DC Comics Release Details And A Preview For José Luis García-López’s ‘DC Comics Style Guide’

Book publishers, Standards Manual, and Warner Bros. Discovery Global Consumer Products have shed more light on the reissue of something of a comic book Holy Grail, the 1982 DC Comics Style Guide. A hardback featuring the unsurpassable José Luis García-López.

Back in 1982, DC Comics hired García-López to create the key art for the definitive look for each character and each one’s colour swatches. A style guide to inform and instructed a wide range of licensed products and promotions for years thereafter and up to the present day.

“The resulting 3-ring-binder filled with rules, color swatches, character profiles, and hundreds of pages of stunning art was in itself a showcase of García-López’s artistic talent, collaborating with legendary inker Dick Giordano… Most earlier DC licensed products or ads picked up images from the comics, without any additional payment to the talent—led by president Jenette Kahn, the team updated that policy so that most licensees had to use artwork created specifically for that purpose, either in the Style Guides or newly drawn.”

“The copy held by Standards Manual is a rare collector’s item and unavailable to wide-audiences beyond low resolution, poorly reproduced, and often watermarked images online. The reissue is based on the original copy held by Standards Manual, containing an amalgam of page versions—presumably added by the owners of this original from ’82 to ’85.”

This is the first time the 1982 DC Comics Style Guide has been made available to the public in print which hopes to also highlight the team behind this great artistic endeavor, including Joe Orlando, Neal Pozner, Mary Yedlin, Paul Levitz, and many others.

The book will be available for pre-order at an early-access price of $90 and will begin shipping August 31, 2024.