My big, fat art book: Drawing Down the Moon, The Art of Charles Vess has taken a
loooooooong while to wind its way from the completion of my initial layouts to actually
seeing print this December. And along the way there have been multiple false alarms as to its publication date.
The folks at Dark Horse and I want to apologize for any confusion that these solicitations may have caused.
So, in an effort to make certain that you know that the book will indeed be available this December we are providing you with a sneak preview of the entire 200 pages.
http://www.darkhorse.com/Features/eComics/1101/Drawing-Down-the-Moon-The-Art-of-Charles-Vess
“Within it’s pages you’ll journey through my high school and college age adventures in art and then follow me as I struggle throughout the years to put on paper what’s inside my head, up to the present day.
See what springs off of my drawing board as I move to NYC and try to geta job, any job at all, as long as it’s by drawing…
See me slide in through the back door at Marvel Comics and draw The
Warriors Three and Spider-man. Then watch as I skip across town to DC
and draw Swamp Thing, Books of Magic, Sandman and Stardust.
See me strike out on my own and self-publish an odd ball collection of
graphic narratives based on old English and Scottish ballads with a bunch of my all-time favorite writers. Then collaborate with Jeff Smith of Cartoon Books on the prequel to his splendid series Bone with our own 130-page adventure called Rose.
Along the way, see me bestowed with multiple Will Eisner, World Fantasy and Chesley awards!
Peruse the perceptive things that award-winning and international
bestselling author Susanna Clarke has to say about my art. I’ve also commented prolifically on the art and process.
Above all, there’s the unique opportunity to view all the projects that you’d never have a chance to see except in a book like this: a 16′ bronze sculpture, event posters for local organizations, private commissions and previously unpublished paintings done just for the pure pleasure of doing them.
Here’s the link to my previous, image heavy, post on this blog about the book which includes various methods of ordering it:
http://greenmanpress.com/news/archives/415#comments
Enjoy,
Charles
4 thoughts on “Moon Link”
I’ll wait as long as it takes.
Hello, Mr. Vess. Big fan here. If I’m not mistaken, in your Dark Horse artbook, only 8 meager pages are devoted to your entire Marvel period (from 36 to 43). I say meager because that was your most productive period at drawing and writing comics.
According to this exhaustive bibliography:
http://www.maelmill-insi.de/UHBMCC/namv4.htm#N404
You drew about 350 pages of comics for Marvel, plus 29 covers and several pin-ups and illustrations. Of those 350 pages, 218 were also written by you. Aside from those, you also wrote the 78 pages of the Hook movie adaptation and co-wrote the 192 pages of the Prince Valiant revival with Elaine Lee. Finally, you also inked and colored most of your stuff and some pages from other artists.
Now, how much of that material has been reprinted and is therefore available in the current market?
As far as I know, 4 pages from Kull the Conqueror #4 were reprinted by Dark Horse in “The Chronicles of Kull Volume 1” and your 13-page Dr. Strange story from Marvel Fanfare #6, was reprinted last year in the trade “Marvel Fanfare: Strange Tales”.
And that’s it, 17 pages out of 350, and certainly not the most interesting or important ones of your Marvel output.
So, here’s an idea: art books are ok, but I’m sure everybody would be much more excited about a book reprinting all that stuff for the first time since its original publication.
You probably know that Marvel has been pushing an aggresive reprint program in the last few years (with 30 or even 40 collections a month), including some massive oversized books under the name omnibus that reprint historically important runs of certain books and/or authors. So how about one of these massive books collecting your entire Marvel production? An artist-centric, done-in-one Charles Vess Marvel Omnibus. Something like this (taking Marvel’s solicitations usual template):
CHARLES VESS OMNIBUS HC
Written by CHARLES VESS, ALAN ZELENETZ, LAURIE S. SUTTON, ELAINE LEE, ROGER STERN, RANDALL FRENZ & BILL MANTLO
Penciled by CHARLES VESS
Cover by CHARLES VESS
Collecting
SPIDER-MAN: SPIRITS OF THE EARTH GN (MARVEL GRAPHIC NOVEL #63)
THE RAVEN BANNER GN (MARVEL GRAPHIC NOVEL #15)
MARVEL FANFARE #6,13,34-37
EPIC ILLUSTRATED #5,8-10,16,21-22,24,27
THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #277
THOR #400
HOOK THE MOVIE #1-4
HEROES FOR HOPE STARRING X-MEN (2 PAGES)
& GALLERY OF ASSORTED COVERS AND PIN-UPS
500 PGS./Parental Advisory …$70.00
Trim size: oversized
So what do you think? Would you be interested in pitching this idea to Marvel? I’d certainly buy such a magnificent book.
Charles, what an awesome body of work! A book like this should been a long time ago. Lord knows, there are artists publishing art books way too soon! Love it.
Hello everyone!
I wanted to let you know I had my first store appearance for “Drawing Down the Moon” at the amazing Malaprop’s Bookstore in Asheville, NC last night and it was great! Everyone there was super supportive. Thanks to everyone who showed up in spite of the extreme drop in temperatures. Here’s a tip of the hat to Gina Moon and company for everything. Malaprop’s has ordered plenty of copies of the book, and now you can mail order an autographed copy of “Drawing” from them by calling 1-800-441-9829, or visiting
http://www.malaprops.com
and get it in time for Christmas!
Grazie, grazie.
Charles