Worst Book Cover Ever?

Is this book cover for Alien Sex, a fantasy sci-fi short-story compilation, the worst ever?

Let’s look at the evidence. The background color is pus gray usually reserved for orphan-grade gruel from a Dickens novel.

Then, within the title, there are the circle-dots separating the letters S E X, probably meant to represent boobs, because the typesetter was twelve years old. At least he resisted the temptation to set the font in comic sans.

But the designers apparently wanted to put that Photoshop correspondence course to good use. There’s a set of lips, a pic of actual lips a la Rocky Horror, stuck in the bottom-left corner, floating above a pink rectangle, plopped there for … color? A visual counterbalance? A postmodern statement of feminism and female roles in the 20th century?

Then, to clash with the “realistic lips” is a clip-art eye in the top-right corner, with a dot orbiting the iris because, you know, the book’s about aliens, who come from space, where things circle other things.

At this point, the designers could have kept going. There is still space to fill, but come on, we don’t want to look like amateurs, desperate to fill any negative space. Besides, adding more might push into more camp territory, instead of the nightmarish clip-art screensaver floating in orphan-grade gruel that it is.

Worst ever? The publishers certainly made significant changes in later versions.