Jake Blatowski's New Look

Oh man, what a hunk. No wonder Dana wouldn’t stop pestering him after he sat next to her in class.

He looks like he’s about to go on a crazy adventure after getting sucked into a Nintendo …

And I like the Velcro sneakers. Not only can Jake not graduate to high school like a normal kid, he can’t tie his own shoes. This works for me.

Comments

[D G D Davidson]

I actually asked the cover artist if he could darken Jake up a bit. He's brown-skinned according to the text. The idea is that, as the human race is dying out, people of Caucasian appearance are almost extinct, which is why Dana/Dynamo, with her red hair and pale skin, stands out.

[D G D Davidson]

4891093

Based on his indicated tastes, I doubt he'd care for my stories of bone-crunching pubescent girls anyway.

Racial matters in the story are more an afterthought than a preoccupation. They come from a consideration of what things might look like with humanity dying out from a war of attrition. Inspired by another fellow who's novel I edited, I started with the notion that gingers had become a scarcity and continued from there.

Originally, I pictured Urbanopolis as indiscriminately mixed due to the upheavals of the First Invasion, but later decided it was both more realistic and more interesting if the city had distinct cultural enclaves, which is how I came up with Little India, New Beijing, and so forth. It's much more fun that way, because i can send my protagonists to any part of the world simply by putting them on a bus.