Sean Robinson’s Living the Line will release Dave Sim’s The Strange Death of Alex Raymond in a single 320-page deluxe hardcover volume in July in comic stores and on August 3 in the book channel, the company announced.  The Strange Death of Alex Raymond was begun as one of three ongoing features in Glamourpuss in 2008 (see "Interview with Dave Sim").  The series ran 26 issues, and then in 2018, IDW announced that it would publish The Strange Death of Alex Raymond, exploring the history of photo-realistic art in comics, as 18 comic issues, with re-mastered, redrawn and reworked pages from Glamourpuss (see "Dave Sim’s ‘The Strange Death of Alex Raymond’").

The IDW project never came to pass.  Sim ended up discarding almost all of the Glamourpuss pages for the new work, and then completed around 180 pages on his own before he contracted a potentially career-ending wrist malady, according to the publisher’s announcement.  Sim then brought in fellow photorealist Carson Grubaugh to continue the work, which he did for several years.  Sim ceased work on the project in 2020 but granted a dispensation to Grubaugh to complete the story and release a collection of the completed work.

The Strange Death of Alex Raymond tells the stories of the lives and techniques of artists Alex Raymond, Stan Drake, Hal Foster, and others, recreating their work as a way to dissect their methods, and "…highlighting the metatextual resonances that bind them together," the publisher said in its description.

The pages will be printed on sheetfed offset printers using cutting-edge prepress techniques to allow the art to be presented with an extremely high level of detail.

The 320-page, oversized hardcover volume will carry a $39.99 MSRP.

Click Gallery below for pages from the work!