Watching the Watchmen

If you attended An Event Apart in either Chicago or New Orleans, or @media in London this year, you might have seen Underpants Over My Trousers, my talk about how comic book design conventions and principles can influence web page design.

Underpants Over My Trousers leans heavily on Watchmen, possibly the most successful graphic novels of all time and certainly one of my favorites. So how happy was I when my good buddy Jason Santa Maria told me that his good buddy Chip Kidd was writing a book about Watchmen?

Late last spring I was approached by DC Comics on behalf of the artist Dave Gibbons to design a coffee table book of his preparatory artwork for the seminal 1986 comic book series Watchmen. [...]

Dave kept all sorts of interesting stuff that hasn’t been printed anywhere before—chiefly all his roughs for the page layouts, which are wonderfully loose and yet almost entirely un-deviated from on the final (extremely tight) art. [...]

This book drops at the end of this month (Oct ’08).

I’m as excited as a small boy who takes all his clothes off and paints his body blue.