Paper Tiger's Julie Bell books
   Soft As Steel - The Art Of Julie Bell
   Hard Curves - The Fantasy Art Of Julie Bell
   The Julie Bell Portfolio
                                                                  (Paper Tiger)

Soft As Steel - The Art Of Julie Bell (1999)(also Thunder's Mouth Press) 128 pages, 88 of those being dedicated to a single large-presented artwork (and 20 of those full-bleeds). You'll find 22 works spread across the book's gutter and half are the sorrier for it. (To make matters worse, many of the images in question were smaller and didn't *need* to be split.) The works are captioned with title, size, original date & use. There's also a healthy accompanying anecdote about each piece. And there are more pages of commentary, beyond the introductions, about each of the chapter groupings, namely, Comic Book Characters, Worlds Of Fantasy, Warriors, Private Gallery & Figure Studies. Those headings may suggest the lighthouses, futuristic cities, aliens, mermaids, monsters, dragons, centaurs, barbarians, samurai and sorceresses to be found within. Some of the works are decidedly humorous and male & female nudes abound. The German ART FANTASTIX edition (#5) seems to be the same material, though I notice that it has about 30 less pages. Without a side-by-side comparison, I can't say what layout changes they made to accomplish that - they may have left out some of the art, or perhaps reduced some to multiple-image pages. This turns out to be the best book on The List solely devoted to Julie Bell's work - though all of the books done with her husband, Boris Vallejo, scored as a better presentations of her art than this one. If you already have those then you will find only 26 new works in this collection, along with 10 other pieces that are presented better here. That's approaching only a third of the book being "yet uncollected" material.

Hard Curves - The Fantasy Art Of Julie Bell (1995)(also Dragon's World / Thunder's Mouth Press) 128 pages with 75 held to display each a single piece of art, but so many of these are half-hearted, shrinking the image so that it can share the page with fawning text and a lot of negative space. There are a number of head-scratching-worthy display choices at play here. First, as just mentioned, is the valuation of text, infomatics and captions, at the expense of the art itself. Second, each of the chapters is opened with a full-bleed double-page spread with a semi-transparent text-block laid over half of it (and those images are *not* presented anywhere else in the book). Third, more than half of the images allowed to substantially spread over the book's gutter are presentation failures and most were also less-than-full-page images and didn't need to be split at all. And while no great harm is done, it's disturbing that on the multiple-image pages, they chose to place the art works so that some of them lay over portions of others. With that said, there are still a number of single-page images that seem to revel in their full-bleed glory. They, and the chock-a-block-full-of-art perception gotten from leafing through this book, lends it a better first impression than it really deserves, and then SOFT AS STEEL is revealed to be the better solo book of the artist, even with its own problems. Anyway, the chapters here are: Metallic Images, Sensuality, Portraits, Superheroes and Bodybuilding, and within those you'll find her sports & television subjects romping about futuristic cities & swampland with Conan, Zorro, vampires, robots, centaurs, unicorns, dragons, mermaids, monsters and any number of Marvel & DC superheroes. Almost all the pieces are captioned with title, medium and original size, year & use/source, along with some admiring commentary. In addition to a lot of biographical material, the text devotes quite a bit of its time detailing her work methods & techniques, as well as the philosophies at work as she takes her paintings from idea-germination to finished product. Before getting this volume, The List recommends all of the books where Bell's art is presented along with that of her husband, Boris Vallejo's, and her own monograph SOFT AS STEEL, but it has to be mentioned that if you already have all of those, you will still find here 43 new works, as well as 6 better displayed ones - meaning that well over half of the good stuff here are "yet uncollected" materials

The Julie Bell Portfolio (1994)(also Dragon's World) This is an easy-to-handle 12"x 9" book, albeit slim, with 64 pages to display 28 paintings. They're presented as isolated full-page plates, on the back of which (the facing page of the next art piece) is a much smaller black-and-white photo of the same image with the title caption. There is also a substantially larger-size edition available, using the same image on the cover, that I can't help but think would seem more ungainly. The book was published in the early '90s and at that time she was most renowned for her "metal flesh", painting glistening metal in her works that was particularly alluring. Nearly every one of the images here seemed to have been chosen to show-off that facility. Everybody is either made of, or wearing, glossy steel or gold. Those individuals not clothed in metal aren't clothed in much at all, there being a healthy sampling of scantily clad, or nude, males & females. Included among the harpies, unicorns, dragons and other fantasy subjects, are depictions of Conan and a number of characters from Marvel Comics. The 3 pages of text are an introduction to the artist written by her husband & fellow artist, Boris Vallejo. The List recommends getting all the other monographs, with her husband or not, before this one, but it should be said that 3 or 4 pieces here get the good presentation that isn't given to them in any of the other books and twice that see at least better (larger) display here than elsewhere.