COMIC DETAILS
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Comic Description:
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Echo Echo: Cut-Up Drawings From Black Hole nn Modern
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Grade:
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9.4
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Page Quality:
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WHITE
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Certification #:
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3717436021
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Owner:
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Qalyar
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SET DETAILS
Owner's Description
Echo Echo is an awesome, weird little book. It is basically an artist sketch book published in comic book format, using prestige materials. There's no story here, just sketches Burns used in his creation of Black Hole. Quoting the artist:
"What is this? I took a bunch of pencil drawings from my comic Black Hole and taped them together and xeroxed them to make this book. When I 'pencil' my comics I work in layers on sheets of tracing paper and build the drawings up by slowly refining and fixing them. Sometimes I get what I want in one or two tries, but that's rare..."
Besides Burns himself, the other famous name behind this publication is Alvin Buenaventura, the renowned indie publisher whose earlier Buenaventura Press was the source of a lot of well-regarded indie comics-as-art. Echo Echo, on the other hand, was released through his short-lived later project, Pigeon Press. It's a beautiful piece of work. The cover is translucent vellum, with high quality acid-free interior pages, hand bound together with linen thread.
The book was announced as being a limited run of 500 copies, each of which is signed on the interior back cover by Burns and numbered. To the best of my knowledge,there are no known unsigned or unnumbered extraneous copies. That run of 500 is divided into two series, which CGC will not consider distinct books (and neither will I). One series is 400 books, numbered via a blue ink stamp alongside Burns's signature; this copy is #22/400 from that series. The remaining 100 copies are "deluxe" copies, hand numbered by Burns, with an original sketch from his archives taped in.
I'm not sad about the 9.4 on this copy, which is by far the nicest of the half-dozen I've examined. There's a lot working against high grades for this book. The hand-threaded binding processes lends itself to handling defects, as well as enlargements or tear-outs around the threading holes. Also, the vellum cover is theoretically more durable than paper, but any defects it acquires are unforgiving and unlikely to be pressable. This copy, like many of them, was sold to a European buyer. I acquired it from Librairie Thé à la Page, a bookstore in Montélimar, France, via the magic of the internet.
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