Johnny Bruck - Perry Rhodan Illustrator
                                             (2013 - Marlon)  

     (by Frank G. Gerigk)   This is a German book that primarily celebrates Johnny Bruck's contribution to the popularity of the fledging Perry Rhodan weekly magazine series with the artist's dynamic cover paintings.  Let's start with the penultimate section, 182 pages exploring 50-odd Bruck covers amid the first 100-issue run of the series.  Each of the covers are 'well-presented' and then, for most, the analysis begins, in regards to identifying which previous illustration Bruck is 'lifting' for the composition or particular elements within his own, not to mention later appearances or uses of the new images or even the lifts they inspire elsewhere.  So there are plenty of slightly-larger-than-thumbnail images, with repeats of the studied image, so all can be compared practically side-by-side, those images being from many, many, enjoyable science-fiction or men's-adventure books & magazines.  The pages before that are colorful displays of even more Perry Rhodan covers and many more covers from all sorts of other publications that Bruck executed.  Almost every exhibit is a published cover having the full accompanying typography, with only a handful of displays of the original paintings.  Photo-collage does play a role in a small set of the works, either as part, or all, of a composition.  In all, you find here 109 pages featuring large reproductions and another 169 more with multiple images dominating the page (there are 5 instances of double-page-spreads and they are all 'o.k.' in negotiating the distortion of the center gutter).  Finally, there are then another 40-odd pages where the German text, or pictures from the man's career, crowds out everything else.  Of those 'well-presented' covers, four other artists each has a work slip in, namely:  Renato Cesaro, Arndt Drechsler, Alfred Kelsner, and Swen Papenbrock.  I like this book a lot, but unfortunately the only copies that make it to market are priced in the multiple hundreds of dollars.

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