The fact that the makers of Adventure Time saw the potential of releasing a book simply made up of the title cards from the first two seasons of the show is an incredible thing. The fact that it was popular enough to see a second book released is just fantastic!
It’s no secret that we are big fans of the first book, regularly pulling it back down off of the shelf to have another look (usually after having just seen one of the title cards appear on TV). As such, we were excited to get our hands on the second volume and can safely say that we’re big fans of this book too.
The book sticks to the same format as the first, giving the final title card a full page and then having some early stages of the image, some brief text about the creation of the image and a quote from the episode on the page next to it. It’s a formula that served so well the first time around so you can see why they have repeated it here.
It’s a layout and style that makes the book accessible to fans of all ages, walking the fine line between appealing to children without short-changing adults. The text is fun and breezy to read, neither short-changing older fans out for information nor going into so much depth that younger fans will lose interest in what they are reading.
The finished title cards draw their inspiration from the style of old pulp novel covers and straddle many genres, including sci-fi, fantasy, romance, crime noir and horror (the title card for The Lich is a wonderfully gruesome image for what is essentially a kids cartoon).
The images are stunning (some more so than others) and the detail is tremendous. The fact that these images appear on screen for a matter of seconds at most, makes the attention to detail even more impressive. In fact, if the book has a flaw, it’s that it doesn’t come with a selection of prints of the title cards that you could frame and put on the wall. But then we suppose the problem would be which ones you would choose.
Roll on, Volume 3!
ADVENTURE TIME: THE ORIGINAL CARTOON TITLE CARDS SEASONS 3 & 4 / AUTHOR: PENDLETON WARD / PUBLISHER: TITAN BOOKS / RELEASE DATE: AUGUST 4TH
