The Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor)

Normally, if I doodle characters inspired by an author's prose, I have no illusions regarding their canonicity. But in the case of GCA, I was a post-hoc semi-official unpaid fan concept-illustrator. I was definitely working to Wasp's feedback, and as such, I've got an emotional stake in the likenesses of the characters (not the characters themselves: they're all Wasp's). So any divergence from my interpretation (Flickr set) of Wasp's descriptions feels like a betrayal, or at least poor communication. (Not to forget: Props to the other artists who populated GrandCentralArena.com.)

Okay, now that I've deconstructed my emotional reaction in proper Vulcan fashion (whew)... The amazon.jp cover images are bigger than thumbnails, but they're still too small to clearly interpret all the detail that's been crammed in. Given that caveat, my specific comments are:

Left to right: DuQuesne, Ariane, Simon, Molothos, Amas-Garao, and Orphan(?). Busy/dynamic, but given that necessity the composition and color are good. The tonal range isn't as wide as it could be. As long as you're going with a light/dark dichotomy, the dark side could've had a darker background.

DuQuesne has the wrong kind of beard. Going with the manga/anime-styling here, there are very few anime characters with beards, and those that have them, tend to have ones like this. (And not all that many in U.S. animation; as a beard-wearing man myself, I'd be slightly annoyed that my cosplay choices are limited to Shipwreck, David Xanatos, and Ben Ten-Thousand. If I were into cosplay, which I'm not; but it's amusing to ponder.) And he's obviously burly, but given the mix of scales in the montage, it's not apparent just how huge he is. His glove has extra-intimidating knuckle-reinforcements.

Top-middle: Is that a slab-shaped spaceship? Nope, it's DuQuesne's gun. Which he's holding sideways, gangsta-style, yo. This is, I'm given to understand, a dumb thing to do with a 20cen gunpowder handgun but might be a reasonable posture for whatever this is. And it's clearly a compositional decision.

Ariane's hair is too light a shade of blue -- she looks rather like Eureka from the Gonzo/Bandai anime Eureka 7. She's in her Arena gear, her left hand is emitting subdued biomod electrical sparks, but she's not wearing "Astrella's Wrath of God" -- I don't know what that looks like, but it's wrist-mounted.

I can't tell if Simon is wearing glasses. The tail of his (from this angle not obviously) lab coat has been stretched for dramatic effect, like Batman's cape.

The Molothos is in the background and obscured, and since that species has a complex-unfamiliar shape at the best of times, it's hard to tell quite which bits of anatomy are which. Its eye is red instead of yellow, the fringe on the back of its head is spiky instead of fan-shaped, its right arm is -- that's an interesting take, less praying mantis-ish. (An exercise for the class: How does it grasp anything safely?) This pose conveniently avoids the need to figure out its feet. And it's the wrong colors: Wasp specified black, red and blue-violet. But I suspect an artistic decision tfor visual contrast with Amas-Garao in the foreground.

Shadeweaver Amas-Garao's costume cues seem to have been taken from the Baen cover by Stephen Hickman. Fine. I dig the purple-blue hand-glow miasma-magic.

Assuming that's Orphan in the corner (on the "XTs, not adversaries" cover), he's a lot more buglike than Wasp envisioned. Of course, Wasp envisioned something resembling Cell from DragonBall Z (fan art in useful pose, LEGO minifig custom), which might be just slightly too obvious an homage in the native Japanese market. But why is he colored brown instead of green? Green isn't copyrighted.