Contemptible Cover - Television Tropes & Idioms

Not good reading for the bus.

There's a bimbo on the cover of my book
There's a bimbo on the cover of my book
She is blonde and she is sexy, she
Is nowhere in the text, she
Is the bimbo on the cover of my book

— Mike Flynn

We're all taught never to judge a book by its cover. Most of us ignore this advice. A book's cover is one of the most important marketing gimmicks it has, given that the only authors who receive publicity are best-sellers such as Stephen King, who arguably don't need it, though in these cases their name will be the biggest thing on the cover.

Unfortunately, some books, and some classes of books, are cursed with the Contemptible Cover. The kind of cover that you would be ashamed to be seen reading with at home, let alone on a bus... or at the very least, one that makes you wince.

This usually shows up in science fiction and fantasy literature — even the best-written works can suffer from a Chainmail Bikini-clad, BFS-wielding blonde on the cover when the story itself is all about political maneuvering in Rome — though for some reason the book's UK cover will be much better, featuring a map of the Roman senate covered with arrows like the maps they use to show war maneuvers, or something.

The recent popularity of Harry Potter and Discworld has resulted in more "adult" covers that many fans cannot stand, featuring ugly photographs designed to convey the message that literature is Serious Business, and the American science fiction and fantasy publishing industry has yet to collapse, but unlike the Covers Always Lie or Never Trust A Trailer-type articles that this wiki already has, the Contemptible Cover cannot put the blame on the fact that most covers are designed before the book is done. It's usually just a simple and blatant effort to appeal to the Lowest Common Denominator.

Note: This trope isn't for covers that are inaccurately-drawn or just ugly. (See Covers Always Lie for inaccurately-drawn ones.) This trope is about covers that would cause embarrassment if someone sees you with them.

Naturally, it's not just for books, or else cinema fans wouldn't have come up with the term Floating Head Syndrome for DVDs. But you're not likely to be holding up a DVD on a bus.

Not to be confused with a contemptible cover song.

Also not to be confused with selfishly using other people to hide behind while under fire, even though it's both contemptible and cover. That's Human Shield.

Can overlap with American Kirby Is Hardcore in the case of localized video game box arts. See also Design Students Orgasm.

A Sub Trope of Sexy Packaging.

Examples

open/close all folders

Anime and Manga

95% of manga covers are perky, scantily clad young women, no matter what the plot is, from baking bread to rowing a boat on Mars.
Even though the original editors of the Excel Saga manga by and large avoided fanservice, the covers of their period were always of female characters in strange, revealing clothing, like Go Go Enslavement gear or a Stripperiffic Santa Claus outfit.
- The covers are still pretty bad. The two most recent featured one girl in a revealing bodysuit and a little girl in a backless swimsuit on their covers.
- The cover of the DVD collection isn't much better, featuring Excel and Hyatt in lingerie surrounded by Puchuus (and Menchi), with the caption "They'll do anything to please their man!" No, it's really not hentai, honest! Of course, Excel Saga being a Gag Series with a different genre for each episode, this was probably intentional.
According to those who can read Japanese, the Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha novel of the first season makes for good reading. However, it doesn't make for good public reading since its cover◊ features a Panty Shot from the criminally underage heroine for all the world to see.
Special mention to Code Geass for this◊ and a few others as well.
- Though, in all fairness, quite a few moments in Code Geass really are that blatantly fanservicey. They just don't have C.C in them, they usually just have Villeta.
  - Damn shame, too.
Welcome To The NHK is a goldmine of (arguably intentional) bad, unrepresentative box art.
Mahou Sensei Negima averts this for the most part, as the covers are pretty tame (compared to the actual content anyway), but The special edition cover of volume 25◊ falls right into this. (Even though it is a fully accurate indicator of the content.) If you want to read it in public, there's always the regular edition.◊
What the inside pages of Elfen Lied are to High Octane Nightmare Fuel, the volume/chapter cover pages are to Fanservice. This is both funny and squicky, depending on the subject. If Yuka, well, she'd be likely to go all Tsundere on your ass for staring at hers, or anything else that's hers. If Lucy/Nyuu, you will die, either by groping or cutting, or by Yuka finding her groping you and killing you. She's nothing if not consistent. I'm pretty sure Nozomi is there, not sure about Mariko, both fetish problems, not to mention Mariko and her clones may be more Ax Crazy than Lucy. Then come the completely underage Nana and Mayu. A limbless girl and a girl who has been raped by her stepfather. Hmm. Maybe the covers are Nightmare Fuel, after all.

Close Anime and Manga

Film

Comic Books

Literature

Any book with a female protagonist will usually feature a picture or painting of an attractive woman who, depending on publisher, will either be shown in a classy or seductive manner.
Countless works of science fiction, fantasy, comic books...
- ...Especially if the cover is done by Boris Vallejo/Julie Bell...
- Publishers Baen and Ace (see example) from the 1980s and 1990s are so notorious for this syndrome, to the point where "a Baen cover" is a stock punchline at science fiction conventions.
  - As silly as the example above is, it's not actually a case of Covers Always Lie; the book is comic modern fantasy, and contains a scene much like the one depicted.
  - Being published by Baen in the period mentioned above, the Wing Commander novels save the novelizations of WC3 and WC4, which use copies of the game box art, tend to qualify for this trope, and that's not even counting the non-US editions. The height (or depth, depending on your viewpoint) of them, though, has to be the novel Action Stations. The blonde bimbo on the cover is mentioned nowhere in the story, nor is the silly colander thingy on the head of the putative protagonist (who looks nothing like the Ensign Tolwyn the story is focused on, regardless of the source of the Tolwyn image that pops into your head).
  - Lois Mc Master Bujold mentioned once that she absolutely detests most of the covers of her Vorkosigan Saga books. She managed to veto one cover and replace it for something more tasteful ...and that became her lowest selling book. She said she'd stick to writing and let the designers do their work from then on.
The Name Of The Wind has various covers. One of them makes romance novelists sit up and say "Now why didn't I think of that!"
A cover of Robert A Heinlein's Friday showed the protagonist half-naked and fondling her breasts. She's also been aryanized.
- One cover for To Sail Beyond The Sunset has a cover loosely based on The Birth of Venus. And by "loosely based", she's standing on a shell completely naked, with hair covering her nipples. Painted green. The skin, not the hair.
The American cover of Charles Stross' Saturn's Children.
- Being one of the Nerd Authors, Stross has a blog, on which he wrote concerning the cover. It essentially says, "Gosh, I wish they hadn't put this cover on my book."
  - In this case, the problem is purely related to the "Embarrassed to read on a bus" issue, as the novel is, in fact, about a ridiculously beautiful sexbot. It's an homage to the later Heinlein works described above, after all.
Timestop has two women in skintight silver catsuits with erect nipples on the cover.
In Josh Kirby's Discworld cover illustrations, especially early on, no character ever looked properly as they were described and the whole thing looked like a cross between a Monty Python animation and a Hieronymus Bosch painting. The insane parade of ugly punctuated by the Stripperific should be enough to qualify those covers as contemptible.
- The Michael Sabanosh cover for the U.S. HarperPrism edition of Soul Music is actually more than tangentially related to the contents, but the volup tuous Cute Reaper Girl on the cover, who's naked-looking enough to be embarrassing as it is? Turns out she's sixteen. And one gets the impression she's not that shapely, nor does she ever wear anything that form-fitting. Oh, and she doesn't ever have red eyes. And the story never features CDs...
- In The Light Fantastic, Pratchett himself, as narrator, talks about looking over the shoulder of the cover artist and getting entirely the wrong idea about the characters in the book. He's right, as he describes the character Herenna as being dressed quite sensibly, whereas Kirby depicted her as a half-naked, pale-skinned wispy thing. And in Sourcery, Conina is depicted front and centre as wearing a bra made out of bones and not much else, whereas in the book she's only ever wearing either full-on black sneaking costumes or a white dress with flowers on.
- Funnily enough, French publishing house L'Atalante uses Kirby's arguably contemptible cover art on what are otherwise particularly handsome, thick-papered books.
Romance novels. See some particularly egregious examples (pre-snarked for your convenience) here.
- This was done deliberately with lesbian pulp novels in the 1950's, such as Ann Bannon's The Beebo Brinker Chronicles. It was such an integral part of the way people remembered the books that recent releases ramp up the fan service even further to make them equally shocking and explicit for modern audiences, to the point of being outright misleading in a fun, campy sort of way. The first of the series, Odd Girl Out, is a fairly tame Slice Of Life and Girls Love college story with plenty of mild hetero romance to go along with it...this is the most recent cover◊. Note that the one labeled as a "gay rebel" is the one who is struggling with her sexual identity, just to start with how misleading it is.
- Speaking of Stephen King, the inside front cover of the paperback edition of Misery, which featured a romance writer protagonist, is a hilarious parody of a romance paperback cover◊ with a very familiar male model.
The cover to The Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee shows a naked woman in chains. Now, although it is a plot point of one of the cases that Judge Dee orders a woman tortured until she confesses and that this was an ordinary part of imperial China's legal system (No conviction without confession, and thus torture could be used after evidence was gathered), it still made it very hard to read this book for class. In church. In front of the pastor.
The Official Razzie Movie Guide proudly has a picture of a man in an ape suit giving the finger.
Marion Zimmer Bradley's Heartlight is an intellectual fantasy about the battle between Light and Dark over the last five decades or so of American history. Naturally, this is the paperback cover.
- Actually they just got the covers mixed up with my latest novel, Vampire John Travolta Breaks Everyones Spine.
The omnibus edition of Randall Garrett's Lord Darcy stories is a truly stunning example. The Contemptible Cover purports to show the heroine in a pseudo-Victorian confection of a dress, falling over the parapet of a bridge. What it actually shows is, very clearly, a carnivorous blue cabbage eating a three-legged woman.
- The same publisher brought us a Tyrannosaurus Rex farting fire.
- But it has nothing on the Futura/Orbit printing of Too Many Magicians: a black cover featuring a completely naked woman blasting lightning from her hand, who does not, needless to say, appear anywhere in the story.
Sharyn McCrumb's book Bimbos Of The Death Sun parodies this trope: Jay Omega is an engineer who wrote a perfectly respectable hard science fiction book, which unfortunately ended up slapped with...well, THAT title and a Contemptible Cover featuring a scantily-clad bimbo. One of the convention's organizers tells Omega that the artist is here and that he should go say hello; Jay's unspoken response is "With a battleaxe, maybe". Much to McCrumb's chagrin, the first paperback edition of the book looked remarkably similar to how she described the fictional book's cover.
The first cover for Connie Willis's Doomsday Book had a cover reminiscent of a romance novel, despite having no romance whatsoever in it.
One particular edition of The Princess Bride has, as the cover, a nude woman whose legs dissolve into a variety of horrible things like giant snakes. Not only contemptible, but has absolutely nothing to do with the book in any discernible fashion.
- Blame Morgenstern for that one.
According to an anecdote told by noted Science Fiction author Theodore Sturgeon at Princeton University in the early 1980s, a particular paperback edition of his classic SF novel More Than Human was once banned solely because of the cover, which had a surprisingly tame picture of a woman on it.
The German cover of the first two Spellsinger books by Alan Dean Foster features a muscular barbarian hero standing before a scantily clad evil queen and her group of giant fishlike monster-things. None of these come even close to appearing in the book.
Fictional example: Kurt Vonnegut's recurring character Kilgore Trout suffers from an extreme case of this. His stories are published as filler in hardcore pornography magazines, and almost nobody actually reads them for the words.
- Kilgore Trout was originally created as a fictionalized version of Theodore Sturgeon, who'd suffered more than his share of contemptible covers in his time, as mentioned above. Many real authors have suffered the same fate as Mr. Trout, and were published only in porn magazines for the longest time, such as Stephen King, or Philip Jose Farmer... the latter of whom once wrote a novel (Venus on the Half-Shell) under the pseudonym of "Kilgore Trout"!
One cover of the SERRAted Edge books that contained The Chrome Circle includes a minor antagonist being prominently displayed on the cover with her breasts threatening to pop out of her tacky suit.
- One of Lackey's Valdemar books, Magic's Pawn, suffers from this on the U.S. first edition paperback cover by Jody Lee (who does most of Lackey's covers). Despite the fact that she appears nowhere in the book, and in fact the main character is gay, there is a completely naked woman with Godiva Hair lounging in the corner of the border. Worse, this is the most common cover for the book.
  - This happens to Lackey far too often. The cover for "By the Sword" is another blatant example where the main character, a rather experienced mercenary who frequently brings up the need for practical clothes, is portrayed wearing purple leggings, an eighties ponytail and something that looks far too much like football pads to count as armor. Not babes in chain-mail bikinis, but still WTF?
Parodied in The Areas Of My Expertise, which at one point claims to have a cover with a dragon and a seminude sword maiden. It doesn't.
- Unless you buy the paperback edition.
Many of the printings of the James Bond novels, including Devil May Care.
Aldous Huxley's Brave New World is a part of the English canon, which among other things, satirizes consumerism, sensationalism, and sexualization. The cover the book was given at one time when published in America: [1]◊ My lecture group eventually decided these two apparently irrelevant characters must in fact be the protagonists of "30 Days in a Helicopter", the porno flick the main character is persuaded to endure a ways into the book.
The non-fiction art history book (From Dawn to Decadence) had a picture of a Roman orgy on the front. The book spent most of its time with its front cover down when I wasn't reading it.
- The 19th c. academic painting with the totally bummed out blond sprawled across the laps of half the celebrants.
Jon Stewart's Naked Pictures of Famous People has a naked Abraham Lincoln on the cover, hiding his genitals with his hands. The book is a series of essays parodying various celebrities/public figures, so the cover has some relevance (as well as fitting the title), but it's still not something you want to be caught with on the bus.
One paperback collection of Cthulhu Mythos stories has a cover depicting some kind of a green monster (who's most certainly not the Big Guy himself: no wings or tentacles) holding a naked woman. Most of his other mythos books also have covers with little to do with any of the stories, showing stuff like skulls of pikes or generic graveyard scenes.
- The only good Lovecraft covers were from Finnish collections long since out of print — they included things such as books filled with creepy scrawl and imagery, very fitting for the context.
Dragonflight has a random scantily-clad voluptuous blonde on the cover. Dragonriders Of Pern isn't exactly high literature anyway, but still.
Parodied on the British sitcom As Time Goes By: The protagonist, a (white, older) Englishman named Lionel, has written a memoir of the decades he spent growing coffee in Kenya. In one episode, he is made to pose for a cover photo, dressed like an adventure hero in khaki, including a shirt revealing a lot of bare chest. A scantily-clad blonde is sprawled at his feet.
All My Sins Remembered by Joe Haldeman has several things arranged in a surreal fashion on the cover, each apparently intended to portray one event of the story in a metaphorical fashion rather than a literal one. However, it is uncertain what might correspond to a naked man committing a sexual act with a giant snake.
The earlier Anita Blake books, which don't focus nearly so much on steamy action. The covers all depicted some barely covered part of a woman's body clad in silk or satin... for a book that was mostly about vampires and werewolves and gruesome murders. (The later books ended up about vampires and werewolves and necromancers getting it on in various combinations.)
- The Meredith Gentry series, by the same author, also uses the silk or satin (or leather) clad woman's body for covers. They're usually in shiny jewel tones. I really didn't want to show my older brother my purchase that day...
While there may not be anything wrong with their covers, there are certain books that you may not want to be caught reading in public. For example: if you ever plan on reading Mein Kampf you may as well just remove the front cover to avoid scrutiny in public. (Some editions of Mein Kampf make it even worse by having huge swastikas on the front! Then there are the editions with huge pictures of Hitler on the front.) Lolita would also probably apply in this situation.
- Some copies of Lolita are even worse than others though. Some have a photograph of a 12 year old girl on the front. Now given the themes of the book, was this really necessary? And what parent didn't mind a publisher using their daughter's image on a book involving an inapproprate sexual relationship with a young girl?
Reprints of classic novels sometimes, of course, feature photos from recent film adaptions. In the case of faithful adaptions, such as the 1995 version of PrideAndPrejudice, this is perfectly reasonable, as the cover in question features a photo of protagonists Darcy and Elizabeth, as played by Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle. In the case of 'freely' (or 'badly') adapted novels, this can be quite unfortunate, like TheScarletLetter featuring a cover photo of Gary Oldman and Demi Moore drooling over each other.
The NSFW(!) cover of Tsipi Keller's Retelling. Not something I'd read in public.
An old edition of Yukio Mishima's Spring Snow was packaged as a steamy, exotic romance novel. Anyone who's read any Mishima knows how bizarre this is. The back cover quotes a few sentences that appeared to be the lead-in to a graphic sex scene – in the book, those sentences are immediately followed by the protagonist ejaculating prematurely, and are the only steamy sentences in the entire novel.
Raymond E Feist's The Riftwar Cycle books are usually pretty good. But the American paperback editions of several of the Serpent War Saga books contained some truly awful artwork on the interior covers. Here is a sample◊ and no, none of these characters are depicted anywhere in the book.
The American versions of Simon R Green's Deathstalker series all feature a blond-haired man what I can only assume is the female lead in a leather corset and short shorts. The character descriptions weren't very detailed so they did have to take some artistic license but the male lead's description pretty much came down to "dark haired".
Women of the Otherworld books uasually have a scantily clad woman on the cover, in a sexy pose, and have little blurbs that make them sound like romance novels. In reality, however, while there's romance in the stories, it's usually a minor part of the plot.
The Hollows series has the main character scantily clad on each cover. It's actually accurate in that she's known for having an unfortunate dress sense (in the very first scene of the first book she's mistaken for a prostitute) but her dress sense doesn't actually reflect much about her personality.
The original Baen edition for David Weber's Field of Dishonor has someone who looks like Michael Jackson with a gun on the cover.
The American cover of the first Spice And Wolf light novel is going to look like this◊. Apparently, Yen Press doesn't think that a book about economics will sell unless it looks like ~~a trashy romance novel~~ porn.
Poor, poor Mercy Thompson. Every one of the covers shows someone presumably intended to be Mercy posing way too voluptuously to be healthy, wearing Stripperiffic clothes that she probably wouldn't be caught dead in. They also apparently took the fact that she has a tattoo of a coyote's footprint on her stomach and ran with it, since they also give her all sorts of mutually-contradictory and extensive body art.
Used deliberately with The Brand New Monty Python Bok, which, underneath its plain dust jacket, had a pornographic cover titled Tits n' Bums: A Weekly Look at Church Architecture.
A paperback edition of William Hope Hodgeson's classic novel "The House on the Borderland" — which takes place in Ireland — shows a drought-stricken midwestern prairie with a giant ear of corn in the foreground. Somewhere in the world there must be an edition of "The Grapes of Wrath" that has swine-things on the cover.
Jame, heroine of the Chronicles Of The Kencyrath, is a skinny Flat Chested Girl who is often mistaken for a boy- so of course the most recent covers give her not only the Most Common Superpower, but her shirt partway open to show it off. *headdesk* Therefore it also crosses over with Covers Always Lie.
Make Way For Dragons is an odd example. The one blonde female in the book is a supporting character who really doesn't have much to do in the plot other then be a taxi driver and yell a lot. Naturally she's featured on the cover. Skateboarding. Which is completely against her character. At least she is dressed tastefully.

Close Literature

Music

In his youth, I had quite some trouble explaining to his parents why he owned an album with an ejaculating horse on the cover (probably not safe for work.)
Many death metal covers as well. Nothing as risky as walking around with an image of "corpse cunnilingus◊".
- Grindcore, which already is death metal Up To Eleven, has brought us (probably the most NSFW link on the page!) Kutschurft.◊ The name is Dutch for cuntscabies, and that what you get to see too.
The original release of the Dutch prog rock album Atlantis by Earth and Fire featured an appalling cover design that depicted lots of blobby naked people floating around, apparently drawn in crayon. A later CD release wisely substituted a photo of the band.
Another music example, defining music loosely: the cover of ''Two Virgins'' by John Lennon and Yoko Ono. So bad, it was wrapped in brown paper on initial release. They weren't even attractive nudes...
- Type O Negative's original cover for ''The Origin of the Feces'' was far worse.
- The self-titled ''Blind Faith'' album, the Scorpions' ''Virgin Killer'' , and Nirvana's ''Nevermind'' all manage to take the "random naked people" style one horrible step further by using underage nude models. (Blind Faith took it even farther by having the 11-year-old model hold a very phallic chrome spaceship model.)
  - The naked baby cover of Nevermind had a sticker over the baby's penis accusing anyone who is offended by the cover of being a closet pedophile.
  - Blind Faith is something of a special case, because they wanted to use her (over-18) sister, who agreed, then later backed out. After the sister backed out, the girl who ended up on the cover volunteered.
  - Wrong; the sister was turned down for being too old for the effect the band wanted...despite not being over 18. (14, according to That Other Wiki.)
  - The Virgin Killer cover art, in particular, is so controversial that in late 2008, it caused the album's Wikipedia article to be blocked in the UK.
  - In addition to the aforementioned Virgin Killer, some other Scorpions album covers feature nudity and/or are sexually suggestive, in particular In Trance, Lovedrive, Animal Magnetism, Love at First Sting, and Pure Instinct. Then there are Fly to the Rainbow◊ and Moment of Glory◊, which are embarrassing for entirely different reasons. (According to this interview, former lead guitarist Uli Jon Roth dislikes the covers of both Fly to the Rainbow and Virgin Killer.)
- Paul McCartney took the cover photo/self-portrait for his 2001 album Driving Rain himself. With a digital watch-cam. In grainy black and white. In a restroom. At the time, there were a lot of people questioning his taste level and thinking the cover was even worse than it looked...
  - It was taken with a Game Boy Camera (and obviously preempting the Myspace Shot). Neil Young did the same thing but his looks more oddly mosaic.
- While still on the subject of The Beatles.... good luck looking at The Beatles the same way ever again after seeing the original cover◊ of Yesterday and Today.
Enjoy these two Onion AV Club features about notably Nightmare Fuel-heavy or just totally insane album cover art.
The Dwarves. Any album by The Dwarves. Some album covers include: a topless woman in a Mexican wrestling mask holding a skateboard, naked women covered in blood, naked women holding a midget on a crucifix...
- Your Mileage May Vary as what I have seen from the list at That Other Wiki its hit or miss!
The Mayhem bootleg album Dawn of the Black Hearts notoriously used an actual photo of the singer's corpse following his suicide as the cover art.
Chumbawamba's ''Anarchy''was also sold in brown paper packaging. (NSFW!) So you know without looking at the link, its a baby being born! To be more specific only the head is out and its covered in blood.
- Their album What You See Is What You Get has a cover depicting a completely SFW photo of a dog...until you open it, and fold out the booklet, and it's revealed to be cropped from a photo of mating dogs.
Just about everything involving Passenger of Shit, a band that can be best described as "Anal Cunt goes electronica". Don't even dare to do the Google Image Search on these guys (even with the family filter on!), just seriously don't.
- Due to the way their logo is drawn, Anal Cunt themselves do count as well.
The cover of the Japanese electronic music duo capsule's "Sugarless Girl" album. Even as a girl, I get slightly embarrassed at the sight of the cover's picture of a voluptuous naked woman, despite the fact that she is covering herself.
The LP release of Keith Moon's solo album, Two Sides of the Moon, showed Moon riding in a car on the cover. The window through which Moon is seen is cut through on the sleeve, so that the art varies depending on how the inner sleeve is inserted. Either he's looking out through the window while clutching a cane, or he's, appropriately enough, mooning the camera.
Venetian Snares' album Horse and Goat had to be sold with a reversible cover, with a close-up of a girl's face on the front and the real cover on the back. The first two manufacturers they went to wouldn't even print it. Not surprising, considering that the cover was done by Trevor Brown.
The Gong album Acid Motherhood features a Mister Seahorse cover image.
Liars' It Fit When I Was A Kid single, which features the band members crudely photoshopped into gay porn◊. The censored version (probably deliberately) made it seem even worse than it actually was◊.
Lords of Acid album Voodoo-U features a she-devil lesbian orgy.

Close Music

Tabletop Games

Video Games

The cover of The Elder Scrolls: Arena. Forget about the engaging Wide Open Sandbox: in this cover, there's a barbarian girl in skanky Stripperiffic Breast Plates, the likes of which appears nowhere in the rather Fanserviceless game. Daggerfall was luckier in this respect, featuring a poorly-drawn rendition of the Underking clawing at the cover, while Morrowind finally settled for the minimalistic path and used Dunmer tapestry.
- Arena was originally intended to be Exactly What It Says on the Tin: a fantasy gladiatorial RPG. It was only midway through the project's development that it began to evolve into the open-world Lord of the Rings-inspired romp we all know and love (the "arena" aspect of the game was even removed altogether until its return in Oblivion). Given that the cover was designed early on for marketing purposes, it's actually perfectly appropriate. So yeah...
- The French cover of Arena was much better, depicting the face-off between the hero and Jagar Tharn.
- The cover of Battlespire goes all three ways at once: it's significant (weapon and enemy show-off), minimalistic, and features the sexy silhouette of a Daedra Seducer.
Vampire The Masquerade Bloodlines' cover prominently features the blonde-haired, big-boobed, pigtailed, hot pants wearing, Lesbian Vampire Jeanette Voerman looking alluringly at the viewer while showing off her backside. Obviously, this was done for Fanservice purposes, since she's only a minor character and only shows up for about a third of the plot.
- To add insult to injury Jeanette doesn't even exist outside of her sister's broken mind
- They already had a live person (Erin Layne) modeling Jeanette for some fanservicey promotional material, which at least helps explain the choice of character.
In addition to not looking like the in-game graphics, the Western box art for Phantasy Star may also count as a Contemptible Cover.
Ailish features prominently on the box art and disc of Sudeki, but the main character is arguably Tal. Ailish does get a decent role in the game however, but she, strangely enough, manages to get less sexually appealing through the course of the game because she get progressively more covering outfits.
Every single installment of Spellforce series has a scantily clad woman in the cover art.
The Mystery of the Druids, a rather average adventure game, gets a screaming druid-like man◊ for a cover.
Acclaim did this twice with their localization of the Puzzle Bobble series, dumping the cute characters for creepy men with sticks over their eyelids◊ and a close-up of an uncute baby with sunglasses, blowing a bubble at separate points. Messed up.
Kid Fenris' Gallery of Hideous Box Art has a good number of these.
The infamous box art of the first Suikoden game resembles the cover of a bad fantasy novel.
- With a Fu Manchu guy, the only thing that's accurate is the three-headed monster (which is just a random mook)
The box art of Karnaaj Rally was so notoriously ridiculous that it made Seanbaby infamously review this game solely based on the cover.