Book Review: Massive Black Volume 2

Massive Black Volume 2 is finally here. That's a four year gap from the first artbook Massive Black Volume 1 that was released in 2008.

As with most artbooks from Ballistic Publishing, this title comes in various editions. There are three, namely the Slipcase, Special Leather and Folio editions. The Special Leather and Folio editions are only available at Ballistic Publishing's website. For early buyers, they are giving some posters.

For the past four years, they have been busy creating concept art for movies and video games. This book collects those and also a small portion of advertising art.

There's a section dedicated to content they created themselves. There are video game concepts for titles like Zombie Playground, Mothhead and Proxy, and a comic called Transient Man created by Justin 'Coro' Kaufman.

The book is heavy on character designs. a bit on weapons and vehicles and not much on environments. The character designs are mainly from games, such as from Infamous, Silent Hill, Red Faction: Armageddon and many more. The most eye-catching ones are the creature designs, especially from the untitled SEGA project which required them to draw 'Baroque-style' monsters with crazy amount of detail. There are also many artworks from concepts that never materialize.

There isn't much 3D work in the book. Even those from Transformers are 2D concept art.

I also enjoyed reading all the inspiring design commentary.

I felt the book could be much thicker though. Figuratively speaking, 196 pages is considered thin for four years of work from Massive Black. But for what it's worth, everything included are awesome.

This is a fantastic concept art book.

Highly recommended.

Massive Black: Volume 2 is available at Ballistic Publishing and Amazon (US | CA | UK | DE | FR | IT | ES | JP | CN)

Character concepts for Starhawk.

Tank concepts for Dust 514.

Untitled SEGA project featuring awesome creature design

Transformers

Zombie Playground

You can view all the pages from the page-viewer on Ballistic Publishing's website.

Visit Amazon to check out more reviews.

The links below are affiliate links, which means I earn some commission from each purchase, but at no extra cost to you.

Here are direct links to the book:
Ballistic Publishing | Amazon.com | Amazon.ca | Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.de | Amazon.fr | Amazon.it | Amazon.es | Amazon.co.jp | Amazon.cn