It’s a challenge to distill an entire trilogy, especially one as good as Mistborn, into a single picture. No idea seems to do the content justice, and every sketch can feel like a compromise. I can recall reading the novels and thinking naively how easy it was going to be to come up with a cover. Sanderson, after all, seems to write like a picture maker, with description and language that suggests more than a casual familiarity with the visual arts. He even writes from an artist’s point of view, quite convincingly I might add, in his recent novel The Way of Kings. To a pictorially oriented person like myself, the effect is palpable, each chapter begs to be illustrated. And in Mistborn everything, both alien and ordinary, is brought to life effortlessly, the fantastic envisioned with the precision and clarity of the familiar and the mundane made wonderful as if seen for the first time.

[Full art after the cut]