Mythology: The DC Comics Art of Alex Ross

A designed monograph on the painter Alex Ross and his DC Comics work, assembled by Chip Kidd with photography by Geoff Spear and published by Pantheon in 2003.

The book gathers Ross's painted treatments of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, the Flash, Aquaman, Green Lantern and the Justice League, and sets the finished work beside its working material: pencil sketches, the photographs of costumed models Ross paints from, limited-edition prints and prototype sculptures. Vintage DC panels are cut in as reference points, so the reader can follow how Ross reworks the source imagery. Kidd's layout treats the paintings at full scale and the studio material at close range. The volume also carries an original Superman-Batman story written by Kidd and painted by Ross, a new Robin origin by Paul Dini, and an introduction by M. Night Shyamalan.

Ross (b. 1970) came to prominence with Marvels (1994) and Kingdom Come (1996), bringing a gouache-based realism to superhero comics. Kidd, the Knopf book designer, has produced a run of books on comics and their material culture, including Batman Collected and Peanuts: The Art of Charles M. Schulz; Mythology is among the most widely circulated of them, and it received an Eisner Award.