On the heels of my Transformers Afterburner toy acquisition from this past weekend I wanted to take a second and point to the super rad new book about to be released, Transformers Legacy: A Celebration of Transformers Package Art.
One of the things that really gets me excited about finding toys in their original packaging (or “with” in the case of Afterburner) is that I get to get a real up close and personal look at the accompanying artwork that I loved staring at as a kid. It puts me right back into my 10 year-old shoes as I was walking up and down the toy aisles of my local Albertson’s or Lionel Playworld. I used to love going grocery shopping with my mom late at night on a Friday or Saturday as I could just obsess over all the toys for an hour or so as she went about her business. I wish I could afford to pick more vintage stuff MIB on mint on card, but I win the lottery ten or fifteen times that just isn’t going to happen. Luckily publishers are starting to come around to the idea of archiving this wonderful art, as is the case with the Transformers Legacy book being put out by IDW in May…
I’m pretty stoked to get my hands on this tome of amazing airbrushed robot madness, and from the sound of it, at 300 pages with with interviews and essays with/by the original artists this book sounds like it’s going to be pretty exhaustive. I’m really curious to see what Jim Sorenson and Bill Forster have put together. Honestly, this sort of thing is the culmination of the whole 80s nostalgia boom. I mean when we’re getting nice hardcover editions of toy box art from our childhood you know our generation is running things! Seriously though, I hope this is just the first of many such volumes. Since IDW is also doing a bang up job with the G.I. Joe license as well I hope we’ll get to see that artwork in a similar format.
Transformers Legacy is set to be released on May 6th, and you can pre-order it at Amazon right now!