Review by Woodrow Phoenix

The IDW series of books reproducing original comic strip art from high resolution scans come in three forms. Artist’s Editions, which feature complete stories presented actual size to simulate looking at the actual pages as produced by the artists, with all corrections, pencil markings, paste-ups and margin notes visible; Artifact Editions, which contain any available pages gathered from multiple sources with few or no complete stories; and Artisan Editions, which are smaller-sized softcover reprints of the first two. The Bill Sienkiewicz’s Mutants and Moon Knights… and Assassins… Artisan Edition is a 21cm x 30 cm reprint of the now out-of-print Artifact Edition from 2018. While obviously not as big as the first version, this volume is still much larger than typical comic size, presenting 159 pages of covers, pin-ups, and comics from Bill Sienkiewicz’s work for Marvel in a very impressive assembly of technically astonishing images.

Mutants and Moon Knights… and Assassins… contains 50 pages of art created for 13 issues of New Mutants, plus five covers, one unpublished. Moon Knight is represented by 19 interior pages, five covers, two unpublished covers and one unpublished painting. There are 51 painted pages from Elektra: Assassin, including the complete 32-page first issue, and scattered pages from the other seven issues, plus three covers. There are an additional three cover paintings for Elektra featured in other publications, plus one preliminary sketch. There are eight painted pages from Daredevil: Love And War. The remainder are six covers: three for Dazzler and one each for Daredevil, Beauty and the Beast and Punisher War Journal, plus two single-page drawings; the memorable house ad for Power Man, and a Wolfsbane Trading Card.

Fans of Sienkiewicz or of superhero comics art in general will find this book completely essential. ‘Nuff said.