Broken Frontier

Guillem March gets an art book all his own, and while some treasures are begging to be shared, others are really missing.

In the comic book world, art can make or break a book. Sometimes, you can have a great writer bogged down by a weak artist, and you can likewise have a poor writer with a brilliant artist. In either situation, if a fan left a book for either reason, there wouldn't be too much to say. Every once in a while, there's an artist that can make a bad book bearable, or a writer that has nuggets shine through, at best, mismatched artists.

Guillem March is one of those artists that you should be following from book to book, wherever they go. He was on the launch of Gotham City Sirens (with Paul Dini, focusing on three women, which all made sense), and is currently on Catwoman (by Judd Winick), which has largely only gained notoriety for its first issue sex scene between Batman and the titular antihero. While Winick's writing is enjoyable, if not attention grabbing, at the end of the week, most people had seen the most notable of pages from that first issue, and complained about the content of the art, not the art itself.

For most, that was their first glance at March's interior work. Cover Girls goes beyond that.

In fact, by and large, there's very little DC work in this book. Most of it seems to have never actually been in a DC comic, as he's enjoyed exclusivity with them since 2008. Either done in jest, test, or just before his exclusive time, only some Gothamites grace the book.

Cover Girls is a great look at his pre-DC work, and much of it was before he started working for American publishers, and beyond a few captions, it is largely indecipherable if English is your only tongue. Yet, March's work stands enough on its own that words aren't needed; he may not be Maguire who can tell a whole story with a series of intricate grimaces, but he can tell you most of what women want when we see them. The book contains mostly pinup art, with a few sequential pages in the mix (not enough to tell a whole story), and a fair bit of nudity once you reach the halfway point, something you've definitely not seen since he began hanging out with Catwoman for extended periods of time.

If anything, the book's only flaw is that it's too short; 80 pages of this man's wonderful work isn't enough. He might not have the 20+ years and multi-brand work that Jim Lee has, but you could easily make an art book of March's work near the size of Icons, and it would be justified.

This is assuming you like the female form, which March is known for.