John Picacio, Superstar

John Picacio and MonkeyBrain Books have published a coffee-table book of John's work. John does beautiful work, so correspondingly, the book itself is beautiful. For example, here's the cover:



In the introduction, John offers up that one of his early influences were the woodcuts of Gustave Dore. Strangely enough, I have a copy of the 1885 Gustave Dore illustrated Paradise Lost sitting on my shelf. So, I thought I would flip through it and see if I could see any influences. How about this:



Or this one:



Not perfect, but this was just a quick flip through. I'm sure if I had an art background I could pick out salient points of comparison between the two. I can't. The Picacio book is fantastic--Chris and John have outdone themselves in designing and laying out this book--and you should buy one now.

In semi-related news, John Picacio has a blog.

Tags: Science Fiction, Electric Velocipede, John Picacio