The Art Of P. Craig Russell
(2007 - IDW)

Subtitled 'a retrospective', this 256-page volume, developed under IDW's Desperado imprint, does pull together material from Russell's nearly-40-year career. The 10.5-inch-square volume is actually about 25% too big/heavy to be optimal. Right off the bat, I need to report that a whopping 94 pages are given over to sequential-art sheets, slight sketches, pencil-roughs, character-sheets, thumbnails & photographs. Four exhibits cross the book's gutter, all acceptably. Captioning is adequate to detailing when & for where the pieces were created and the material is divided among these chapters: An Autobiography (Sort Of), Early Works, Mainstream, Elric, Short Stories & Other Adaptations, Oscar Wilde, Opera, The Ring Of Nibelung, Illustrations, Storytelling, Unfinished & Abandoned Projects, Sketches & Portraits, and Three Stories (most of the text is in Russell's voice). So, you will find 40 pages that have multiple images gathered together and then 111 more that feature large reproductions of black-&-white & colored works, most anchored in the glorious singular style that the man carved out for himself within the comics industry.