Marvel Comics Artist's and Artisan Editions

Before the colorists have their ways with comic book pages, line artists conceive and perfect the contours of the superheroes who swing across skylines on their webs or smash through brick walls. For some aficionados, pre-colored pages are the purest products of the central artist's vision, hence the existence of "Artisan" and "Artist's" editions of iconic comics. 

IDW's latest additions to its "Artisan" and "Artist's" library showcase Jack Kirby's unpretentious illustrations for Fantastic Four issues #71, #82-84, and Annual #6 (in which the Invisible Girl brings down an android and the FF put Maximus's hypno-gun out of commission), John Romita's similarly bold and basic work for Spiderman #67-69, #71, #75, and #84 (in which Spidey finds himself shrunk down to 6 inches and grapples with the Kingpin), and a random assortment of pages depicting Jim Lee's comparatively complex work on X-Men. 

Unlike the "Artisan" homages to Kirby and Romita, Lee's Artist's Edition makes no attempt to spin stories. It's all about the art, which appears on astoundingly huge 12" x 17 1/2" pages in a hardcover package with giant centerfold. When the illustrations are blown up to such proportions and drained of color, the eye is drawn to unexpected spots on the page. The central images that register with perfect punch on standard-sized pages step aside to allow the small details to swoop out: the tirelessly applied hatching, the wrinkles of a furrowed brow (there are a lot of those), the stubble on a square jaw (lots of those too). 

The pages of Jack Kirby's Fantastic Four: Artisan Edition, John Romita's The Amazing Spider Man: Artisan Edition, and Jim Lee's X-Men: Artist's Edition are also uncommonly tactile despite the absence of consciously applied color. Taped-on typed page numbers, globs of white paint, penned notes in margins, and even dirty fingerprints humanize comics that always seemed a bit like they slipped in from some more perfect dimension.

Review: 'The Art of Star Wars Galaxy's Edge'

The Star Wars movies have always been a lot like amusement park rides with their dizzying flights through asteroid fields and high-speed races on speeder bikes. So when Disney gobbled up the franchise in 2012, it was just a matter of time before the mega-corporation built some sort of Star Wars land in its theme parks. Indeed, the Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge section of Disneyland and Disney World opened to the public in 2019. Little did the Mouse know that there was a pandemic lurking right around the corner that might cut into attendance.

For those of us not dopey enough to risk exposing ourselves to crowds of maskless tourists in Bermuda shorts, The Art of Star Wars Galaxy's Edge should scratch the itch to check out Galaxy's Edge a little. The book is a tour through the theme park section via production illustrations and paintings. The work inside this book is not too different from what artists created to conceptualize the films that inspired the park. There are paintings of fanciful new aliens, spaceships, and environments intended to remind you of such familiar Star Wars territories as Yavin 4 and the Mos Eisley Cantina. As is always the case with books of this sort, there are ideas that didn't come to fruition, such as a cool alien aquarium that would have been the centerpiece of the Galaxy's Edge cantina. It would have been nice if the book included a few actual photos of the rides and concessions developed from the art to get some idea of how they were realized, but I guess there's no substitute for seeing this stuff in person. Just be sure to get your vaccines first, kids.

Lost in the Dark: A World History of Horror Film

It seems naive to think anyone can cover 125 years of horror cinema in a mere 200-page book, but Brad Weismann gets the job done extraordinarily well despite such limitations with his new book Lost in the Dark: A World History of Horror Film. Beginning in the silent era and moving through horror's various subgenres right up to 2020's The Invisible Man (the most recent movie he mentions), Weismann touches on everything from the Universal monster movies of the thirties, Val Lewton's subtle scares of the forties, kaiju, giallo, slasher movies, J- and K- horrors, torture porn, zombies, and horror comedies. He references more than 1,500 movies produced across the globe.

Because the topic is so rich and Weismann's map is so wide, most of the hundreds of films he covers receives little more than a name-drop but he slows down to study the most essential horror films, stars, and filmmakers with greater thoroughness. He keeps his tone conversational and loves to crack wise. Weismann sometimes lets his fandom get the better of himself (is Frank Darabont's adaptation of Stephen King's The Mist really "brilliant"?), but it's hard to begrudge him that when he drops so much valuable information on us and is such an amiable tour guide. Weismann is well aware of the social, cultural, political, and artistic merits and implications of the films he discusses, but he also clearly realizes that even an academic text about a genre as fun as horror deserves better than a strictly academic analysis.

Review: Jason Crest's 'A Place in the Sun'

Jason Crest (a band, not a guy) made some singles smothered in psychedelic phasing, wah-wahing, and Mellotron and got some decent exposure opening for the likes of The Who and The Moody Blues, but they just never cracked it. A few of their single sides, such as "Turquoise Tandem Cycle", the heavily Moodies-influenced "A Place in the Sun", and the audio horror movie "Black Mass", made it onto installments of the Rubble and British Psychedelic Trip series, but Jason Crest is definitely one of the more obscure British psych groups of the sixties. That's too bad because their songs are mostly appealingly poppy (well, maybe not "Black Mass"), their productions are imaginative, and well, any record that features the Mellotron owns my heart. 

Guerssen's new Jason Crest compilation A Place in the Sun mixes demos with studio recordings since the group's mere five singles do not provide enough material to fill an LP--and since notator David Wells assures us that the "Waterloo Road" / "Education" single stinks, both of those proper recordings are omitted (honestly, I don't know what the problem is. "Waterloo Road" is a bit corny but not egregiously so, and "Education" is a peppy, bluesy number better than a good deal of the tracks that made the cut). That leaves A Place in the Sun as a somewhat uneasy shuffle of buffed recordings and lo-fi ones. Some of the tracks are inessential. As I've already implied, "Black Mass" is interesting but pretty grating, and a by-numbers cover of (Here We Go 'Round the) Lemon Tree" won't make anyone forget The Move's superior original. However, tracks such as "Turquoise Tandem Cycle", "Two by the Sea", "A Place in the Sun", and "Good Life" should scratch my fellow British freaks psych itching for something relatively obscure to discover.

Review: '100 Pivotal Moments in Beatles History'

The Beatles' story has been told many, many, many times, and though we're all anticipating newly uncovered revelations in the next volume of Mark Lewisohn's All These Years series that will no doubt be published someday in the current century, it isn't like the Beatles are making new historical milestones. So any Beatles scribe not as dedicated to research as Lewisohn (all of them) has to settle for figuring out novel ways to recycle the same old stories. 

John M. Borack's solution is to chop half-a-century of Beatles lore into 100 "pivotal moments" each related in a two or three page chapter. Such moments range from the obvious (chapters devoted to Bigger than Jesus, Shea Stadium, Paul is Dead, Butcher Sleeve, and each of The Beatles' albums and films) to the less obvious but hardly pivotal. File "Paul McCartney hires a new touring band in 2002" under pivotal moments in bending over backwards to fill a book. Borack's retelling is breezy and personable enough to make 100 Pivotal Moments in Beatles History pleasant to breeze through, but you'll have to look elsewhere for a truly pivotal Beatles book.