Artwork: Frank Cho
Publisher: Image
Price: £16.99/$24.99
As the title suggests, this 112 page, hard-bound book, features the art of Frank Cho. The book is presented in a beautiful painted cover and the interior comprises a mixture of pencil sketches and finished pen-lined work. The majority of pictures are in the ‘comic book’ style though the book does contain some examples of Cho’s fine art work. Again, as the title suggests, the subject of every picture is a woman.
Frank Cho is a very talented and popular comic book artist with a particular gift for drawing beautiful, fantasy women. Through his work, on Liberty Meadows for example, he also displays a degree of respect and gentle humour towards his chosen subject matter. However, without the context of narrative, the art on its own runs the risk of appearing salacious.
The art is collected into five sections Comics and Covers, Jungle Girls, Liberty Meadows, Mars Needs Women and Fine Art Nudes. However, with the exception of the fine art section, the subject matter is largely the same. We have voluptuous, scantily clad women in spandex; voluptuous, scantily clad women fighting dinosaurs; Brandy (a voluptuous woman) with cute animals; you get the picture.
There really isn’t much more to say. The women are exceptionally well rendered, and whilst there are, no doubt, women who really do look like Brandy or Shanna or the others, Frank Cho’s art ignores the potential variety of the female form. We only see pert bottomed, wasp waisted, large breasted women, albeit in a variety of poses and fantasy settings. I guess the key here is that it is all fantasy, certainly nature is not often so kind to ladies with DD cup bosoms who don’t wear supportive underwear.
Only the fine art section demonstrates that Frank Cho has a talent beyond the cartoonish with its excellent examples of penmanship, though the subject matter remains firmly focussed on the female form. With that short exception, this is sadly something of a one-beat book and rather than showcasing the talents of a great artist, it focuses too heavily on the ‘cheese-cake’ element of his work.
It is difficult to see where the market for this book lies. As a coffee-table item it is of dubious merit, though it may find favour with regular buyers of FHM or Playboy calendars, and is likely to reinforce any negative stereotyping of Frank Cho’s work as mere fluff. On that basis, by featuring such a narrow aspect of his work, the end result risks doing Frank Cho a disservice.
John Davidson Despite working in IT for the last 20 years and collecting comics for even longer, he is married, has two young daughters and lives in Scotland. Ideally he spends his spare time reading and watching movies, but this is curtailed by the calls of child-rearing and part-time study, not to mention the 'call of the internet'.