The official TotES cover art

[lacrossedeamon]

This is pretty much a nitpicky and petty complaint but I preferred the artwork for the cover during the initial announcement and excerpt releases. I assume it was changed to what we got due to being too The Little Mermaid adjacent which is understandable but still a bit disappointing. Curious to if anyone else felt similar.

[Elegy he/him]

This cover was always meant as a placeholder. It's by Steve Argyle, while the official cover is by Howard Lyon, the artist who designed the whole book. The other covers will be by their respective artists and none of them will be the same as on the initial announcement. So the reason is not any similarity to another property, it was always planned to be changed.

Regarding my personal opinion on them, they're pretty much equally good to me, while Lyon's official art looks a bit more unique to me, which is why I prefer it a little bit. But both are good in my opinion. Honestly, I wished Lyon would have used that more minimalistic style for the in-book illustrations. His realistic style always looks very religiously inspired to me, which didn't feel like it fit the fairytale-style story very well, imo.