By: Jonathan H. Liu
Scholastic has announced that there are new covers coming for the Harry Potter series, illustrated by Kazu Kibuishi, to celebrate Harry’s 15th anniversary. I’ve been a fan of Kibuishi’s work since discovering the Flight anthologies years ago, and more recently with his awesome Amulet series. It’s hard to say how fans will react. Personally, I think the originals are great, but I’m pretty thrilled with the way the first new cover turned out, too.
Some of my favorite series have gotten new covers many times over. I still like the old Narnia covers that I had growing up (although they certainly weren’t the originals, and were probably considered horrendous by older fans); but I also really loved the covers by Chris Van Allsburg many years later. My wife’s favorite book is A Wrinkle in Time, and we own several copies of the books, but when we came across Peter Sís’ covers, we got those, too.
Our current set of Harry Potter books (in hardcover, mostly bought all at once when the original eToys.com went out of business) has the classic covers by GrandPré, but I’m eyeing these new ones already. They’ll be available as a box set in September — I’m sure we’ll see more of the covers revealed before then.
(And don’t worry; the original covers aren’t going away, either.)
