Book Review - Mileships by Ian McQue
- The Artbook Collector
- 8 minutes ago
- 5 min read
December 16th 2025
Narrative artbooks are a small but growing genre within the book world, delivering stories and ideas alongside artwork from talented artists to pull readers in. Mileships from Ian McQue is one of these titles that has now been making its way into the hands of backers after a hugely successful Kickstarter campaign last year.
Created by concept artist and illustrator Ian McQue (Grand Theft Auto, Solo: A Star Wars Story), and co-written with author Jim Rossignol, Mileships is set in an alternate world where people work and live on floating ships and stones. After a decade of painting these ships, this book has been created to explore them further and a copy has joined the collection to become my first narrative artbook review!
Build Quality
The book comes as a 190-page hardcover measuring 30.5cm x 25.5cm and it's thick too. I wasn’t expecting it to be quite this big, but as they have used high quality thick paper, it does give it some heft. Fortunately, the binding is also very good, securely holding everything in place and allowing pages to open fully too. Overall, they have done a fantastic job with the physical book.
Story
For a conventional artbook, I would give right into the full content, but it makes sense to split it here for a narrative artbook, so I’ll begin with the storytelling, which comes with an interesting approach.
The world of Mileships is presented through excerpts from in-world journals, compendiums, letters, books, and more, all building a picture of this unique world. There are characters and ships that are brought up multiple times throughout the book, with the journey of captain Huna Lintaig and his ship the Remora being the standout that is followed most closely. New elements and areas are visited by the captain, making the Remora somewhat of an anchor (pardon the pun) for the readers experience.
The fleets, ships, floating stones, and the inhabitants of this universe are fully fleshed out through details delivered in handfuls of paragraphs at a time. By approaching it through personal accounts, historical texts, and more, it allows deeper details to be shared more efficiently, preventing it from becoming a heavy novel. It does mean that you have to go with the flow initially, as it just drops you in at the deep end, but it’s not long before you suddenly realise it has gripped you. It’s interesting in that it’s not laid out in acts like a story, but rather a collection of the highs, lows, and realities of these people’s lives.
What I really like is that, without sticking to just one character, it does take you through the different social classes and places organically, from the marshfolk (people on the ground), to the workers, ship builders, and eventually those that live on the stones in the sky. You learn about their lives, their roles, the politics, and of course, the ships themselves. It’s a strange and yet familiar world presented in a non-conventional way and works well to deliver so much lore in a book like this.
Art
One of the things that attracted me to this book was Ian McQue’s artwork, and unsurprisingly it is exceptional throughout Mileships. His art of floating boats gets the full artbook treatment and creates a simultaneously grounded and surreal reality to get lost in.
There are a lot of incredible full colour pieces of the mileships, stones, and people, each depicting the artist’s world, and all are complimented by the written history and stories too. As you can see in the previews, this may be sci-fi, but it’s certainly not alien and this helps you settle in to the world as there are recognisable elements from real-life places like boat yards, scrapyards, and farms.
It also features a lot of sketches too, an inclusion I really like as other narrative artbooks don’t include things like this. McQue’s concept art background is on full display as there are a large number of designs in the book by doing this, as opposed to only having select ships featured in illustrations. Most of these include no text at all, so become a showcase of ideas and elements, and designs for the gravity-defying reality.
I love the style, it’s not photoreal as you can see with the people and some of the shapes, but it still looks familiar enough to feel tangible. You can imagine being on the ships and going to the places they visit. What always impresses me most is the sense of scale and depth in the artwork, made more extreme by the fact most of the book takes place in the air. The only drawback is that I want more of it!
Overall, along with the narrative elements, this a hugely effective way to get immersed in a new reality, as well as collecting wonderful art. It has left me wanting more because it’s such an interesting place, it’s easy to imagine that there are individual stories to tell after my tour of the sky.
Credits
Short and sweet, Ian McQue has his name on the cover and Jim Rossignol is named at the start too, you can’t expect much more! The only thing I did notice is that there is no book publisher mentioned for the manufacturing, which I haven’t seen before.
Use of Space
As you can see, the pages are filled and the text is placed either on empty areas or outside of the main focal point of an image. The art goes right up to the page edge to maximise its use of the space and the binding helps the pages open fully to reduce image loss. A great job for getting the most out of the book.
Value
This is hard to comment on as it is not available at retail and arrived via the Kickstarter campaign. The standard edition of the book was £40 though and that is more than reasonable for the quality of the content and the physical book itself. I’ve not seen details on a retailer release yet, but keep an eye out for that. A RRP of £40/$55 would be a very fair price for the book.
Verdict
Mileships is an excellent book and a portal to a new place, one that that feels lived in and full of history. It doesn’t waste time in setting sail and taking you along for the ride, offering a unique mix of first-hand tales and written documents to compliment an impressive visual spectacle. It may not be a story in the conventional sense, but if you like the artwork and love strong worldbuilding, you will find a lot to enjoy in this book!
If there are any updates in the future of Mileships heading to retail, I will report that here.
