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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sialia" data-source="post: 1874872" data-attributes="member: 1025">Thank you both for your stories, Macbeth and Orchid Blossom. I enjoyed them. Just as an FYI--when I did the montages it never occurred to me that authors would feel obligated to literally include all the junk I juxtaposed. I had been reading a lot of Dave McKean illustrated things--like Black Orchid--and I was in love with the way he would use objects to suggest something related to the themes of the story, but not literally in the story. So for example, of the back cover of one of the Black Orchids, I think there was something like a picture of a leaf that had been sutured to some other objects--techno, man-made, pharmaceutical things. Which fit the themes of Black Orchid's story (a genetically engineered sentient plant person with superpowers, for those who missed this). The stitched leaf and hypodermic needle never appeared literally in the story--they were symbolic of things in the story, and it worked fine as an illustration. I'm sure that I (perhaps unconciously) echoed that picture when I did this montage. I moved away from doing montages after the writers had such trouble with my fox-lady and cherry blossoms metaphor.  Also because a few of the later ones started to look more like the covers of paperback mystery novels and less like multi-leveled, methaphorical McKean things. It is really hard to do this well. But there's still a few left  from that period that haven't been used that may turn up here eventually. So I thought I'd mention this, in case anyone has to face these again.</blockquote>

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