults decide to look for rationality in stories meant for children - or adults with open minds. That Marvel Comics made an internal rule about how they'd deal with dragon communication is their business.
(This is one of those subjects Jer has arguments about on the game forum where people complain about something like Spiderman's relationship with his girlfriend being unreal - in a story that has a guy in underwear web-slinging his way around a city.)
Someone with a certain number of autistic tendencies looking at art runs the risk of hearing the song but missing the music. I'm sure I've done it so I'm not going to judge too harshly. You can always get it right later. Dali and Magritte, both somewhat inspired by Chirico, made their own thing. And of course Picasso is the one with this story:
When I was a child, my mother used to say to me, over and over again, ‘Pablo, if you become a soldier, you’ll be a General, and if you become a priest, you’ll become the Pope.’ But I became an artist, and so, I became Picasso.
Frazetta was versatile. He did a lot of comic book work as well, but wasn't really involved with superheroes. Instead he did a mixture of horror, science fiction, crime, and some westerns. Still in the vein of illustration, really. His fantasy art was over the top, in a way, but still oriented toward economical storytelling.
There's probably an interesting story to be told about meeting a dragon for the first time and initially not knowing how to communicate with it. That's not the story Tolkien was telling.
Tolkien's fantasy world had internal consistency perfectly adapted to the stories he wanted to tell, despite these stories being different in tone. Marvel and DC both have the problem of being horses by committee, moreso as time goes on. Some creators have been able to fight through this.
Between fandom, narratology, and the internet a generation has come of age that sees fiction as a series of signals and nothing else. It sounds like Jerry has been dealing with the result of that.
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