This year’s artbook purchase happened only last month, when I went over some saved products in my Amazon cart. I had put in the artbook for Avatar the last airbender “for later” and forgotten about it, and not only was the book at 50% off, red text below the price tag told me that there was only one left in stock. So, I bought it. Unfortunately for me the book arrived as if it had been dropped from the second floor onto a very hard concrete pavement, and since I’d purchased the last copy, I couldn’t replace it, only return it. So I opted to keep it – after all, the pages were intact.
Beautiful pages too, filled with art and commentary. This artbook mimics the format of the series, followingthe “Book 1, 2, 3..” format to follow through each series and tell the story of how aang and his friends were first dreamt up by series creators before being placed in a world created by several talented people who each brought their own expertise to the final product.
The series founders give commentary throughout the book, which is always the highlight of an artbook for me. They set out the journey of making the series with all its ups and downs in a pleasantly engaging manner.
There is concept art from nearly every episode with lots of explanations on how the production of a series works (or worked, I suppose – Avatar was made in the mid 2000s and things have probably changed by now.) I liked reading the captions for the images as they not only explained the piece but credited the artists who worked on it. I was able to really appreciate how many people actually work on something like this.
One thing that really stood out to me was the contributions of Elsa Garagarza, the background layout artist (and later background supervisor) She was credited in the text as an architecture graduate who joined the team in the first season. I followed her art throughout the book, trying to observe as much as I could. Her experience as an architecture student was reflected in the sketches she made, and I couldn’t help but feel a mix of wonder and curiosity – if I had known this was a viable career path for an architecture graduate, I would have tried it out myself. But I digress.
I’d first seen this book at Comic-Con here in Chennai last year, but I’d already purchased a Kiki’s Delivery Service artbook and didn’t have the budget for this. So, despite the unfortunate nature of the cover, I’m happy to have a copy at last. I get one artbook a year, but I’m seriously considering raising that to 2 or even 3, there are so many good books out there that might never get reprinted.
