Review by Woodrow Phoenix
Kevin Nowlan is an Eisner-winning artist much admired for his precise and technically flawless graphic style as an inker, penciller, letterer and colourist. The Kevin Nowlan’s Marvel Heroes Artist’s Edition collects material created by Nowlan over thirty years of working for Marvel Comics on a variety of projects. It is all reproduced here, as usual for this format in high resolution scans presented same size to simulate looking at the actual pages as produced by the artist, with all corrections, pencil markings, paste-ups and margin notes visible.
After an introduction by Mike Mignola, this book is divided into two sections. The first is a gallery of covers, pinups, presentation drawings, layouts, and random comics pages; the second is four complete stories, although two of them are not lettered and are art only. The thirty-one covers, the drawings and comics pages are arranged alphabetically: two X-Men covers, two Alpha Flight covers, four Defenders covers (one pencilled by Mike Mignola), eight Doctor Strange covers, four Hulk covers, one each for Moon Knight, Powerline, Secret Wars, Solo Avengers and Tarot, three Strange Tales covers, and four Wolverine covers. Four covers feature pencil versions as well as inks. The drawings include commissions and pin-ups of Avengers, Beast, Daredevil, The Defenders, Doctor Strange, Hulk, Valkyrie and Wolverine, plus eleven pages of layouts for the Man-Thing graphic novel reproduced in its entirety elsewhere in this volume. The comics pages feature one Daredevil page pencilled by Joe Quesada, eight Doctor Strange pages, one X-Men page, nine Moon Knight pages (five inked by Carl Potts), eleven New Mutants pages and one Punisher page, pencilled by David Ross.
These are followed by the section of complete comics stories beginning with ‘Immortal Hulk: Time of Monsters’ which presents the pencils for each page side-by-side with the final inked pages. The centrepiece of this volume for most fans will be the complete 62 pages of Nowlan’s unpublished, fully painted Infernal Man-Thing graphic novel, ‘Man-Thing: Song-cry of the Living Dead Man’, which he worked on for over 25 years. There are no speech balloons or captions on these pages which are art only, so although Steve Gerber is credited as the writer there is no dialogue to be read. Lastly there is a six page X-Men story and a five page Doctor Strange story. A one-page biography wraps up this collection.
The Kevin Nowlan’s Marvel Heroes Artist’s Edition is guaranteed to fascinate readers interested in Nowlan’s process for creating his elegantly designed and near-flawlessly executed artwork.
