Colorful Fiction

Like a lot of people, I enjoy novels, films and comics, thus verbal, audiovisual and visual-verbal fiction. Films and comics have the advantage of full color visuals but prose fiction can be "colorful." First, it generates book covers and each new edition of a text can have a different cover.

Secondly, the writing can be "colorful." Many of Poul Anderson's descriptive passages are multi-sensory. We see, hear and smell a scene.

Chee Lan, a member of Anderson's "Trader Team" is squirrel-like, small with a large tail and white-furred except for a black nose and a dark mask around golden or green eyes. Thus, not only is she described colorfully. She also resembles a member of the DC Comics Green Lantern Corps, pictured lower left.

To complete the resemblance, Chee flies with a gravity harness in "Day Of Burning" and she and her team mates engage flying soldiers in a forest on another planet in Mirkheim. The Trader Team and the Green Lantern Corps, both interstellar multi-species outfits, differ in almost every respect. However, by basing an extraterrestrial on a terrestrial life form, Anderson and a comics script writer have generated visually similar characters.