Comic Review: Bill Sienkiewicz’s Mutants and Moon Knights Artifact Edition (IDW)

Bill Sienkiewicz’s Mutants and Moon Knights… and Assassins… Artifact Edition, from IDW Marvel, is a beautiful thing. Well, it’s a book volume of course, collecting pages and pages of well photographed reproductions of Bill Sienkiewicz’s original art pages. It measures 12″ x 17″.

This Artifact Edition focuses on New Mutants, Moon Knight, Elektra, Daredevil and a few others. There is literally not a bad page in the book. It is a true joy and privilege (I feel as if I am making a speech!) to view the development of Sienkiewicz’s work from August 1984 onward. We can see that he started out at what truly is a high level of graphic storytelling ability, and went upward from there.

While the emphasis of this book is NOT complete story reprints, there is enough of a flow among the pages that a reader can grasp the storytelling. There are strong figures, great poses, and the beginnings of Bill’s strengths: an intuitive grasp of the benefits and limitations of the comic medium as seen by an illustrator.

He experiments with textures, paint splatters, exaggeration, parody, bigfoot cartoon elements, and playing with various paint mediums. Panel shapes are subject to interpretation. Storytelling gets more abstract.

It’s all here, in this well appointed collection!

IDW Marvel, Bill Sienkiewicz’s Mutants and Moon Knights… and Assassins… Artifact Edition $125 for 172 hardcover pages. Not rated