As an artist/illustrator of comic book-style artwork who, like an entire generation, became an artist because of comic books (and particularly those
of The Silver Age), it bothered me that there wasn’t a coffee table book
about the ART of comic books—and again, about the art and artists of The
Silver Age, as most comics history books were about the Golden Age (the
1940s), the EC years of the‘50s, or other genres and eras of comics. Where
was the book about the era I and so many others of the Baby Boom generation (I’m on the tail of it, born in ’58) came of age in, grew up with, and
still are in love with? The Silver Age of Comics, which gave us the new DC
heroes, the Marvel Revolution, the Batman TV Show, Neal Adams’gamechanging photorealism, and the Jimi Hendrix of comics, Jim Steranko?
Well, if you want something done (right), you have to do it yourself. So I
did. Over the years prior to the book’s original publication in 2003, I had
developed a verbal/visual approach to published historical essays about
comic book art that you “read” like a comic book itself. That came from
my training in graphic design at Rhode Island School of Design (which
I went to because Walt Simonson had come out of there!), in which we
learned the concept of the“concrete book,”in which every design choice
you make in book, magazine, or publication design should reinforce the
subject matter. So, if you’re doing a book, say, on the history of trains,
maybe there are tiny train tracks running alongside the bottoms of the
pages that carry the page numbers, your display type reflects nineteenthcentury signage, etc. So it only made sense to me that a coffee table art
book ABOUT comic book art should “read” like a giant comic book itself.
This design approach extended to the typography. I wanted to have the
artists themselves—via first-person interviews and previously-published
interviews with those deceased—to “talk” about the art, with my own
curatorial text supplemental to their voices. So, there had to be two levels
of text, two type fonts that would harmonize with each other. As I looked
at the art I’d be reproducing, I realized that the original text in the word
balloons and captions was now meaningless, since I was isolating the
artwork and re-contextualizing it in coffee table art book-form; my book
is not about the characters per se, nor is it about the “stories”; there are
plenty of books about both. So I took license here and there to drop out
original word balloon and caption-text in favor of the artists’ quotes, set
in comic book-styled text lettering. My entire design approach—utilizing
SELF PUBLISHER MAGAZINE 2015
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