Book Review: The Art of Jamie Hewlett

The Art of Jamie Hewlett is a stunning book released recently by Taschen that features the beautiful art that Hewlett has created over the last 25 years. That's over two decades spent creating art and comics. Just amazing.

The book is a huge impressive 424-page thick hardcover. When I saw the book, I nodded thinking to myself, "This is the way to do it." It measures 10 by 12.5 inches and the binding is excellent. The paper is those matte non-glossy type and the colour reproduction is great.

The book starts off with a casual round table interview with Hewlett. Oh, there's some crude jokes and nudity in this book which you may already know.

Jamie Hewlett's art is fantastic. Looking at them printed so large on the pages is satisfying. Those artworks look like high quality prints because of the good paper. The line art is crisp and wonderfully reproduced. The comic pages here may actually be larger that the actual comics.

Hewlett's career of art is featured chronologically. You'll get to see art from Tank Girl and Gorillaz which are probably the most recognised around the world. Other works include Phoo Action which is about a gay, Buddhist kung-fu law enforcement officer and his sidekick Whitey Action. He has also created art for an opera about the Chinese fantasy tale Journey to the West. It's really cool to see a western take on such a classic Chinese classic. Other works include sketches from a trip to Bangladesh to document climate change, illustrations for tarot cards, erotic cinema posters designed in 60-70s style. There are also many miscellaneous art and additional sketches.

The only text included are for chapter openings and they are in English, Deutsch and French. I wished there were more written because if you have a career of over two decades, there are bound to be lots of amazing stories. That's my only quibble for what's already an awesome book.

The first edition was sold out promptly after two weeks and now we have the second edition, the one with the red cover. The first edition features a cover with characters created by Hewlett. That cover art has now move to the back cover.

Highly recommended. It's no doubt one of the best artbooks from 2017 too.

Jamie Hewlett (Second Edition / New Cover) (Multilingual Edition) is available at Amazon (US | CA | UK | DE | FR | IT | ES | JP | CN)

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