I have been reading and writing about comics for a few decades, though there I tend to lean more heavily on story elements - talking about story, I'm on much firmer ground. (And even wordless comics are storytelling vehicles: the art is always purposeful, and I at least think the tools I have can be useful.) But occasionally I wander into the pure art book, usually because it overlaps with some other interest - in the past, I saw a lot of SFF art books, especially when I worked as a book-club editor, and more recently, I sometimes dip into comics-related art.
That's how I stand with Jaime Hernandez's 2021 collection Queen of the Ring. It's not comics; the book makes it clear that this was an entirely separate artistic exercise. (There's even a discussion of how his tools and working methods were different for this work than for his comics - I found it vaguely interesting; people who actually understand how art is made will get more out of it.)
This is a collection of individual drawings - some black and white but mostly colored in pencils - of female wrestlers. Some of it is "in action" - showing a moment in the ring - and some of it is posed, often as if it was the cover of a wrestling magazine or program. All of it is fictional; all of the wrestlers here were invented by Hernandez, part of a vague - but probably fairly clear in his head - alternative timeline of wrestling from the 1960s through about the '80s.
He made these drawings over the course of forty years, as the book's subtitle makes clear. (He's probably still doing it now, five years later.) The book is not organized in chronological order - either by art-creation or the fictional history of Hernandez's wrestling world - and the short bits of text here, from an interview Hernandez did with the book's editor (and fellow cartoonist) Katie Skelly, essentially say that he didn't date any of this work at the time, and can only vaguely tag it by decade at this point.
So: this is a whole lot of undated, non-comics art, organized in a vague sequence to make a pleasant book. There are recurring characters, of a sort, and we get a vague sense of their careers and personalities from the fake headlines of their wrestling magazine covers and other flavor text Hernandez put on the art at the time. (His aim, I think, was to make his own world of women's wrestling, roughly congruent with what he saw in glances as a kid, with heroes and villains and long-running plotlines and rivalries and shocking betrayals and all of the other standard wrestling story beats. He's somewhat successful in giving a sense that history exists, behind these individual drawings, even though it doesn't.)
As I said, I'm not great at talking about art. But even I can see the changes in Hernandez's style over the years, and appreciate them. In what seem to be the earliest drawings, he has a lot of lines, trying to capture every fold and wrinkle. The more mature work, to my eye, is more concerned with defining volumes and shapes - his bodies are rounded but strong, crisply defined and real, with fewer lines overall and vastly fewer in the middle of shapes and bodies.
I doubt I got as much out of this book as I could: I flipped through it, looking at the pictures, and finished it quickly. Good thing I read it digitally: this is the kind of book I would probably never buy, so being able to get it through my library app is a huge bonus. If you are anything like me, I recommend the same - for this and any other books you're vaguely interested in but don't necessarily want to own forever.
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