Insight Editions released their latest poster book last month, and this time it was a collection of WWE pay-per-view posters in a book dubbed “The Ultimate WWE Poster Collection.”
Back in November, I reviewed my first Insight Editions poster book (Destiny) and came away impressed with it. This WWE one is really no exception. If you’ve seen one of Insight’s poster books before, then you know the kind of quality you can expect.
The posters are fairly big, measuring 15.9 x 11.9 x 0.4 inches. They’re on high quality paper, easily removable, and thus perfect for framing if that’s what you want to do with them. There’s 20 pages here, and the posters are double-sided so there are 40 posters in all.
These are mostly pay-per-view posters, but there are some that aren’t. For example, the first poster in the book is a cool black and white drawing of Andre the Giant towering over a city (you can see it below). There’s even a Sting poster straight out of the pages of an old WCW Magazine.
For me, the coolest poster in the book is the Royal Rumble 1992 cartoon poster. That’s art as far as I’m concerned, and it’s the only one that I’d personally frame and hang somewhere.
What I don’t understand though is the selection process for including these posters. They’re largely PPV ones, but WWE has had a lot of great posters over the years and the vast majority of them are no where to be seen here. Skipped over in favor of some generic ones. The collection starts with some late 80’s and early 90’s, a couple of Attitude Era posters, and then skips right to the mid 2000’s to present.
The only really good modern poster included is the No Way Out 2012 poster featuring AJ Lee and Daniel Bryan, which you can see below. Mark Henry yelling, Chris Jericho pushing a button, and John Cena staring off into the distance do not make good posters.
You can’t fault Insight for that, after all it was WWE who created the posters (and knowing WWE, likely picked the ones they wanted in this collection). But it is rather lackluster given WWE’s history of having some really great and clever posters, especially PPV posters. I would have likely to have seen more diversity in the time periods, rather than mostly modern day PPV posters which have largely been rather generic save for a few here and there.
If you’re considering this book, it’s retail price is $25. If you want to actually hang these posters somewhere, I’d say there’s only a handful even worthy of it and thus it isn’t worth $25. But if you like to collect wrestling items and will leave these posters in the book (as I will do), then I can see spending the money on it. It is a good quality poster book with some cool posters in it.
The Ultimate WWE Poster Collection gets a three out of five: GOOD.
* Book provided by the publisher for review.
