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"The Riddling Reaver"
(From the book "Heroes & Villains
Volume 2")By : Deborah Susan Jones : Editor & Contributing writerAnother Fighting
Fantasy book cover classic! Published in 1986 by
Puffin Books, and created by Peter in that year,
which was unusual as publisher production lead times
were typically a year, but the success and excitement of
these books had led to a shortening on previously
typical lead-times. The Riddling Reaver (ISBN 0-14-032156-X)
is a multi-player game book written by
Paul Mason and Steve Williams, and was edited by
Steve Jackson, and we spent a few hours discussing with
Steve the cover content while inventing the character
and his environment. Although in principle a part of Steve Jackson
and Ian Livingstone's Fighting Fantasy series, it was
not in fact part of the main game book series and though
visually served up in the series illustrative style
Peter used on other covers in the main series and in
addition included Penguin's own graphical container
layout, it was more a kind of spin-off from the main
series of books.Much discussion was had at the meeting with
Steve as to how the figure should be portrayed and it
was very unusual for the artist to have direct access to
either a book's creator or editor so this was an
extremely rare event indeed and perhaps reflected the
sheer success of the series at that time.It was an interesting characterisation
exercise for Peter, since characterisation has always
been such a core aspect of his work, to design a
character that had a joker type feel about it and yet
was centred in role play art styling as it had been
established by him.Of course, in hindsight, it is always easy to
reflect on how a character should be seen, whilst at the
time, usually, time is of the essence with a publisher's
scheduling needs very much a element of creative time
restriction, but that was always part of the attraction
to Peter, the risk element of getting it right and doing
it in the time allowed.The art was subsequently licensed by Peter's
company's licensing division, The Solar Wind Picture
Library, to publishers in France, Denmark, Japan and
Brazil and now appears in his role play art
anthology Heroes & Villains
Volume 2 we publish.Deborah Susan Jones
