Artist's Edition is a line of hardcover reprint comic books published by IDW Publishing and edited by Scott Dunbier.[1][2]
Unlike the usual graphic novels, this project features printing of the original artworks in a way to mimic the experience of a comic book artist viewing comic art. Artist's Edition is designed to print exactly the same dimension as the artwork papers that comic book artists usually use in their illustrations and also retaining the editorial notes and printing crop marks seen on the papers. All the artworks were originally colored, Artist's Edition specifically prints in black and white palette to show the details of pasteovers, zip-a-tone technique, and blue pencils. Even though the project requires scanning of the original artworks, Dunbier stated that not all the pieces can be assembled together for some titles, so a "not scanned from original art" line is included in some pages to represent IDW isn't able to acquire the artworks.
According to Dunbier, the idea of Artist's Edition drew inspiration from the Batman Collected book. One of the pages in the book features an original Batman work by Neal Adams; designer Chip Kidd had the idea of photographing the work and then printed in black and white palette.