Artist's Edition is a line of hardcover reprint comic books published by IDW Publishing and originally edited by Scott Dunbier.List of Eisner Award Winners - Best Archival Collection/Project - Comic BooksList of Harvey Award Winners - Best Domestic Reprint Project
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.
In 2024, together with his wife Amanda, Dunbier launched his own company, Act 4 Publishing, through which he will continue to publish new Artist's Edition volumes.
List of Artist's Edition titles Some titles exclusively receive limited edition; available only via either pre-ordering or purchasing from IDW's official website. This version includes a variant design of the front cover and a personal signature of the title's comic book artist printed in an interior page. The trade paperback known as Artisan Edition would be made available later on if a title is eventually out of stock. This version, however, is scaled down to the standard size of a graphic novel despite retaining the same content as the regular version.