Halloween season approaches, sure it's a reason to give a present, could be for the Star Trek fan in your life including you. Star Trek: The Art of Juan Ortiz is is the perfect book to show off on your coffee table, filling your friends with rage at the cool things you own. This wonderful collection of 100 posters based on every episode of the original Star Trek series will have you swinging behind the sun at warp speed letting you time travel back in time, I am inferring the movie where the Star Trek crew does time travel that way.
Juan Ortiz forced himself to finish one portion of his poster project in a month doing 33 posters, almost one a day. After making contact with CBS about really using the posters for possibly t-shirts and mugs they went with a full-fledged art book.
Now instead of having the posters grace your belly for 80 days on different t-shirts, that does sound cool, you can instead go through the pages of this book while watching the show or watching with friends, admiring the episodes and getting into fights over trivia.
The collection sets the posters as if they were made alongside the series was being shown in 1960s The 60's style presented has some very minimalistic features for some posters. I don't think I've seen the Enterprise depicted in so many way before either. Skulls aplenty though, but you have it as a shield and even something caught by a cat. Simple cut-outs of figures from the show like bad photo-shop make up some highlights.
Each one can be admired at your own time and a little tidbit of info is given at the end of the book about each piece by Juan himself.
I was going to bring up the idea that Juan do posters for the Star Trek The Animated Series too, but he already is. Check out his latest work on making posters for those episodes here.
Possibly, the best part of the book is arguing what Juan did to represent the episode. Sometimes I disagree with what moments stood out to him and he made a big deal of. Sometimes he doesn't capture the whole episode, but a scene or something that caught his eye. In many ways the book is more about his taste of Star Trek and what came to his attention.
It shows how much Star Trek inspires to this day, I don't get why they don't push for a TV series with th cast of the movies.
The book will make you want to watch the episodes again, hopefully in a future of Netflix and other similar services these posters will be in place of the one stupid box art picture they use while going through which episodes to watch.
For art to remind you of how Star Trek endures to this day, not based on the reboot look no further, but do look in the book.
The book was provided by the publisher for review purposes.
