#artbooks

Honoured to be a part of Wraithmarked's first 101 Artists artbook campaign on Kickstarter! You can find all the details HERE

So, I bought The Monarch Files, maybe expecting just a little too much from it (esp with that $53 tag). But as I was reading through it and looking at the format, I was struck with pangs of nostalgia. A genuine sense of wanting.

When Pacific Rim: Man, Machines, & Monsters came out, it was one of the first production books I'd ever bought since finding The Making of Final Fantasy: the Spirits Within at a book sale for $3.00 (as a kid), that really fed into this desire to know how movies worked, or how certain stories worked, and what went into it to make it come to life.

As far as Pacific Rim is concerned, there was nothing quite like the presentation of information they provided in this book alone that wasn't a Guillermo del Toro authored book (Cabinet of Curiosities, The Shape of Water) that really indulged in the inner workings of the movie's world and the production itself. The way del Toro and the production talked about the Kaiju, the design of the human characters (themes, etc).

Every Monsterverse film has its own production book (and I own all of them by the grace of thrifting), so that's not it. It was looking at The Monarch Files and outright noticing how much of the layout and detail was lifted straight from Machine, Machines & Monsters.

The way it talks about the Tians, the details about their biology, or tries to (and doesn't really succeed) marry the contradictions of its movie-to-movie ideas together. Greg Keyes has done a relatively good job at narrativizing the franchise in ways someone like Alex Irvine (the novelist for PacRim) doesn't with his novelizations. GVK and GXK are almost serviceable stories because of his novelizations.

The Monsterverse is almost a great successor to PacRim were it not for the fact that so much of the non-King Kong/Godzilla elements just feel like redshirts or set dressing versus a genuine ecosystem. I can't say the making of the del Toro film didn't have preferences with regard to Kaiju. But there's the understanding that all of it was created more or less on equal footing, and the rest was a roll of the dice.

And for me, I think the closest, in the aftermath sense, a book has got to replicating that excitement was finally getting the production book for The Last Guardian (genDesign, 2016).

I'm eighty pages deep, and so the worst I can say about the book is that everyone who isn't Keiko Muira and Lee Shaw gets paid pittens. Other character bios were basically copy/pasted the character stuff from each movie's official website with only threadbare alterations (nothing really interesting).

I think that's only a negative if you spent as much time as I did reading them.