Artist's Edition is a line of hardcover reprint comic books published by IDW Publishing and edited by Scott Dunbier.[1][2]
Unlike the usual graphic novels, this project features printing of the original artworks in a way to mimic the experience of a comic book artist viewing comic art. Artist's Edition is designed to print exactly the same dimension as the artwork papers that comic book artists usually use in their illustrations and also retaining the editorial notes and printing crop marks seen on the papers. All the artworks were originally colored, Artist's Edition specifically prints in black and white palette to show the details of pasteovers, zip-a-tone technique, and blue pencils. Even though the project requires scanning of the original artworks, Dunbier stated that not all the pieces can be assembled together for some titles, so a "not scanned from original art" line is included in some pages to represent IDW isn't able to acquire the artworks.
According to Dunbier, the idea of Artist's Edition drew inspiration from the Batman Collected book. One of the pages in the book features an original Batman work by Neal Adams; designer Chip Kidd had the idea of photographing the work and then printed in black and white palette.
Some titles exclusively receive limited edition; available only via either pre-ordering or purchasing from IDW's official website. This version includes a variant design of the front cover and a personal signature of the title's comic book artist printed in an interior page. The trade paperback known as Artisan Edition would be made available later on if a title is eventually out of stock. This version, however, is scaled down to the standard size of a graphic novel despite retaining the same content as the regular version.
Artifact Editions differ from the main Artist's Edition line in that they collect an assortment of individual pages rather than complete stories.
Note: Following the publication of Todd McFarlane's Spider-Man Artist's Edition in Sept 2022, the main Artist's Edition line now includes books that would previously have been branded as Artifact Editions.
An Artist's Edition Portfolio contains loose pages, printed on one side only, collected in a hardcover folder. Like the regular Artist's Edition books, the pages are printed in the same size as the original artwork.
Since the Artist's Edition line became established by IDW, other publishers have begun to release their own lines of similar books reprinting comic art at its original size: