Book Review: Sci-Fi Art: A Graphic History

Sci-Fi Art: A Graphic History explores the history of art used in the popular science fiction genre more than 150 years ago — the Jules Verne and H.G. Wells era. The book focuses on the development of illustration and use of art from the 1920s onwards.

The work featured in the book comes from media ranging from magazines, novels, comic books, movies, TV programs, games and even toys. Many artists are prominently featured with their illustrations. Just to name a few, there are Chris Foss, Jim Burns, and David Mattingly to Moebius, Albert Robida, and Frank Kelly Freas. Several popular series are also highlighted, like Flash Gordon, Star Trek, 2000 AD, etc.

I've limited exposure to science fiction art from the past and most of the images in the book look absolutely retro to me. Still, you can see the evolution of style through the years. There's a generous amount of pictures included, all are pretty well scanned, and comes with captions.

The section on sci-fi art in movies and computer games are much shorter. Given the amount of titles churn out by major entertainment companies, there should have been more writeup in this area.

The bad part about the book is the binding. It uses the perfect binding style you see in most paperbacks. In this case, the glue became so hard it was unable to stick to the cover. It also cracks if you open the book too much. Just look at the picture of the book that arrived in my Amazon box below. Admittedly Amazon didn't wrap the books properly but the binding was bad to begin with.

Other than the issue with binding, this is book is nice resource into sci-fi art.

Sci-Fi Art: A Graphic History is available at Amazon (US | CA | UK | DE | FR | IT | ES | JP | CN)

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