This week is a fantastic day for people who love great comic book art, with the release of The Art of Ditko, Dave Stevens' The Rocketeer The Complete Adventures, and Drawing Down The Moon The Art of Charles Vess having arrived to beautify comic store and personal book displays / coffee tables everywhere!
The Art of Ditko is 206 pages of fantastic obscure short stories drawn by Steve Ditko from the 1950's and 1960's, in a full color over-sized hardcover with stellar reproduction throughout, lovingly put together by Craig Yoe. This Ditko collection comes out hot on the heals of Fantagraphics' Strange Suspense: The Steve Ditko Archives V.1 so it's been a great year for people who love the art of Steve Ditko (and I don't even want to talk to you if you don't - grin)!
The long-awaited The Rocketeer The Complete Adventures hardcover and deluxe over-sized edition also arrived, newly beautifully colored by Laura Martin, who was selected by Dave Stevens for this project before he died. 
The regular hardcover is a great value at $30, but the deluxe edition really re-defines the word "deluxe" - and I know I often say such things and sound like a hype machine, but everyone who looks at the Deluxe Rocketeer will immediately see that I'm not just talking out of the side of my hat (and there's an extra 130 pages of Stevens production art in the deluxe edition). Both The Art of Ditko and The Rocketeer hardcovers are from IDW. 
From Dark Horse this week is the third eye candy art book release of the week, Drawing Down The Moon The Art of Charles Vess, which is a 200 page hardcover collection of paintings from one of the masters of fantasy art. Too much great stuff!
1 comment:
That Ditko book looks pretty cool.
The stories featured are during what I think was his best period as an artist and storyteller.
His Spider-Man work is cool but the weird works preceding it were always my favorites.
(That was also long before his overzealous fans and the resulting socio-political opinions made him seem like an out of touch, bitter whack job)
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