Book Description

**NOW IN PAPERBACK, WITH COLOR AND BLACK-AND-WHITE DRAWINGS THROUGHOUT** Alex Ross opens his private sketchbooks to reveal his astonishing pencil and ink drawings of DC Comics characters, nearly all of them appearing in print here for the first time in paperback. Thousands of fans from around the world have thrilled to Alex’s fully rendered photo-realistic paintings of their favorite heroes, but, as they may not realize, all of those works start as pencil on paper, and the origins of the finished images are rarely seen—until now. From deleted scenes and altered panels for the epic Kingdom Come saga to proposals for revamping such classic properties as Batgirl, Captain Marvel, and an imagined son of Batman named Batboy, to unused alternate comic book cover ideas for the monthly Superman and Batman comics of 2008–2009, there is much to surprise and delight those who thought they already knew all of Alex’s DC Comics work. Illuminating everything is the artist’s own commentary, written expressly for this book, explaining his thought processes and stylistic approaches for the various riffs and reimaginings of characters we thought we knew everything about but whose possibilities we didn’t fully understand. As a record of a pivotal era in comics history, Rough Justice is a must-have for Alex’s legion of fans, as well as for anyone interested in masterly comic book imagination and illustration.