![]() ![]() I’ve read a lot of “Usagi” in the standard comic-size format, and probably even more in the trade paperbacks, which are slightly smaller. And since the book is black and white to begin with, you’re not suddenly seeing Sakai’s unvarnished art for the first time.īut it does look very nice at a larger size. There’s no necessary compromise with a digital lettering overlay or anything. Thankfully, the series has always been hand lettered, so all the lettering is there on the page. He’s either a really light touch with his White Out - lighter than other artists I’ve seen in IDW’s Artist Editions - or the scans are a bit brighter. You still can see the brush strokes in the solid black areas and tell the difference between his pen and brush marks thanks to this reproduction, but the corrected areas are easy to miss if you’re not looking for them. There are some occasional bits of White-Out in there to see, but you really have to squint to see it. You can better see where he picks his ink pen up off the page, or where minor variations in the thickness of the line are more apparent. You can, however, see nuances in the ink lines at this larger size that might have been missed at the published scale. He also cuts his own boards, so you won’t see the publisher’s name in the blue lines up at the top, nor the blue lines to indicate where the bleed and margins are for the printer. I love the layers and directionality in this wide panel. No matter what format it’s in, you can learn a lot about composition from Stan Sakai’s work in Usagi Yojimbo. Sakai includes it as part of the board that only his editors will see. Most artists just scrawl the series name and issue number up there to get it out of the way. You will see how Sakai properly letters the headers at the top of every page, though. You’ll need to look closely at these pages to get a better grasp at the mysteries of the process you may have thought this book would answer. There’s no yellowed tape on the edges or holes punched in the margins for print alignment. There are no margin notes with shopping lists from Sakai’s wife to go fetch when he goes to the store on his lunch break. These are not pages with coffee stains and cigarette burns at their edges. You can see every mostly-erased Ames Guide lettering line and - well, Sakai is a pretty clean artist. It effectively does the same thing as an Artist’s Edition: It reprints Stan Sakai’s original art boards for all the stories at their original size and in full color. It’ll run you $125 and it’s available in stores this Wednesday. Today, I want to review Dark Horse’s “Gallery Edition: Stan Sakai’s Usagi Yojimbo: The Artist and Other Stories.” It includes six issues of the comic that aren’t consecutive, plus a couple of short stories that fit in, thematically. Previously, I broke down the list of all the companies inspired by IDW’s “Artist’s Edition” format and their attempts to bend over backwards not to rip off the name directly. ![]()
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