Artist's Editions

Miracleman, aka Marvelman, has one of the most convoluted publishing histories in comics. Created by Mick Anglo, but very closely modeled on Fawcett's Captain Marvel, the character has passed between several owners and publishers over the years, and run afoul of all sorts of legal entanglements. Those complications seemed to be resolved by a recent court case --- so this is clearly the perfect time to add yet another publisher to the character's long history! IDW is getting into the Miracleman game with a deluxe hardcover 'Artifact Edition' reproducing pages from the 1980s Miracleman revival in Warrior magazine, by artists Garry Leach, Alan Davis and John Totleben and "the Original Writer." (Pssst; it's Alan Moore.)

Of all the concepts Jack Kirby created in his time at DC in the '70s, the most underrated by far is Kamandi: The Last Boy On Earth. If you're not familiar with it, it's essentially Planet of the Apes mixed with cold war fears about the end of the world, filtered through Kirby's signature over-the-top bombast until it came out as the story of a young man who emerged from a bunker after the Great Disaster into a shattered world overrun by animal people and sinister sci-fi concepts. And also, he had an amazing head of hair. It's been one of my favorite Kirby books for a while, and now, it's getting the deluxe format treatment in the form of one of IDW's Artist's Editions, which once again raises the question of just how much money they are trying to get from me, personally. The answer, it seems, is all of it.

At this point, I'm starting to think that IDW Publishing's line of Artist's Edition hardcovers are a sinister plot to separate me from my money as efficiently as possible, but that might just be because of how beautifully they're produced. In case you're unfamiliar with the format, the basic idea is that they reprint the art of some of the best and most historically important comics of all time using high resolution scans of the original penciled and inked pages to reproduce what it's like to read the original art, which is often much larger than the published comics, and they are gorgeous. In the past, they've done Artist's Editions for comics like Walter Simonson's Thor and Frank Miller's Daredevil, but the one that got my instant purchase was the massive 11" x 17" reproduction of New Gods. Now, the publisher announced that they're following it up with another piece of the Fourth World saga: Jack Kirby's Mister Miracle, reprinting seven complete issues of Kirby's masterpiece of action and escape artistry.