Product Description: Complete with a foreword by George Lucas and an introduction by famed artist James Bama, Alex Raymond: His Life and Art delves deep into the history and work of this internationally famous artist, showcasing never-before-known facts and art that transcended the confines of a comic strip page and make him more than the renowned artist of Flash Gordon.
=Passion truncated by execution= From the jumbled cover design I really had reservations about the quality of the book. I know now after having read it that my trepidation was warranted.
Functionally this book is too heavy and poorly bound to be a landscape-style edition. My binding was tearing and required reading on a flat surface. The amount of information is so great it tends to repeat itself often and could have stood up to some serious editing if only to create more breathing space around the borders of the pages. The amount of spelling mistakes alone had me shrinking with embarrassment for the author.
This is clearly a labor of love by one man who had a wealth of access and serious dedication to the source material and the subject's acquaintances. The amount of detail undermines the craft but I felt like there was no stone left unturned. In the end though a lot of what I learned made me far less impressed about the man behind the brush than anything. Maybe it's as the saying goes, "You should never meet your idols,they'll never live up to their work." By contrast the Hal Foster: Prince of Illustrators book that I had read prior to this was beautifully written.
Both however are essential for the serious artist and collector, but the Raymond book only at discount.
=s=
An Impressive but Flawed Book The warning bells started going off not long after I opened this eagerly anticipated book. On page four the author tells us that the "Buck Rogers" strip was syndicated by NEA. Then a few pages later he tells us that "When Mother Was a Girl" was the topper to "Blondie" and that "Dumb Dora" was Chic Young's first syndicated strip. These errors aren't exactly earthshaking I suppose, but such details, all of which could have easily been fact-checked, don't speak well for the quality of the research that went into this book.
I soldiered on, though, and found that Tom Roberts is certainly an expert on all things Raymond. Only when his story has to touch on other creators and comics does his expertise take a serious fall. In fact Roberts is such a Raymond fanatic that his devotion to the subject ends up being the real source of the project's undoing. The book is chock full of rare Raymond artwork, but that material is presented in lieu of long loving looks at "Flash Gordon", "Secret Agent X-9" and "Rip Kirby" art, the sort of material that this reader presumed would be given more play in a Raymond bio. We do get some material from all those strips, of course, but the book is chock full of all manner of oddball Raymond work -- movie poster designs, pulp illustrations, ad campaigns, etc. It comes across as if the author is trying to impress us with the breadth of his Raymond collection which, don't get me wrong, is indeed astounding. The sense that the book was put together by a Raymond collecting wonk is highlighted when the author occasionally switches to first-person commentary explaining just how rare such-and-such an item is and how many eyeteeth collectors would gladly trade for it. Nowhere is that wonkish attitude more vividly apparent than with an utterly pointless two page sidebar detailing how an auction house approached the author to authenticate an unsigned painting as being the work of Raymond.
Some of Raymond's rare artwork could just as well have stayed under wraps, too. For instance, we get fourteen pages of art from the juvenile book "Scuttle Watch", and another ten from an insurance ad campaign. In neither case did Raymond produce particularly distinguished work (at least by his lofty standard), so I would have much rather seen a few representative images from those venues and allotted some of that space for more of Raymond's best works. Roberts has the collector's myopia -- his devotion to Raymond leads him to focus more on minutiae than on what made Raymond famous.
And speaking of minutiae, a fifty page chapter detailing Raymond's service in World War II is enough to test the patience of even the most devoted reader. Raymond served on the U.S.S. Gilbert Islands, an aircraft carrier that I now know in such intimate detail that if I materialized on its deck I could find the mess hall blindfolded. I dutifully read the whole chapter, a feat few will or should attempt, and got treated to a detailing of that ship's activities that might be fine military history but goes ridiculously far afield from telling the story of Raymond's life. Here's a taste: "The Gilbert Islands was an escort carrier of the CVE 105 Commencement Bay class. With a displacement of 23,200 tons, she carried a 28-foot draft. Not as big as her sister carriers of the Essex class, the Commencement Bay class had a flight deck spanning 500 feet..." etc., etc., ad infinitum. Look, If I wanted an exhaustive history of the Gilbert Islands I'd buy one. Any competent editor would have slashed this chapter by 30 pages without losing anything of Raymond's story.
It's hard to imagine that a book so lovingly produced, about one of the greatest cartoonist/illustrators of the twentieth century, could fall so far short of what it could and should have been. And yet, even though the book is flawed in a whole variety of ways, I still have to give it a pass. Even a cocktail napkin doodle by Raymond is worth a look, and so a whole book chock full of his art, despite the questionable choices made in the selection, is a joy to behold. And since this is the most complete biography we're ever likely to have of the great penman it's a book that, flaws and all, deserves a place on any fan's bookshelf.
PS -- for those keeping score, "Buck Rogers" was syndicated by John Dille, "When Mother Was a Girl" was the topper of "Dumb Dora", and Chic Young's first syndicated comic strip was "The Affairs of Jane".
A GREAT introduction!!! For a guy like me who only knows Alex Raymond as the artist on the classic Flash Gordon comic strip, this book serves as a wonderful introduction to the man himself and his other work.
Author Tom Roberts has put a lot of time and energy into this book and done painstaking research to bring the man off the pages of the comic strip and into real life. Never again will Alex Raymond be for me just a signature on a comic strip. He will from here on be the fantastic artist that Tom Roberts has revealed him to be in this book.
Do NOT hesitate to buy this book!!
Clearly a labor of love To begin with, this is a beautiful book. No doubt about it - for the most part the graphic design of the book is really outstanding, other than the fact that sometimes it was difficult to understand where to find the caption that went with a particular photo. As far as pure content goes, in addition to what you'd expect (pages/panels from Raymond's comic art), there's also an equal emphasis on his illustration work, pin-ups, etc. We are also treated to extremely rare material, such as Raymond's colour guides - done in watercolour on small reproductions of his Flash Gordon pages. Raymond's assistant on Rip Kirby gives us a run-down on the kinds of brushes, pens, paper, etc. that Raymond used, and we even get to see a Flash Gordon panel "ghosted" by Austin Briggs in which Raymond wisely re-drew Flash's face. As far as the book's shortcomings go, there are some curious omissions. Roberts describes the initial, rejected version of the Flash Gordon strip when he could have simply reprinted the art - it saw print in the comics fanzine Alter Ego in 2005 or 2006. In a book chock full of Raymond rarities, that strip would have been a natural to include. There are tons of great photos of Alex, but I also would have liked to have seen more photos of Raymond's wife and children. In some ways I think that the material in the book could have been arranged a bit differently so as to give it a more natural "flow," but I can fully understand the challenge of trying to organize and juggle such a huge amount of stuff. All in all, this book is the sort of work that I have been wanting to get my hands on for 30+ years. Thanks to Tom Roberts, thanks to Adventure House, and thanks to everyone involved in making this possible.
Alex Raymond: His Art and His Life Enjoyed the book very much. My father, Toby Cromwell, served in the military as a Marine with Alex during WWII. I never heard much about my father's time during his years in the military, so the chapter during Alex's time in the military helped put some more pieces of the puzzle together. Thank you.
Anything Goes Trivia
Megaton Man
Trevor
