Very nice. Looking forward to the other covers and the series in general. -*- My only criticism would be the title. It should be more like the Campaign and Essential Histories format: the name of the raid and its date on top in bold and the subtitle--in this case, Rangers Lead the Way--in small type underneath. When sorting through the Osprey books, whether at the store, the library or home, I like being able to pick out the wars and battles at a glance. The current layout would make it more of an hassle when quickly going through a shelf-full or stack of books.
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I'm sorry but to me the cover looks like an old war comic and just puts me off.
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My first impression is frankly negative! This was such an incredible action - and here we do not really see the cliff. In fact, the cover is so gray, vague and foggy, that we can not see much. It is almost as bad as if it was made by Christa Hook (although I guess it was not - because soldiers actually have faces...).
Definitely not a good idea this cover - but as I know Osprey people, they will not care about any comments....
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I like it - similar to the Duel series.
Count me in for a pre-order!!!
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One has to wonder whether the artist also draws for horror and graphic novels. I would hard pressed to treat any book with a cover like this one as a source of serious information. It would be in the same league as using the graphic novel "300" to understand better the Greco-Persian Wars.
Hopefully this cover will never see a bookstore.
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From a marketing point of view, I can understand the need to differentiate between the series Osprey offers. In addition when launching a new series, you want to make a strong impact to catch a potential customer's attention. Having said that, this cover misses the mark with me. Firstly I find it too dark, hiding the details of the characters in the foreground. I know D-day was overcast but this is overkill. Secondly it has a rather generic WW2 feel to it. In fact it reminds me of any number of World War 2 video game covers out there (Call of Duty 2 comes to mind). On researching the background of the artist and his connection to the gaming industry perhaps this is understandable. Finally digital art always leaves me cold. Stylistically it all starts to look the same with very generic features. I prefer a sense of the human creator behind the artwork. I've got the Raid series on my wish list but it will be the internal content that decides me now. This cover has not sold me.
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I agree with the previous comments. The cover looks like a comic book or a video game, not a serious piece of historical research.
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Sorry Kate, but I don't like it . Too dark and above all, looks like a video game cover. I think that an aerial photo of this magnificent site, taken on june 1944 would be far more appropriate. Fortunately, I know that a book by S. Zaloga will be a good one.
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To be honest it doesn't impress me but to give a final judgment i would like to see the other ones forseen in the next weeks. Anyway I'll be a big fan of the series and I look forward to buy many of them!
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You are Osprey, not Ubisoft. Back to your "realistic" style, please!
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PLEASE, please don't do this there is plenty of cartoon artwork available don't do this good art can make or break the series off the shelf, there is a painting by vincent WAI which shows the scene nothing like this, this looks too farcical like some second rate science fiction paperback!!!!!!!!!!!!
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Just looked at the first Raid covers on Amazon I can only hope that these are "fillers" until the good art comes along, sorry, but believe this artwork is poor and way below your usual excellence
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