Book Review: The Art of The Cuphead Show
December 5th 2024
The popular game Cuphead made its return with an animated show on Netflix in 2022, titled 'The Cuphead Show!'. This made perfect sense because of the visual style of the game, going back to the vintage 1930’s look, with fun characters, rubber hose animations and painted backgrounds, The show was became popular among fans and picked up new ones too.
As much as I wasn't the best at the game, I enjoyed the visuals a lot and this continued with the show. Games take so long to make now, it’s great Cuphead and his brother Mugman found life elsewhere. They returned again in this book, The Art of The Cuphead Show, released in September of 2024.
If you're reading this, you likely love the art too, so take this review as one of the book and how it presents that art to you, not a breakdown of the art itself. The art would get a 10/10 from me, but that's easy and subjective, you want to know if the book is worth picking up!
This book was my first video review on YouTube, if interested, you can see my thoughts with a preview here.
Build Quality
This book is published by Dark Horse and if you buy artbooks, this will be a familiar name. They make a lot of artbooks, especially for video games, including The Art of Cuphead, but also for animation too. These are meat and potato books, there’s nothing fancy here, but they do it well. You can rely on the binding and they all come with a hardcover. What’s interesting here though, is the size. Dark Horse typically keep their books the same dimensions, but this one, like The Art of Cuphead for the original game, is a little bit smaller as seen below. I’m not sure why this is, but it still has over 250 pages.
Content
There is a lot here and it has everything I want to see, which is impressive considering it covers 3 seasons of a show. Early sketches, final designs, background art, storyboards and even some physical models.
There’s nothing worse than opening a book looking for early ideas or what could have been, but just finding images of what you can see in the final product anyway. So this book is great for showing everything, from start to finish.
That also includes a Lost Episodes chapter. These parts are often my favourite and in this book you get 10 pages of art and storyboards for episodes they didn’t make. As noted in the book, this was due only to the budget, not because they were not good enough. So it’s great to see them get some attention here.
There are lots of insights from the team too, from how they worked together, why things were changed from the game and how individual episodes and characters came together. Fans of the show will find a lot to get into.
Credits
Each page and image is credited, so no complaints here. This is a big deal for people, especially the artists, so it’s great to see that they did right by them and let everyone know who did what, as this isn’t always the case.
Use of Space
As you can see in the previews the pages are packed. I would be pretty disappointed if there was empty space given how many episodes this book is covering, it would actually be impressive if they didn’t manage to fill them all! The layouts aren’t all the same either, which keeps it interesting and as chaotic as the show can be, a perfect choice for the book. The only minor complaint is there are a couple of instances where art cross the centre fold and you lose some of the image. Though it’s not often, it’s worth mentioning as no book can be perfect.
Value
The book cost me just over £30, which is normal for an artbook. But, there were stock issues for the UK at release as none was delivered here, so my copy was an import. Dark Horse did respond online to say stock was coming and it did eventually arrive. My American cousins across the pond could pick this up for around $35 at release, a little lower than a lot of artbooks.
Prices have fluctuated as expected since release, but even at the full RRP prices, this is great value for money for the amount of content they included.
Verdict
It’s a solid book that crams a lot in and shares a lot of unseen material and ideas. This is great for not just fans of the show, but animation in general. I can also see this being great reference material for artists out there too. I could happily recommend this book to anyone interested.
For those interested in The Art of The Cuphead Show, you can order it here and see the video below for more previews;
Tags;
Based On: #TheCupheadShow #Cuphead Series: #TheCupheadShow Publisher: #DarkHorse Studios: #LighthouseStudios
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