It’s Urban Fantasy Month according to Tor books, and as part of the celebration, Carrie Vaughan, author of the Kitty series (which I haven’t read, but appears by her own admission to fall squarely in the midst of the current vampires-and-werewolves trend), posted a timeline of urban fantasy informed by her own experience, talking about where her books were shelved throughout the development of the trend.
She mentions briefly the proliferation of covers in “urban fantasy” that feature the female main character, butt-to-camera, generally wearing some sort of midriff-bearing shirt to show off the tattoo just above their belt line. I’ve noticed this myself; Juno Books has a good description of the design here.
The Juno Books post asks “why so many butts,” which is a good question – I think it’s a combination of sexual advertising and the proliferation of video games in which a protagonist is viewed almost exclusively from behind (seeing these ladies from behind, we’re invited to project ourselves into them), which plays also into the number of these books written in first person. But (natch) nobody I know of has produced the timeline I’d like to see for the urban fantasy genre: “rear view” covers released per month over time. I wonder what that curve would look like in comparison to the Fabio-chest covers of romances in the 80s and 90s…
Any grad students out there looking for a truly pointless semester project?