Featuring illustrations inspired by the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen and Charles Perrault and the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe and Rudyard Kipling, these illustrations include scenes from Shakespeare, Rabelais, and Chaucer. Menges, an expert on Golden Age illustrators, this compilation is the first full-scale compilation of of Robinson's legacy, including his earliest material from his long and prolific career. The Golden Age of Illustration arose from improvements in printing techniques that introduced a sudden explosion of color in books and magazines.Įnglish artist William Heath Robinson (1872–1944) ranks among the era's most prominent illustrators, and this original anthology presents more than 100 of his Art Nouveau-inspired images, many of them in glorious full color.Įdited and with an Introduction by Jeff A. Paints a more convincing postwar portrait of DC's superheroes.Advances in technology are often accompanied by a flowering of creative expression, and the turn of the twentieth century witnessed exactly such union of art and commerce. But Darwyn Cooke's recent The New Frontier Smith's realistic artwork and mastery of gesture and facial expression bring out all the dramatic potential in Robinson's scenario. By revealing that Thompson's and Dynaman's identities have been usurped by impostors, Robinson shies away from demonstrating how an American superhero could morph into a neo-Nazi übermensch But Robinson never explains why the 'greatest generation' that just defeated fascism abroad would embrace a homegrown version. Beneath their patriotic rhetoric, Thompson and Dynaman conspire to become dictators. One of these 'mystery men,' Tex Thompson, alias the Americommando, enters politics and initiates a government project that uses atomic power to create Dynaman, a 'superman' who becomes a living weapon against the Soviets. Robinson unpersuasively projects the dark pessimism of 1990s superhero comics onto the idealistic, committed heroes of half a century before. Whereas Moore's superheroes were forced into retirement, here the heroes succumb to disillusionment, personality flaws and even madness. , this reissue depicts DC's superheroes from the 1940s hanging up their capes following the end of WWII. Clearly influenced by Alan Moore's Watchmen

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