Book Review: The Art of Cuphead: The Delicious Last Course
December 12th 2024
The third artbook for Cuphead from Dark Horse has a lot to live up to. After delivering on books for the original Cuphead and then The Cuphead Show, the characters are back for more in The Art of Cuphead: The Delicious Last Course. This covers the content of the DLC from Studio MDHR as well as some extras.
Lets see if it lives up to its predecessors and delivers another example of how to please fans. You can also find a video review at the bottom of this page.
I’m not going to critique the art, if you’re a Cuphead fan though, you’re likely here because you enjoy its hand drawn visuals in the vintage, rubber-hose art style. If you stumbled here by chance, you can see previews below. I am big fan of the style myself and seeing more of it is always welcome. It's fun, creative and is perfect on the page, in game and on the animated show, the art really works anywhere. Bringing it back for a modern audience was a brilliant idea that is well executed.
Build Quality
No surprises here, it’s a solid book. Artbook releases from Dark Horse are just another day in the office for them. It has a hardcover, strong binding and a good print quality as usual. I’ve always described them as meat and potatoes, nothing fancy, but they do it well. The only thing here of note, as with the artbooks for the original game and show, it is smaller in dimensions. Dark Horse have a standard size for their artbooks, I don’t know why, but they make them smaller for Cuphead. It is still a good size though, so nothing to worry about here. It also has a good page count at 272, which is more than most.
Content
When looking up the book, the high page count was a surprise, this is DLC for the game after all, a good size one, but 272 is still a lot. I wondered if they would show more art for stuff from the first game, but instead they do something more interesting which I appreciate.
All the art here is new and for the DLC content. You won’t find art for Cuphead and Mugman, this book is a follow up to the first one, just like the DLC was to the game. What they did instead was include a section at the back highlighting merch, practically filmed trailers and more. Not only is there enough art here to make a reasonable sized book anyway, but this additional content takes it from just an artbook, to a celebration of Cuphead.
Like before they include early sketches, storyboards, animation ideas, painted backgrounds and more. Ignoring the merch section, they still have a wealth of content here and they are not holding back with it. There’s no padding, nothing is enlarged to fill more space and increase the pages count either.
Go to any page for a boss and not only do you get the art for them, but also a lot of unused designs and animation ideas. A lot of books will show you a few variants of a character and the final design, but this one gives you a huge look behind the curtain for every character. If you’re a fan of the art like myself, this book gives you a lot to pour over.
On top of unused designs for characters in the game, there are sections on unused levels, bosses and NPC’s. They really do show all here, Cuphead artbooks are great for this, it’s definitely a book aiming to please.
That’s not all though, you get a look behind the scenes at the model building for the practical elements in the game, which is just as interesting and allows the talents of the model makers to be seen too. The game was a labour of love, making this book feels very much the same.
The text throughout gives you insights on the characters, how and why the designs changed, how things were done in the game and more. There are no generic text descriptions, they show you the art and then tell you all the interesting details to go along with it.
Credits
Onto credits and this is the only negative I could find because not every image is credited. There are notes throughout letting you know who worked on art on that page, but it isn’t consistent throughout. Everyone gets a mention, it’s just that names aren’t tied to every image. There are credits in the back of the book though too. This isn’t a huge negative, but worth pointing out.
Use of Space
As you have seen on the previews above, the pages are full. It’s not a surprise given how much they share. They could have made images larger and made the book over 300 pages if they wanted to, but I like that they didn’t because it doesn’t feel crowded and it’s very readable. The page layouts don’t repeat over and over either, so it keeps it more interesting. They had a vendetta against empty space and they filled it, without creating a unorganised mess.
Value
I go to Amazon for price checks for consistency and availability and this book is really making it hard not to buy. In the UK it is often under £30, which is a ridiculously low price. At full price it is £35 and even that, for what you are getting, is great value for money.
In the US, the full price it is $40 and this is great too, I would have no problem handing over my money at this price point.
Verdict
This book then, in a year of strong releases in 2024, has come out swinging making a play for artbook of the year. They have given every fan of the game a lot to enjoy and at a price point that makes it hard to pass on.
For any game, a book presented like this would be superb, but what makes this game special is the visuals. Again, this isn’t an art review, but if you like the game, it’s also because you like the art style and what they draw and paint is what you see on screen. So, while the art for other games isn’t always in the same style or translated well to the final product, here you know you’ll love every image on every page and that’s a unique situation for a video game artbook.
In short, this comes highly recommended! It's great if you enjoy the game, suck at playing it but still enjoy the visuals or if you’re a fan of cartoons and animation in general.
For those interested in the book, you can order it here and see the video below for more previews;
Tags;
Based On: #CupheadTheDeliciousLastCourse Series: #Cuphead Publisher: #DarkHorse
Studio: #StudioMDHR
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