DC Comics: A Visual History - A Review

DC Comics: A Visual History
Published on Oct 21/2014 by Dorling Kindersley Ltd

“Trace DC's fascinating story: the company's beginnings as National Allied Publications in the 1934, and its subsequent change to Detective Comics, Inc. in 1937. The book details all the major DC publishing landmarks and more, displayed clearly, month by month.

"Highlighting the debuts of iconic super heroes like Superman and Batman, the geniuses that invented them, and the real-life events, like the Vietnam War, the atom bomb, and the Space Race, that shaped the atmosphere of the times, DC Comics: A Visual History follows the characters' foray into the real world through TV series and blockbuster movies.”

Yes, this is a book about DC Comics, so I’ll restrain the Marvel Zombie within me long enough to provide an impartial review. And for the record, I received a complimentary copy of this book for review purposes.

At first glance I was a bit put off by the book’s slipcase as it highlighted DC Comics’ New 52. However, when I pulled out the hardcover, I was blown away by Ryan Sook’s cover. Wow. Sook lovingly renders each DC Comics age in a beautiful montage, channeling Murphy Anderson, Bill Kane, Frank Miller, and George Perez just to name a few! After flipping through the book, the cover captures the effort and completeness of this visual history.

This 375-page hardcover is an update from the 2010 Edition (DC Comics: Year by Year – A Visual Chronicle), adding 16 new pages for 2010-2014.

The book is dense and while it’s titled a visual history, there’s a huge effort by a team of writers to cover each year, month by month. These write-ups aren’t simple issue summaries, but instead capture the importance of these comics with a critical eye and discuss their significance and creative teams. Also, a nice little added touch was the real world history ticker at the bottom of the pages, that gives you a few of that year's news headlines.

The book covers the entire history of DC Comics, from the Golden Age, to Silver Age, to the Bronze Age, and the New 52, right up to the current year. And they cover these ages in impressive detail. For example, the 1980s section runs over 50 pages.

And speaking of the 1980s, for obvious reasons I paid close attention to that section. It was certainly a fun read through, reminding me of how industry leading DC Comics was. They not only introduced the limited series, which they expanded into maxi-series like Camelot 3000, Crisis on Infinite Earths, and Amethyst, but broke ground with the new formats (Batman: The Dark Knight Returns’ prestige format and The Teen Titans’ Baxter format series.

DC Comics: A Visual History is a gateway drug that will have you hunting down the other DK Visual History books, like DC Comics Villains and Batman, all recently published in 2014.

Marvel Comics 75 Years of Cover Art

MARVEL COMICS 75 YEARS OF COVER ART
by Dorling Kindersley Publishing
$50US/$52CDN

“Marvel Comics will celebrate 75 of years of comics excellence in 2014. DK commemorates this special anniversary with Marvel Comics Cover Art, a beautiful, large-scale book featuring some of the most impactful, inspiring, and unusual comic cover art to come out of the Marvel vault.”

This hardcover volume highlights Marvel Comics cover art from its 75 year history, walking us through the golden, silver, bronze, and modern ages. As you might expect, I was curious about which covers they chose for the 1980s. That beloved decade’s cover art was spread over the Bronze Age (1970-1986) and the Modern Age (1986-Present), spotlighting Frank Miller, George Perez, Walt Simonson, John Byrne, John Romita Jr., Todd McFarlane, and Art Adams.

A bit more attention could have been paid to other classic 80s cover artists, like Ed Hannigan, Michael Golden, and Bill Sienkiewicz, but I understand the desire to cover the 75 years in one volume. And to be fair, each of the eras covered is worthy of its own book. Hopefully the success of this book will spawn more volumes that can more thoroughly detail the masters of each age.

Writer Alan Cowsill did an admirable job authoring the text that accompanies each cover, as it must have been a challenge to summarize the significance of the cover and artist in one poignant paragraph. And knowing the breath of talent in the 1980s, I can only imagine how difficult it must have been to select the covers to display.

The reconstruction of the cover art needs to be praised as well, especially with the oversized page format that presents the art in a lavish, larger-than-life format. While a lot of the cover images were digitally enhanced and repaired, it would have been nice to see them in their raw form, blemishes and all. As you might know, I love digging up old original art and I would have liked to have seen more of the original art.

This book gets a strong buy recommendation from me. And for full disclosure, I did received a complimentary copy for review purposes, but don’t take my word for it. Check out the hardcover at your local bookstore, you’ll find it hard to leave without it.

This 320-page hardcover fits nicely into its slipcase and sits nicely between my Omnibus and Absolute editions on my bookshelf.

Here’s the official trailer for the book to give you a good preview: