Once upon a time, there was an English painter who moved to Provence, a part of southern France long associated with artists seeking the colors nature might reveal to them in the region’s legendary sunlight.

This painter was not working in the time of the Barbizon School and the Impressionists, however, but in the blossoming days of the internet, as an early participant in painting/blogging and the nascent practice of “painting a day”.

Before “painting a day” acquired its current connotations of artists latching on to the term as a way to drive eyeballs, and hopefully purchasers, to their web based storefronts and auctions, the regimen of painting one small painting a day had a different purpose. It was (and still is for those who practice it in the right spirit) a form of artistic discipline, a way to focus and hone one’s painting skills and artistic vision.

Our English painter in Provence, Julian Merrow-Smith, thought of it as a project, painting a small painting every day over a period of time, and posting each day’s painting on the internet for sale and comment, a practice he admired in the hands of its originator, Duane Keiser.

Merrow-Smith’s small paintings were essentially the size of postcards, and the act of posting them on the web akin to sending them out to someone, thus his project took on the name “Postcard from Provence”.

Now, five years and over 1,300 paintings later, in a small abstract of that project, winnowing down the work of those years into 140 selections, Merrow-Smith has released a book of paintings titled, simply enough, Postcard from Provence: Paintings by Julian Merrow Smith.

The book, as one who has been following Merrow-Smith’s work for some time might expect, is beautiful, and wonderfully produced. Representative of the project as a whole, the paintings are divided more or less equally between still life subjects and landscape. The book design is elegant and simple; the printing well balanced, the colors rich and vibrant (and, for those who are into such things, the book is printed in one of those ink and paper combinations that smells wonderful).

In addition, there is a conversation with the artist in talks with Michael Gitlitz, that delves into his history, the origins of the project and his approach to painting.

The book can be ordered, signed and numbered, directly from the artist, or without signature, through Amazon in the UK and Alibris in the US. There is also a list of selected bookshops in the UK that have the book on shelf.

There is a preview widget on the book page of the Postcard From Provence blog, that allows you to step through 50 pages of the book. Be sure to choose the “full screen” option.

I have long been a bit frustrated with the reproductions of Merrow-Smith’s work on the web, in that they feel small, even though the paintings themselves are small.

Here they are displayed in the high resolution of print (much sharper than images on the web, as I frequently remind my readers). With only a few exceptions, they are also, much to my delight, presented at their actual size.

In print we can see, in a way that is not clear in the low resolution images on the web, the painterly brush strokes, sensual textures and deft painting handling that Merrow-Smith has worked so hard to acquire and now wields with apparent ease.

In selecting the paintings for the book he has not done what I might have hoped. I’ve mentioned before that I see his story as one of artistic growth and struggle, told over that five year period in the sequence of over a thousand paintings, and I might have wanted a temporal sequence showing that advancement.

In retrospect, of course, that would have been a bad and unworkable idea in the limited space of a book. (That story is there, however, on his site in the form of his archive of paintings.) Instead he has taken the much more reasonable course of selecting some of the best of those paintings, which is to say, mostly recent ones [Correction: see this post's comments].

These are the fruits of his labors, the result and reward of the daily painting discipline, and they display the current state of his abilities, his deft draftsmanship, crisp and lively paint handling, superb sense of chiaroscuro, firm command of composition and negative space and, most dramatically, his evocation of color and light.

In a way, the book has a storybook feeling to it, as if a writer had decided to depict the life of a painter in Provence and the paintings had been chosen and arranged to communicate that perfectly; here is the painter on the edge of the vineyard, bursting with greens on the edge of shadow; here is the painter at the foot of the hill, distant mountains washed in haze; here is the painter in his house, this evening’s fish waiting to be prepared, scales glistening in the kitchen light; here is the onion, hints of transparency in its film of skin; here the garlic, rounded in deep chiaroscuro; here the simple glass of wine, reflective and refractive, the day’s fruit from the local market or the artist’s garden, ripe with color.

Here is the artist and the bits of his life he has chosen to share with us, whether in sunlight or on a kitchen counter, sparkling with the colors that Provence has revealed to him.

There are hundreds of art instruction books out there, with a wide range of topics, approaches and degrees of value, but Imaginative Realism: How to Paint What Doesn’t Exist by renowned painter, illustrator and Dinotopia artist James Gurney, is exceptional in several ways.

Before I go too far, I’ll point out that although this is essentially an instructional book, it also works well simply as an art book; and fans of fantastic art in general, and Gurney’s work in particular, will quickly find it a “must-have”. (See my previous posts on James Gurney, also here and here. As a side note, Gurney is part of the Enchantment Artist’s Symposium and Exhibition at the University of Hartford’s Joseloff Gallery, 6 November 2009 to 17 January 2010.)

First, this book is unusual because of its topic. Most art instruction books concern themselves with drawing and painting aspects of the real world, and this is certainly the most fundamental and important factor in representational art. But for those in working in areas that demand the creation of images of things that do not exist, whether of real but extinct animals, scenes form the historic past or visionary imaginings of undiscovered worlds, the challenge is to take those fundamentals of drawing and painting from life and extend them into the realm of the imagined.

This is increasingly important for contemporary illustrators, movie and gaming concept artists, animators and comic book artists. Figures, faces, animals, creatures, scenes and entire worlds need to be conjured from the the artist’s imagination and made visually manifest.

Gurney tackles the skills needed in this kind of art head-on. He goes through an extensive array of topics, from generating ideas to initial sketches to models and maquettes, through materials, mediums, techniques, perspective, composition and finishing. In the process he covers elements like imagined architecture and landscapes, vehicles, dinosaurs, history painting, characters, creatures and aliens. The topics are arranged in short, but densely informative two-page topics and sub-topics, lavishly illustrated with Gurney’s own work and occasional nods to the masters.

Steeped in the traditions of classic representational art and the firm artistic foundations of 19th Century academic art in particular, Gurney starts from his interest in those traditions and opens with a brief look at the history and origins of imaginative art, with an acknowledgement of the value of studying the work of artists that have defined the field.

The topics are at once wide ranging and surprisingly consistent. I say that because of the other, perhaps most important, stand out characteristic of this book, its rather unique origin.

There are several approaches to the creation of art instruction books. We can eliminate those that are mediocre or downright terrible and concentrate only on books we would consider valuable.

Among these there are books that are proposed by editors in publishing houses, and fulfilled in a perfunctory, but capable manner by artists and writers chosen for the task. There are books that are proposed by the artists themselves in an effort to leverage their knowledge into financial stability beyond its application in their own work. There are books that are created from the artist’s inclination to take on the role of a teacher.

Rarest of all, there are art instruction books that are born out of the artist’s sheer enthusiasm for what they have learned and the desire to share it with any who are inclined to benefit from that knowledge. Imaginative Realism is one of those rare gems.

The contents of this book didn’t originate as a book project, but were gleaned from posts to Gurney’s superb blog, Gurney Journey, in which they have been offered up for free over the course of the last few years.

Over the extent of it’s run, Gurney’s blog has evolved from chronicling a book tour into a personal journey of artistic exploration and discovery; in the course of which Gurney has shared his insights into painting, composition, color, light and a variety of keen observations about the nature of creating art. As you can imagine, in the course of writing Lines and Colors I have occasion to visit hundreds and hundreds of artists’ web sites and blogs. Gurney Journey is one of the exceptional few that I return to on an almost daily basis.

The book started as an idea in a blog post, and further posts followed it’s creation and eventual publication. In this one, Gurney explains his intention in creating the book.

The resulting book is beautiful. It’s printed in a nicely oversize format on heavy stock, with printing values that make the hundreds of illustrations jump off the pages. The reproduction standards follow in the tradition of the superb reproductions and excellent printing evident in Gurney’s popular Dinotopia books (particularly the most recent one, Journey to Chandara), and his refined use of color is vibrantly present.

I also haven’t seen many art instruction books as information dense as this one. Not that the book feels visually cramped in any way, the book design is clear and elegant, but every one of its 200+ pages can be mined for nuggets of art technique gold. This is likely due to the origin of the book in blog posts collected over a long time, rather than a book project that had to be filled out from its inception. Instead of having to put together enough material to create a substantial book, Gurney probably had a job sifting through that wealth of material and deciding what to leave out.

Gurney even goes the extra mile and gives an insightful overview of art careers based on the techniques he outlines in the book, including paperback covers, film design, storyboards, concept art, video game design, toy design and even theme park design.

The one glaring omission is comics, perhaps because it’s an art form in which Gurney doesn’t personally work, and, though he pays plenty of attention to drawing, his emphasis is on painting. I do work in comics, however, so I’ll take in on myself to point out that virtually all of the concepts in the book can be applied to the creation of comics in addition to the other areas mentioned.

The last way in which Imaginative Realism is different from most other art instruction books is the feeling it carries of a start-to-finish labor of love; from its origin in the artist’s enthusiasm for the subject, to the fulfillment from a lifetime of experience, observation and work, to it’s refined finish, crafted like one of Gurney’s own paintings. It is instructive not only in how to draw and paint from the imagination, but in how to create an outstanding art instruction book.

In short, an absolute treat.

Anyone who has read my previous post about comics art great Al Williamson, knows that he is high on my personal list of adventure comics artists, but I have to admit that even I was surprised by the new book from Flesk publications, Al Williamson’s Flash Gordon: A Lifelong Vision of the Heroic, that collects all of his art for several comic book incarnations of Alex Raymond’s iconic space hero.

I had seen a few of the the stories collected here, but by no means all. The 5 or 6 collections I have of Williamson’s work hinted at even more terrific Flash Gordon pieces by Williamson, with short excerpts and individual panels, but until I got this collection I didn’t realize how consistently amazing his Flash Gordon work was.

In terms of his wildly imagined and intricately detailed science fiction settings, it easily rivals his stunning work for the classic EC Comics stories from the 1950’s, but the sophisticated renderings of figures and faces from some of the later stories bring with them the elegance of his work from the Secret Agent Corrigan strips.

In many ways, Williamson was the inheritor of Alex Raymond’s role as one of the artists who carried the superb draftsmanship and refined pen and ink techniques of the turn of the century illustrators into the 20th Century world of adventure comics

The book collects three periods during which Williamson worked on Raymond’s most recognizable character, from the King Comics stories of the 1960’s, the 1980’s adaptation of the campy motion picture (of which it was by far the best aspect) and the easily missed Marvel Comics miniseries from 1994, as wall as including much supplementary and related art in its 256 pages.

I have Williamson’s 1980’s Flash Gordon movie adaptation as published by Golden Books, in which the printing is terrible and the art is lost in sloppy over-saturated color and poor reproduction values in general. I didn’t realize how beautiful the art for that story actually was until I saw the same story printed here in it’s original glorious black and white.

This kind of comic art, when printed in black and white, is like having a book of classic pen and ink illustration that happens to tell terrific pulp adventure stories.

If you look at the pages in the book you’ll see that in many places the black areas are shades of dark gray rather than solid black. This is not because the quality of the printing is in any way off; Flesk Publications is a small niche-publisher devoted to creating superb editions of books about classic illustrators and comics artists, and the standards of book design and printing from Flesk are always high.

Those areas are, in fact, not quite black because the quality of the printing is superb, and the majority of the art has been reproduced not from stats or mechanical copies, as wold be the usual procedure with this kind of collection, but from brand new scans of the original artwork, allowing you to actually see the tones of ink as laid down by the artist! Wonderful.

Mark Schultz, who acknowledges being tremendously inspired by Williamson’s work, was instrumental in working with John Fleskes to assemble the book, and contributes the major essay. There is an interview with Schultz about the collection on Newsarama.

For admirers of great adventure comics art (and I obviously include myself here), Al Williamson’s Flash Gordon: A Lifelong Vision of the Heroic is one of the must have books this year. It can be found in better bookstores and comics shops, or ordered from Amazon and other online bookstores, as well as directly from the Flesk Publications.

For more on Al Williamson, see my previous post.

We live in a wonderfully weird world, in which life has taken forms more spectacularly bizarre and varied than the imaginings of any fantasy or concept artist (which, given the talents of many of those amazing artists, is saying something).

Nature has provided us with a record of some of the wildest experiments of the past, most notable among them might be the dinosaurs, which have captured the public’s imagination since the first artistic reconstructions of them in the 19th century.

But there are many eras of geologic time and restless evolutional experimentation in nature’s vast fossil scrapbook, from long before the dinosaurs as well as the epochs between their demise and our short time on the stage.

William Stout, a multi-talented artist who I have written about previously, has created murals of several periods of prehistoric life for The Houston Museum of Natural Science, Walt Disney World’s Animal Kingdom, and the San Diego Natural History Museum (see my previous post on William Stout’s murals for the San Diego Natural History Museum).

Flesk Publications, a terrific independent art book publisher that I have also written about before, has published a lavish, beautifully designed and printed book devoted to displaying all of Stout’s prehistoric life murals.

The book is 144 pages in nicely large horizontal coffee-table format (10×12″, 25×30cm), crafted with with Flesk’s usual meticulous attention to quality and detail, and features reproductions not only from the finished murals, but from the preliminary half-size paintings submitted to the museum paleontologists for approval before the final paintings ere undertaken, as well as the sketches on which they were based and even some of the briefly notated thumbnail sketches that preceded those.

In fact, as much as I admire Stout’s final mural art, which displays a painterly approach rarely found in scientific murals, it is often his beautiful pen, ink and watercolor drawings that I find most appealing.

As I mentioned at the outset, there are wonderfully strange animals from many periods of life on Earth represented here, from the time before the dinosaurs up to our own ancestors, arrayed in dramatic scenes teeming with life and alive with color.

The book attempts to show not only the range of the mural subjects, but the range of artistic approaches Stout applied to the various tasks involved in the process of creating the murals. There is a pleasing variety to the formal and informal pencil drawings, ink sketches, watercolor renderings and finished oil paintings within the overall continuity of Stout’s recognizable style.

The Flesk Publications page devoted to the book unfortunately only shows a couple of images from the book, so you don’t really get a feeling for that variety.

You can see some of the paintings for the San Diego Natural History Museum in high-resolution here, and you can see a brief look at one of the ink and watercolor drawings in the animation on the Museum’s Fossil Mysteries page (from which I extracted the low-resolution image above, top), but there is no other web preview I can find to show you the character of the pencil, pen and watercolor renderings.

William Stout: Prehistoric Life Murals is available through the usual book channels, but can also be ordered directly from the Flesk Publications site in either a regular hardcover edition ($39.95), or a limited signed edition ($49.95).

Since the jolt of receiving my Coraline Mystery Box I’ve been understandably curious about the upcoming animated movie, and equally frustrated that I can’t yet find a significant repository of Coraline concept art (though I did come across some very early concept drawings here).

I’ve also noticed that the Coraline movie web site is now active, with a nicely responsive Flash interface and lots of stuff to explore and download; and the ASFIA-Hollywood Animation Archive has added a few more Coraline Mystery Boxes to its tally.

In the meanwhile, I’ve been happily feeding my Coraline fascination with the excellent graphic novel adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s novel by veteran comics artist P. Craig Russell, which Santa, and/or my stepdaughter, brought me for Christmas.

The book is a hardback, a bit smaller in aspect than typical American comic size, but certainly big enough to give the art a good sized canvas. It’s also worth noting that the book, at almost 200 pages and consisting of a complete story, can be correctly called a “graphic novel”; as opposed to the constant misuse of that term by the mainstream comic companies to apply to the last six issues of some superhero comic slapped into a square binding.

Russell is no stranger to working with Gaiman’s material, Coraline is his fifth collaboration (including a stint as my favorite artist for Sandman), and he is currently adapting Gaiman’s The Dream Hunters as a graphic story. When HarperCollins originally proposed a graphic novel adaptation to Gaiman, he immediately asked that it be done by Russell.

Russell’s adaptation of Coraline was begun prior to the release of visual concepts for the movie and is free of the influence of the film. This is a Good Thing; not that the movie doesn’t look great, everything I’ve seen from it looks amazing; I’m just glad the graphic story is an independent artist’s interpretation of the novel and not part of a “movie package”.

Russell’s vision of the story is more straightforward than the highly stylized character designs featured in the film, with a realistic representation of Coraline, her parents and the other major characters; giving it more of the feeling one might conjure up on one’s own mind when reading the prose version.

Russell’s elegant linework, refined draftsmanship and keen sense of design are well suited to the story and its setting, and he seems to take particular delight in his portrayal of the old house and its surrounds.

Lovern Kindzierski contributes restrained and effective color to the artwork, Todd Kline adds nice touches to the lettering and the entire package is very satisfying, almost like a deliciously dark children’s picture book for adults.

There are some pages you can see on Gaiman’s site (from which the image above is taken, also here) and a couple bits of art (and here) on Russell’s site. There is an interview with Russell on Newsarama.

The HarperCollins site has a page devoted to the Coraline Graphic Novel; and both that site and Neil Gaiman’s Mouse Circus page have a Browse Inside link that takes you to a preview that is almost 40 pages long (large and long enough to get you reading and hooked on the story – clever).

Addendum: P. Craig Russell has begun a series of video talks on graphic storytelling on the PCR TV site. In the first installment, he talks about story openings, using his graphic story adaptation of Pelléas & Mélisande as an example. New segments will be added weekly on Mondays.

To go along with my previous post about 2008 Best Graphic Novel Lists, here’s a list of lists from various corners for art, design and photography books for 2008:

About.com: Best 10 Art Books of 2008

New York Times: 2008 Holiday Gift Guide, The Best Art Architecture and Design Books (if it asks for a login, try BugMeNot)

SFGate: Art and Photography Books

Times Online: The Times Christmas Books 2008: Art

Times Online: The Sunday TImes books of the year: Art

Chicago Tribune: Beautiful art books published in 2008

Artforum: Books: Best of 2008

Time Out London: Best Christmas gift books 2008: Art

Booklist Online: Top 10: The Arts

[Image above: Classical Painting Atelier: A Contemporary Guide to Traditional Studio Practice, Painter in a Savage Land: The Strange Saga of the First European Artist in North America, Chagall: A Biography, Artists and Their Studios, Colour (Documents of Contemporary Art), Let's See: Writings on Art from The New Yorker]

In these days of increased reliance on web-based shopping, online book merchants like Amazon, Barnes and Noble and Powells offer much wider selections than physical stores, even large ones, can provide. (Though nothing still beats the personal selections made by owners of small, independent booksellers, if you’re lucky enough to have access to one.)

The big selections of books available through the online sellers works well for finding a book that you already are familiar with and have decided to buy, but browsing, a practice of key importance to all book lovers, is hard to duplicate in the window of a web browser (despite the name).

This is particularly difficult in the case of art, illustration and design books.

The online booksellers have tried to make up for this in various ways with reviews, recommendations, ratings, and more recently, small visual excerpts form the books.

The latter, as exemplified by Amazon, is particularly bad at delivering on its premise, hampered perhaps by overzealous intellectual property lawyers and poor think-through on the part of the company. These “Look Inside” features usually disappoint, showing a table of contents, some opening pages and a bit of an index, but little (if any) of the heart of a book. I get the impression the preview pages are chosen by an algorithm or numeric formula, rather than a person.

Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a site where art related books are reviewed and described, accompanied by a few carefully chosen (by a human), high-resolution images that really give you an idea of the book’s visual content?

Enter Parka Blogs, a blog by Teih Yi Chie, an illustrator and cartoonist, blogging under the alias of Parka, who makes a point of doing just that.

The Art Book List is heavy on movie and animation concept art, illustration, anime and science fiction, but within that vein does a great job on the books that are reviewed. (If anyone starts a review blog like this for gallery and museum art books, please let me know!)

The reviews themselves are succinct and give a nice overview of the book. The killer feature though, is the selection of well-chosen images from the books, images that are actually representative of the books’ content (are you listening, big-time online booksellers?), and often supplemented with video “flip-throughs”, in which the entire book is quickly flipped through, giving you on overall impression of the amount and kind of images that make up the body of the book.

The still images are linked to larger versions on Flickr, the largest of which are nicely high resolusion, giving you a browsing experience that is next-best to actually having the book in your hands when deciding what to buy.

The Art Book list is divided into types of movies, individual studios (like Pixar and Studio Ghibli), as well as collections of work by individual concept artists, illustrators and others.

There is also a shorter list of Intsructional Books.

The site provides a list of relevant links; and the blog itself can also, of course, be read like a blog, browsing back by date or searching out topics of interest. In addition to the reviews, he covers topics of interest in similar veins. I came across Parka Blogs when he was kind enough to post a brief article about Lines and Colors a few days ago.

The Parka Blogs book reviews are accompanied by links to the reviewed books on Amazon. Purchases made through his links return a small percentage to the reviewer so he can, what else?, buy more books to enjoy and review.

(Images above: from Parka’s reviews of The Art of Star Wars Episode III Revenge of the Sith, Miyazaki’s Magical World, Covers by James Jean and The Art of Kung Fu Panda. See my posts on Hayao Miyazaki and James Jean.)

You will often hear the phrase “big shoes to fill” applied to the task of filling a role formerly held by someone whose accomplishments were significant and difficult to achieve.

Illustrator and comics artist Gary Gianni put on some big shoes when he stepped into the role of illustrator for Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant newspaper comic strip.

Hal Foster (who will certainly be the subject of a future lines and colors post) was one of the three or four greatest newspaper comics artists in the history of the medium; and, to my mind, should be on the list of all time best pen and ink artists.

Gianni took over the illustration chores on the strip from John Cullen Murphy, who was Foster’s assistant, and had taken the reins on the strip when Foster retired in 1970.

Gianni’s previous work included illustrations for versions of classics like Moby Dick and Kidnapped, and he created graphic novel versions of Tales of O. Henry and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. He also worked for mainstream American comic book companies on titles like Indiana Jones and The Shrine Of The Sea Devil, Batman: Black and White (for which his story won an Eisner Award in 1997) and The Monstermen Mysteries, which ran as a backup feature for Mike Mignola’s Hellboy.

The Prince Valiant Page is a new book from Flesk Publications (see my previous posts on Flesk Publications) that showcases Gianni’s work on the strip, and also offers a glimpse into his background.

The book is written by Gianni, and offers an insightful look into his working process, and his collaboration with Mark Schultz, a terrific artist himself, who handles the writing on the current strip.

Gianni talks about his admiration for Foster, as well as other great pen and ink artists like Joseph Clement Coll and Franklin Booth, an admiration that is evident in his refined ink drawing style.

In the process of describing how a modern Prince Valiant page is created, including the use of models and reference, we get to see a number of pages of Gianni’s pencil drawings before they were inked. These, though not meant as finished art, have a wonderful tonal quality that is very different from the final ink drawings.

I have to admit that I didn’t have a proper appreciation for Gianni’s work prior to seeing this volume; partly because I had not seen much of his other illustration and comics work except in scattered examples, and partly because of the terrible job that modern newspapers do of presenting their comics.

One of the things that newspapers do to render their comic strips ineffectual, particularly those few remaining adventure strips, is to print them too small to allow for any real visual excitement. The original Prince Valiant pages, like those of Little Nemo in Slumberland and many other comic strips in the early 20th Century, were sized to full newspaper pages. (See my post on Winsor McCay.)

As time went on, and the role of newspaper comics as one of the major forms of home entertainment was superseded by movies and then television, newspaper editors (or more likely, owners and accountants) continually reduced the size of newspaper comics. In an age where home video screens and computer monitors keep getting bigger and bigger, this is a trend that, if continued, will eventually result in microscopic panels; which will undoubtedly help in the efforts of newspapers to remove all entertaining content as their circulation drops.

Prince Valiant is now down to 1/5th of a page at most in the newspapers, but several of the Gianni & Schultz strips are printed in the book as fold-out pages, doubling the book’s 9×12″ (23×30cm) size; nice and big, though still far short of a full newspaper page. It’s enough to let Gianni’s work shine, and make you wish for a volume of the strips at this size.

There is a collection of the Gianni & Schultz strips, Prince Valiant: Far From Camelot due in the (presumably near) future, but the Amazon pre-publication listing doesn’t include that book’s dimensions.

You can see a recent Prince Valiant strip on the King Features site, but you apparently can’t see the current one, or search the archives, without getting a membership of some kind, in an effort to… well, I don’t know why; I guess as part of the continuing effort on the part of newspapers and syndicates to discourage reader interest.

In the meanwhile, we have this beautiful volume to appreciate Gianni’s work. The Prince Valiant Page can be ordered directly from Flesk Publications in either hardback or limited edition signed, slipcase hardback. The book includes a foreword by Hellboy’s Mike Mignola and an introduction by Robert Wagner, who played the character in the 1954 Cinemascope movie.

Flesk has done their usual superb job of showcasing the art, jamming the book cover-to-cover with wonderful examples and using the highest production values. It certainly makes you wish newspapers would treat their comics with half as much respect.

Gianni and Schultz continue their work on the Prince Valiant weekly strip, trying to give us a taste of the former glory of newspaper adventure strips within the restricted confines of their 1/5th of a page.

It’s a valiant effort.

Kazu Kibuishi, who I have mentioned before, both in reference to his wonderful online comic Copper (also here), and as the primary force behind the Flight comics anthologies, has been hard at work for the last two years on a graphic novel project that has finally been released.

Amulet, Book One: The Stonekeeper is the first volume of a larger, three volume project (though it reads well as a story in itself).

The story is a fantasy adventure in which two siblings, an older sister and younger brother, must rescue their mother from deadly peril. It is something of a coming of age story in that they have the ability to take actions and effect events, but must take responsibility as well.

In it, Kibuishi combines some themes he has favored in his work on Copper and his longer pieces in Flight — the viewpoint of children, the visual textures of elements of the natural world like rocks and water, fanciful imaginative vistas, atmospheric color and eccentric flying machines.

I won’t describe it in too much detail because I enjoyed the little surprises I encountered in the story and I don’t want to deny you the same.

One of the most interesting aspects of the book, though, is the way Kibuishi has chosen to create his narrative.

You’ll find no panel-length word balloons with characters expounding on back-story or setup, no caption panels, no pages of exposition; everything is shown graphically, cinematically.

Many sequences are presented wordlessly, or almost so, relying on the flow of sequenced images to convey the narrative. This is where a comics artist’s skills as a visual storyteller are tested, and Kibuishi shows that he has studied some of the masters, probably both in comics and in film, where many of the same problems must be resolved. In both the set up and handling of the story you can see the influence of Anime masters like Hayao Miyazaki.

The drawings of the characters in Amulet are simplified, almost cartoonish; delineated with thin, single-weight outlines, and filled with areas of flat color or gentle gradations. Again, this is very like Anime, but without the slavish projection of Anime’s exaggerated stylizations to which so many young comics artists are inordinately prone.

The panel backgrounds in Amulet are often more implied that realized, with muted suggestions of detail overlayed with gradients of textured color. The exceptions are the dramatic establishing panels where the details of the background are important. There, of course, Kibuishi has a chance to show off his fertile imagination, in both fantasy and “real world” settings that are rich with texture and detail.

Throughout, his linework is controlled but retains a casual feeling; lines that accidentally cross another form or a panel border, and would normally be corrected, are left in place; nothing is ruled; even the panel borders are rough edged. Overall, the line, color and visual tone of the drawings are perfectly suited to the story.

One of the decisions about the presentation of this story that I’m not so fond of is the size of the book. The paperback edition is about 6×9″ (15×23cm), somewhat smaller than traditional comic book/graphic novel size. The book reads fine at that size, but I just prefer the larger canvas (which is why I really like the European graphic album format which is over twice the size of this volume).

The book is published by Scholastic, and this is the same format as their color editions of Jeff Smith’s Bone. In both cases it may be a compromise to keep the price of a 200 page color graphic novel down to under $10; which, for work of this caliber, is a tremendous bargain.

Kibuishi has created a page devoted to Amulet, in which he collects many of the posts from his Bolt City blog that have chronicled his work on the book; although, like many comics authors and artists, he has been so close to the project that he has neglected to include introductory information for newcomers.

As a better introduction, there is a 12 page excerpt from the beginning of the story (non-spoiler) on the New York magazine web site (who now has a terrific regular practice of excerpting recent graphic novels on their Comics Page). There is also an interview with Kibuishi about the project on Newsarama.

I received a copy of Steve Rude: Artist in Motion from Flesk Publications.

Flesk is a small specialty art book publisher that was the subject of one of my first posts on lines and colors in which I praised their terrific collections of the work of pen and ink greats Joseph Clement Coll and Franklin Booth.

Since then, much to my delight, they have continued to expand and produce terrific books on illustrators like James Bama and contemporary comics artists like Mark Schultz and Steve Rude; and I wrote a follow up post on Flesk last Summer.

Over that time I’ve come to expect high standards in the production of their books, which are simply excellent, but I have to admit I was actually surprised at what a beautiful book they have produced in this latest volume. Not only is it a larger and more extensive book than I had expected, it covers a range of Rude’s work that was eye-opening.

Steve Rude is best known as a comic book artist. He is the co-creator, with writer Mike Baron, of Nexus, one of the most unique takes on the science fiction/super-hero genre ever produced. Rude has also applied his superb draftsmanship and story-telling skills to several other comics projects, including his own character The Moth, and mainstream characters like Superman, and even Space Ghost.

There is, of course, plenty of art from Nexus and Rude’s other comics work here, including preliminary sketches, model sheets, penciled and inked pages (often of the same page or panel, which I particularly enjoy). There are also many of his painted comics covers. In addition, however, are a large number of his other paintings, which is where the book really shines.

Rude is an artist who isn’t afraid to wear his influences on his sleeve. He has taken as his favorites some of the best, Alex Raymond, Jack Kirby and Russ Manning in the comics field, and for painting some of the terrific and under-appreciated illustrators of the mid-20th century like Harry Anderson, John Gannam, Haddon Sundblom, and in particular, Andrew Loomis.

Rude was instrumental in the production of the book, and in fact shares writing credit with publisher John Fleskes; and he is not only quick to acknowledge his admiration for these artists, but goes into some detail about them and also discusses his process of learning and discovering techniques form the study of their work.

That’s another remarkable thing about the book, in the process of creating a dazzling art book of Rude’s work, there are enough studies, preliminaries, and step-throughs that the book is also instructional. In several cases it includes original reference photos and preliminary sketches next to the finished work. There are also sections of Rude’s life drawing and animation work.

If you’re not familiar with Rude’s work, you can browse through the small gallery on the Flesk site and also click on the right two images on the book’s page. Unfortunately, the images are small and the ones chosen fall way short of giving a feeling for the real nature of the book.

You can also see some of Rude’s work on his own site, including a clip of one of the painting demos he has been giving in various locations.

All in all, this is a beautiful book notable to those interested in both comic book art and illustration in the classic tradition.

Steve Rude: Artist in Motion can be ordered directly from Flesk Publications, from Amazon, or from your local bookstore or comic book store.