The IDW Sonic comics have been a fantastic series of adventures for old and young fans alike, and I share them with my 4 year old daughter. I jumped at the chance to pick up an official artbook of the beautiful covers associated with the series, especially as so many of the incentive covers can go for well over £100 each. Sad to say this book does little to bring these amazing covers to readers.
To start, the cover galleries are split 4 to a page, which makes them very small. Worse, all too often pages only contain 3 covers each, leaving hugs gaps across the pages, with not even commentary text to fill out the blank space. This is a huge waste of paper, not to mention highly disrespectful of the wonderful artists whose work has been minimised. It reads more like an auction catalogue than an artbook. At least each artist gets a dedicated section, but it's about as "organised" as the book gets.
What an absolutely tragic waste of space. These comic covers are hard to find, and thanks to this book, hard to see.
One of the worst crimes is that most of the time, they leave the connected covers separated, but when they do present them as a single piece of art, they put it in portrait and leave half the page blank! Why didn't they rotate it to make the most of the space? What amateur put this together?
Nobody thought to rotate this and use up the full page? Seriously?!
A book like this requires the covers one-a-page so you can properly appreciate them. It's very simple and Udon has literally been doing this properly for over a decade with the Capcom artbooks. You have art with insane levels of details, such as issue #25's incentive cover by Jonathan Gray, and I can barely make out any of it. I can't even find it online, so this tiny image may be the only way I can see it. How utterly frustrating.
Where it does score a couple of points is in the rough work that shows the design process for the original characters the comic has introduced, such as Whisper the Fox, Surge the Tenrec and Tangle the Lemur. I know a few of these have been included in the hardcover collections, so I'm not sure how many are even exclusive to this book.
All in, this is a book best purchased digitally (and it's part of Amazon's Kindle Unlimited, which is handy), because at least then you can zoom in and appreciate all the wonderful details the artists have included in their work, but as a coffee-table artbook it feels woefully inadequate and put together by people who haven't the first clue how to compile an artbook. Literally five people were responsible for compiling this, and not one of them thought to point out that the art is hard to see. Woeful.
Very, very poor execution and ultimately pointless.
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