The thing that I love about Erik Larsen is that he is a perfectionist. He could just slap together the mini-series that he made into a book and leave it be but he cares far too much. Instead he has snuck in stories about the making of the Dragon, the usual cover gallery and pages of sketches with little captions describing page layouts and character designs. He doesn't stop there he also rearranges the series into a chronlogical order (the original mini-series was told in a sometime confusing flashback fashion) and adding new scenes. It makes for a seamless and enjoyable read.
To reference Jerry Maguire, this series had me at the first splash page. Savage Dragon represents a fairly realistic hero, a hero who can be injuired, who is vulnerable. Despite his appareance, this is a character who is extremely human.
This trade is also the beginning of the Savage Dragon universe and no other series works so hard to establish such a large universe so early on. Larsen also tries hard to incorporate the newly found Image universe with appearances by Spawn and Bedrock, neither of which feel gratitutous. It is reminiscent of the early Marvel days when another character would briefly pop up to reinforce the idea of a shared universe.
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