There are still four more months until Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows – the final book in the Harry Potter series – is published, and the excitement is so palpable that people are literally wetting themselves over a cartoon of Harry Potter.
Yesterday the new cover art for various international versions of Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows were revealed and Harry Potter fans have been frantically unpicking all the artwork's symbolism ever since in a bid to try and work out the fate of their hero. In short – the American Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows cover shows Harry Potter reaching for the sky surrounded by scenes of destruction, the British version shows Harry Potter seemingly doing some karate in a vault full of Scrooge McDuck-style loot, the adult British version of Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows shows a locket with an 'S' on it and the Malaysian version shows Harry Potter dead on the floor with Ron saying to Hermione "So Lord Voldemort did kill Harry after all. I certainly didn't see that coming."
Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows had something of a tortuous conception. After Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince broke all kinds of records, the pressure was on JK Rowling to knuckle down and get on with writing the final Harry Potter book instead of just complaining about skinny people all the time. It was tough, too – at various points in time JK Rowling ran out of paper and almost lost the handwritten manuscript – but the toughest part was possibly deciding to kill off Harry Potter.
The question of Harry Potter's death is currently at the forefront of all his fans' minds. Rowling has hinted at it, even though Stephen King has begged her not to – but the good news is that Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows will be released in July, so we'll all know Harry Potter's fate by then. Not that it's stopping weird Harry Potter fans from poring over every little detail of the new book to try and second-guess the outcome of Harry Potter's inevitable showdown with Lord Voldemort. When the title of Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows was revealed, millions of fans a) looked up what a 'hallow' was and then b) wondered if the word 'Deathly' meant that Harry Potter would die. And when it was announced that Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows would be printed 12 million times, it received a similar scrutiny.
But now we can see the biggest clues about Harry Potter's fate, with the release of the Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows cover art, allowing fans from all over the world to scour some cartoons of a bespectacled wizard in the vain hope that they'll reveal secrets about the book. But what do the Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows covers look like? First here's the San Francisco Chronicle with a description of the American cover:
The cover of the seventh and final Harry Potter book, "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," features a dramatic gold-and-orange sky and a teenage boy in eyeglasses reaching upward… "The structures around Harry show evident destruction and in the shadows behind him, we see outlines of other people," David Saylor, Scholastic's art director, said in a statement. "For the first time, the cover is a wraparound. On the back cover, spidery hands are outstretched toward Harry. Only when the book is opened does one see a powerful image of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, his glowing red eyes peering out from his hood."
And The Sun has the British cover:
The cover for the children’s edition features an illustration of a distinctly grown-up-looking Harry, Hermione and Ron. The adult edition has a photograph of a locket bearing a serpentine “S” – believed to be the “horcrux” in which the evil Lord Voldemort keeps a fragment of his soul.
Yeah, that's what they think. We're keen interpreters of cover art here, and it's clear that the American version of Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows shows Harry Potter and Lord Voldemort buzzing off their boxes on drugs at some kind of all-night rave at an abandoned Colosseum at sunrise, while the British version shows Harry Potter, Hermione and Ron breaking into JK Rowling's booty room and trashing all her displays of exotic treasure with their rudimentary karate skills.
Look, we're just pleased that it isn't just a big picture of Harry Potter's winky, OK?
Read more:
Cover Of New Harry Potter Book Revealed – San Francisco Chronicle
missy pissy says
My bowels are indeed all over the place.
Ron says
Perhaps you would benefit from looking up the word “literally”.
Quidditch fan says
Make sure not to ever search for Harry Potter on google before you read it and make sure you don’t walk by people talking about it. I did the stupidest thing last time when I searched for “who dies in Harry Potter” before reading the 6th book!!!! Enjoy.