Just how big is 75 Years of DC Comics: The Art of Modern Mythmaking? Well, my first thought on opening the box was “Holy crap, this thing’s bigger than my kid!”

Granted, he’s still kind of small (just barely two months old), but the book is huge. 16 inches high, 12 inches across, 3 inches thick. 14.4 pounds. (J weighed in at 10 pounds, 4 ounces a couple of days later.) It comes with its own cardboard carrying case with a handle.

Yes, it comes with its own luggage! Robert Jordan joked about shipping the conclusion to The Wheel of Time with its own luggage cart, but Taschen actually followed through!

But these numbers are still kind of abstract. How does it stack up against other books?

Very well, actually.

Seriously, though, check it out: It’s as thick as two volumes of The Complete Calvin and Hobbes. As thick as the latest Wheel of Time novel. Twice as thick as The DC Encyclopedia or Comic Book Tattoo…and taller than any of them.

It’s not quite twice as wide and a bit more than 1 1/2 times as tall as a standard hardcover novel. The novel that Robert Jordan said might need its own luggage? It ended up being so big that Tor split it into three books (of which this is the middle volume). So it’s pretty close to the original size of A Memory of Light!

So we’ve established that it’s big. What’s inside?

All kinds of random information, historical photographs, scans of panels and pages…

Fold-out timelines for each era…

Classic covers…

And a whole lot more!

This is definitely going to take a while to read through. But I don’t think I’ll be reading it to my son just yet. After all, I can’t hold him and the book at the same time!

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