4 out of 5

All of Eastman’s covers for the IDW series up to issue 26 (City Fall part 5), full color, regular interior paper stock, but it’s IDW so production qualities in general are high (to my lightly discerning eye) – the pages are thick and the colors (series colorist Rhoda Pattison) just as rich as covers, so no problems there.  The covers are presented artwork only: no logos or barcodes to get in the way.  I love modern Eastman’s take on the Turtles.  His heavy inking style and snarky characterizations have evolved in an awesome direction from his stiffer work of 30 years back, his layouts now rivaling Laird’s for their level of detail; as the awesome dude at tmnt entity has pointed out, it’s cool seeing how much more involved his covers get over the course of things as the story direction started to form and the covers could be more than just generic poses.

So why the minus star?  Well, it’s a few tiny nits, not really huge deals but definitely popped into my head first thing, so worth noting:

– I get page count limitations, and this is just art, so the story connections shouldn’t really matter, but it bugs me that the covers stop in the middle of a storyline.

– Some of the images are cropped.  I assume just to break up the ‘flow’ of the book – but maybe there’s some limitation on sizing of which I’m unaware… though that doesn’t immediately follow since these would’ve appeared full page size originally.  The cropping is minimal, just a turtle shell pattern border, but it felt pointless.  The only page where I think it ‘adds’ something is the two-page splash from the annual.  Eastman did a front and back cover wraparound, so it’s a nice centerpiece to this collection and the border effectively makes you pause on it.  But every other page is a single image, so I don’t think the forced break was required.

– You don’t want to mar the images with notation as to which issue they belong to.  And/or we can assume these go in chronological order.  Agreed.  But some note saying which covers these are and to which issues would’ve been appreciated.  Just a brief blurb on the inside cover, perhaps?  It’s possible I missed said blurb.  If so, shall I strike this comment from existence and blind myself with pretend hot pokers.

That’s all.  The bare bones presentation is fine by me – it’s just called a Cover Gallery, so that’s all it should be, and we get it for the regular cover price.