Scott and I decided to upgrade our TV this past Presidents’ Day and ran over to Best Buy to score a gorgeous, 55″ Sony Smart TV for only a little more than we wanted to pay for it. But we’re couch potatoes and I love it! Anyway, I wanted to go to Golden Apple Comics, but Scott gets bored, so I settled for a run to Game Stop, as it’s in the same plaza as Best Buy in West Hollywood. And boy I am I glad I did.

I scored the mini Wonder Woman statue based on Terry Dodson’s art, a Wonder Woman Bombshell keychain, and the deal of the century… the Wonder Woman black-and-white coloring book for only $7.95 (which had an original $14.95 price tag). It was well worth waiting for clearance to buy this tome. It sports a beautiful color cover by Terry Dodson and interiors by some of the greatest Wonder Woman artists ever. It contains a few pages of WW logo designs and a few pages of color art. The paper is a bright white fairly heavy stock. It’s made quite well.

Mostly. My only minor complaints include the fact that they didn’t use a few critical WW artists’ art. My other complaint is that all of the artists’ signatures were remove. (save a couple), and none of them were given credit by name, which could have easily been fixed with credits in the back.

As an artist, it bugs the heck out of me when I’m not given credit or my signature is cropped out for some baloney reason. Comics are a visual medium, my friends. Let’s see how far we get without artist contribution, shall we? I will say that, obviously, another publishing house licensed the art strictly for the coloring book and was likely given a huge stack of art to choose from with little knowledge or care who drew them.

I’m pretty good at identifying artists, so he’s a list of the artists I do recognize (in no particular order.): Terry Dodson, George Perez, Amanda Connor, Jose Luis-Garcia Lopez, Brian Bolland, Aaron Lopeseti, David Finch, Jim Lee, J. Bone, Ed Benes, Yannick Paquette, Cliff Chiang, Neal Adams, Ed McGuinness, and a few others I couldn’t identify. Please feel free to fill in the blanks or correct me if I misidentified in the comments. The artists that were unfortunately left out that I feel should have been included are: Adam Hughes, John Byrne, Liam Sharp, Nicola Scott, Trina Robbins, Darwyn Cooke, Bruce Timm, and probably a few others I’m forgetting.

Only one piece from quintessential Wonder Woman artist Phil Jimenez appears. Oddly, it’s in color. I feel this is a crucial miss, as Phil is second only to George Perez when it comes to masterful detail.

All in all, it’s a gorgeous book. It’s meant for coloring; however, I will save it as an important art book next to the other art editions in my collection. Now, it did make me long for a “Wonder Woman Noir” series of black-and-white Wonder Woman tales in the spirit of Batman black-and-white by different creative teams. Here’s my short list of artists I would love to see contribute to such an event: George Perez, Phil Jimenez, Adam Hughes, Liam Sharp, Nicola Scott, Yannick Paquette, Jason Pearson, Adam Hughes, Frank Cho, Bill Sienkiewicz, Mike Mignola, P. Craig Russel, Trina Robbins, and Barry Windsor-Smith. Now THAT would rule the school! And I certainly wouldn’t mind seeing a big, black-and-white art of DC oversized coffee table book.

Well, I suppose that’s all for this week’s edition of Wonder Woman Wednesday. Make sure to check out the I Am Wonder Fan Facebook page.  I’ll see you here next week!