John Cayea

John Cayea was a cover artist, particularly in the SF/fantasy genres, for Doubleday in the 1970s. He created the iconic cover art for The Stand, of an angelic figure with white hair dressed in white dueling with his sword against a humanoid black crow dressed in a red hood and tunic who is wielding a scythe. This image was reused for the Complete and Uncut Edition, and unusually enough appears on many of the international versions of both original and uncut editions.

Biography (Before The Stand)
Cayea's first known work is for Night of the Saucers by Eando Binder, a novel about an SF author who saves the world from an alien invasion, published by Belmont Books in 1971. Cayea's cover depicts flying saucers lifting what appears to be the disembodied heads of two lovers out of a swamp by their hair. In 1974, he switched to Doubleday, beginning with the cover to Jacqueline Lichtenberg's House of Zeor, a feminist parable about a futuristic Earth in which life-giving mutants interbreed with parasitic ones. Cayea's cover depicts two shapeless white figures intertwining their arms against a plain pale yellow background.

Other 1970s covers by Cayea include Under a Calculating Star by John Morressy (1975), about a rebellion against an alien evil similar to the epic showdown of The Stand, which Cayea illustrated with a man in red lifting a large red globe Atlas-like, and Beasts by John Crowley (1976), about genetically engineered human-animal hybrids, for which Cayea drew a man-lion trapped in a cage.

At Doubleday, his work, which was distinguished by simple shapes with strong contrasts between black and white and was influenced by '70s pop art minimalism, was generally weighted toward the bottom of the covers to give plenty of room for the title and author at the top. Thus, his most famous cover - the one for The Stand - which put the figures suspended in space in the center, was something of a departure, although his distinctive style of line art was unmistakable.

Biography (After The Stand)
After 1981, Cayea is not known to have illustrated new covers for Doubleday or anyone else. Whether this was due to his retirement, his style falling out of favor with readers who now preferred the bold color blocking or computer art-inspired covers of 1980s SF, or his death is unknown.

One of his last known covers is to Octavia E. Butler's 1980 novel Wild Seed, a prequel to her Afro-centric Patternist series about humans who receive superpowers from an alien plague. His cover depicts the novel's female shapeshifter protagonist Anyanwu transforming from an infant to a young adult.

On the release of the Complete and Uncut Edition in 1990, his original 1978 cover art was reused, and a line-drawing silhouette of the angel and crow-demon was used to introduce each of the individual books of the story.