About IDW Artist’s Edition: Marvel Covers

I recently purchased IDW‘s 2014 hardcover first edition measuring a massive 12.25″ x 17.25″ that captures the actual size of the original art pages and all its comic book narrative art intensity. In addition, the tome reproduced 144 pages of iconic art from industry luminaries John Buscema, Gene Colan, Frank Miller, Jim Steranko, Barry Windsor Smith, John Byrne, and Mike Zeck, for instance.

Selective Focus Photography

Beyond enjoying this publication for the art and historical documentation of key Marvel covers, I thought of photographing some pages in a selective focus style using a shallow depth of field. In essence, my photographic style will capture an isolated part of the cover depicting a moment in the narrative as illustrated by the artists, both penciler and inker—also as conceptualized and brought to life by the others involved, viz., writer, editor, letterer; however, since the pages are black and white, the colorist is excluded. Another reason for this detail photography is that comic book aficionados have seen these holy grail covers many times over; hence, presenting the image from a different visual perspective can be enlightening.

I’ve photographed in this style prior with other published art, or original works I’ve seen at exhibitions, where photography was allowed.
Here is an example from a Summer 2018 visit to New York’s The Metropolitan Museum of Art where the medium is a sculpture…

In this case of photographing some of the Marvel pages, I positioned the book in front of a large window with natural outdoor lighting and used a Canon 6D Mark II camera with a 35mm f/1.4 L EF lens at f/1.8 aperture in manual mode. I opted to handhold the camera and eliminate a tripod mount in order to efficiently scan the page through the camera’s view finder and look for a viable area to isolate. With this low-aperture setting, outside the selective focus point on the page is depicted as a bokeh (Japanese for blur), providing a hint to the narrative but not emphasizing it. Where as the main, isolated selective focus point is sharply captured—highlighting that essential moment of the narrative.

Next, the raw photograph file is edited in Adobe Lightroom, where, e.g., temperature, exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, lens correction, and chromatic aberration if any, are all adjusted accordingly; then the file is cropped in Photoshop to add my digital signature and photography website. I photograph using raw format as that contains more data of information than a compressed jpeg or even tiff version; so, raw will provide that depth of extra-added layers of details to the image.

IDW did an excellent job in reproducing the original art pages, where every detail is clearly visible—the aging, yellowing paper; use of white outs; drawn pencil lines; brushed ink strokes; production guide notes outside the margins; signatures; etc. From IDW’s website, here is a sample full page with all her glory…

Final Thoughts

The art featured in this book are extremely rare and can currently sell in the auction market for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Thus, for me, owning this book is the closest I’ll get to owning, or even seeing the originals that sits in the collection of private collectors.

A few of the pages reproduced were part of a traveling Marvel exhibit in Seattle a few years ago, and the Jim Steranko Hulk page I saw at the Society of Illustrators’ The Art of the Avengers and Other Heroes exhibit in New York, Summer 2018.