By John Cassaday, with Brett Matthews, Nick Barrucci, Scott Dunbier, Dean White, Laura Martin, Francesco Francavilla, Marcelo Pinto, Ivan Nunes, José Villarrubia, June Chung, Tony Aviña & various (Dynamite Entertainment)
ISBN: 978-1524109363 (HB)
Win’s Christmas Gift Recommendation: Intoxicating Imagery and Timeless Heroic Poses… 9/10
It can’t be Christmas without an art book or two. Here’s one of the very best of the last decade…
Born Texan in 1971, Oklahoma-raised John Cassady is a multi-award winning comics artist, actor and TV director who has become legendary for his depictions of Ghost, Captain America, The Astonishing X-Men, Planetary, Desperadoes, I Am Legion and Star Wars. His particularly iconic, stridently symbolist use of imagery has made his work globally known and admired, and his art and imagery have featured in many animated films and poster books.
Cassady is self-taught and has a superb eye for landscape and location. It underpins a primal understanding of the body language of evil and heroism and his deep affection for the classic groundbreakers of our somewhat simplistic genre: combining to inform the astounding visuals in this mammoth hardback (234 x 307 mm) or digital catalogue of comic and fantasy masterpieces.
In 2006 Cassady began a long and fruitful association with Dynamite Entertainment, limning covers for a vast pantheon of stars comprising generational household names and the best of new concepts, and they’re all gathered here for you to ogle…
Following context and potted history from Dynamite Publisher Nick Barrucci’s Introduction and a Foreword by comics everyman Scott Dunbier, the Gallery of Graphic Wonders opens with 100+ pages of ‘The Lone Ranger’ and includes commentary by scripters Brett Matthews and Mark Russell and editor Joe Rybandt, augmenting pencil roughs, sketches and those astounding covers (including colour variants). Throughout, Cassaday’s own colour work is bolstered by contributions from Dean White, Laura Martin, Francesco Francavilla, Marcelo Pinto, Ivan Nunes, José Villarrubia, June Chung and Tony Aviña.
Garth Ennis’ war anthology ‘Battlefields’ boasted some of Cassaday’s most engaging images, and those paintings are here supplemented by designs, working sketches and colour variants as are Project Superpowers spinoff ‘The Death-Defying ‘Devil’’, and vintage stars‘Buck Rogers’ and ‘Sherlock Holmes’.
‘The Complete Dracula’ boasts iconoclastic covers and commentary from co-writer Leah Moore before a return to pulp fictioneers offers additional character studies and designs for a staggering swathe of bombastic eyecatchers gracing the many series and crossover team-ups featuring ‘The Green Hornet’, ‘The Shadow’, ‘The Spider’ and ‘Doc Savage’.
Then‘Grand Passion’, and ‘Ian Fleming’s James Bond’ artworks bring us to a selection of ‘Other Covers’ including ‘Red Sonja’, ‘The Boys’, ‘Zorro’, ‘Blackbeard: Legend of the Pyrate King’, ‘The Complete Alice in Wonderland’, ‘Project Superpowers Chapter 2’, ‘Peter Cannon: Thunderbolt’, ‘Wil Eisner’s The Spirit’, ‘Kiss’, ‘John Wick’ and ‘Battlestar Galactica vs Battlestar Galactica’, and they are all beautiful and unforgettable…
There are many books – both academic and/or instructional – designed to inculcate a love of comics whilst offering tips, secrets and an education in how to make your own sequential narratives.
There are far more intended to foster and further the apparently innate and universal desire to simply make art and do so proficiently and well, but here the emphasis is on promoting the artist’s sheer unassailable visual excitement and his treatment of a lexicon of legends. This book will delight everyone who wants to see a master in his element and showing that nobody does it better…
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