Art of GI Joe ARAH Omnibus

[nacho]

Just an FYI....the kickstarter for this book still has a week to go, and it blew through the funding goals, stretch goals, and has made the 3DJoe guys dig deep to make the volume extra special. The funding goal was 35K and it's approaching a quarter mil, so they're going all-out.

I backed some of their earlier softcopy editions of various years, but this collects everything from ARAH ('82-'94) into one huge 500pg 13"x13" slipcase hardcover, with every figure card fully restored and archival printed at 1:1 scale. Also includes vehicle packaging artwork, other merch artwork, process sketches, unreleased designs, interviews with Joe creators, etc... it kinda seems to have it all.

Most comic book omnibi from Marvel/DC have $125-$150 cover prices these days, so if you're an ARAH nostalgia wank like me, $100 is a pretty fair price for a massive tome like this. I highly doubt that anything this comprehensive will be compiled again, just due to the staggering amount of work. Would hate for anyone that cares to miss out.

 

[ThunderDan19]

Cool stuff! Not something I’m in the market for, but I’m still very happy to see it got so much support. Hasbro should take note...

 

[nacho]

All that painted art is pretty special. These days, the package art for most toys is very... unsatisfying. Even the artwork on the sides of Classified figures is by a million different artists with wildly different styles. There is nothing cohesive/coherent about it, and no kid is going to remember it fondly in 40 years. It's all a big "meh".

But that painted stuff (mostly by Hector Garrido at the direction of Ed Morrill), in the style of classic guys like Earl Norem or fantasy guys like Boris Vallejo, it tells a story by itself. I look at some of those painted pieces and I wonder, just like I did as a kid, what kind of crazy story I just dropped into the middle of. Nothing is static, there are no mugshots, just action. Pretty cool.

 

[ThunderDan19]

Indeed. That artwork was something special. I don’t know of anything else quite as unique or iconic in the world of toys and collectibles. I suppose that I’m just spoiled having the Internet to look up the vast majority of it any time I want to look at one of the characters in all their original glory.

 

[nacho]

Agreed, looking them up is simple enough. I really appreciate the artwork from the other stuff... the posters, the covers of the choose-your-own-adventure books, the mail-away pamphlets that came with the vehicles, the magazine covers. It'll be nice to have all that stuff in one place I can look at offline, especially in a decade when Joe is cancelled for (insert SJW cause here) and it gets memory-holed on the interwebs.

 

[ThunderDan19]

Lol, I was going to say “I’ll wish I had jumped on this when the internet dies along with the rest of our society” at the end of my previous post, but didn’t want to bring the thread down with that kind of serious content, but since you brought up SJW cancellation...

 

[nacho]

Yeah, I like paper books for when the chinese/russians/ISIS destroy our power grid and we have to live in the dark for a couple of years while society implodes.

Forgive me, I just finished the Vince Flynn thriller Total Power, where that is a prominent plot point.