This gorgeous collection might just represent the future of picture books for grown-ups.  Fusing familiar elements from comics with an animator’s instinct for cinematic storytelling, the talented folks at Blue Sky Studios have created something very special.

You know Blue Sky even if you don’t think you do.  You’ve seen their work in the Ice Age movies and the crazed shorts spun off from it.  Or maybe it was Robots, or the talking fish back in the early days of The Sopranos that you saw instead.  In any case, it turns out that this group of visionary artists, with Daisuke Tsutsumi and Vincent Nguyen as ringleaders, have more imagination than they know what to do with, and the result is this book.

As an anthology, Out of Picture is even more of a Gumpian “box of chocolates” than most of its kind.  That’s because there is no unifying theme to the selections, unless you consider page count, where the 4-6 pp. range seems to dominate.  You’ll find a sea chantey-inspired story with a horror undertone (undertow?), a film noir pastiche with Mother Goose characters, nonlinear SF, and even some kid-friendly feel-good fables.

  None of these are your cup of tea?  No worries—just keep reading and you’re bound to come across something eye-opening, if not mind-expanding.

Here were the high points for me:

• Michael Kanpp’s “Newsbreak,” with art so evocative and cinematic that you can practically hear a soundtrack playing in your head as you read along.
• David Gordon’s brilliant, part-conceptual, part-polemical “The Wedding Present,” with its connective bomb wires as a panel-navigating device and a killer ending.
• Andrea Blasich’s utterly charming “Yes, I Can”—not a Sammy Davis, Jr. adaptation, but a textless children’s tale that is literally “uplifting.”
• Vincent Nguyen’s strikingly simple yet profound parable “Domesticity.”

Yes, there are a couple of pieces that feel more like ideas for stories than stories themselves, but all in all you don’t wish that these painters and illustrators had hooked up with “writers” at some point—they are writers, and good ones.  A well-designed paperback that boasts a generous trim size and quality paper, Out of Pocket is a nice deal at US$19.95.  And with fifty pages of gallery material following the hundred pages of stories, it doesn’t skimp on content.  There’s another volume due out in 2008, and we say keep ‘em coming.