Review by C.J. Bunce
It’s one of those events fans of Marvel Comics dreamed about back to Marvel Superheroes Secret Wars and even earlier. A team-up of some of the biggest superheroes in one live-action movie. The Avengers was the culmination of the first phase of what would become the sprawling Marvel Cinematic Universe. How did it happen and how did Marvel puppetmaster Kevin Feige orchestrate a deficient batch of intellectual property characters and pull what was available together into the biggest comic book tie-in of all time? Find out in The Art of Marvel Studios’ The Avengers, available for pre-order now here at Amazon and coming to bookstores next month.
The Art of Marvel Studios’ The Avengers is the fifth of 24 books in its re-sized, re-issued MCU coming from Titan Books (check out our review of Captain America: The First Avenger–The Art of the Movie, earlier here at borg). A great feature of the series is how each book doesn’t just re-hash the same information for each film, instead digging into what makes the movie unique in the Marvel catalogue.
For this movie behind-the-scenes accounts include interviews with key players including director Joss Whedon, concept artists Ryan Meinerding and Charlie Wen, Feige, the key cast of actors including Robert Downey, Jr., Chris Hemsworth, Chris Evans, Scarlett Johansson, Mark Ruffalo, and the show’s villain, Loki, played by Tom Hiddleston. But wait–he wasn’t the only villain, and the reason is explained by Whedon in the book. Which meant a CG alien army needed to be created. But the real effects challenge was translating the helicarrier concept from page to screen.
How do you pull together a superhero movie about Marvel’s best when you don’t have the rights to Spider-Man, Wolverine, and the X-Men? According to the book Feige was the guy who figured it out.
The book takes fans of the films back, revisiting each of the films in Phase 1 that came together in The Avengers. It’s a great opportunity, and great reminder, of how Feige & Co. “made it up as they went” in the early days of the Infinity Saga. A pull-out timeline documents the journey of characters and elements needed to converge into the final story.
And don’t forget Samuel L. Jackson’s first of many turns as Nick Fury, the big-screen introduction of Clark Gregg’s new character Agent Coulson, and Cobie Smulders bringing Agent Maria Hill to live-action for the first time. Layouts include significant coverage of all the costumes designed for the film, as well as props like the Tesseract (and a whole page of arrows for Hawkeye).
Writer Jason Surrell and book designer Jeff Powell make the most of comparing images from comic book pages as they were translated to the screen. Comic book artist Andy Park provides much commentary on finding the right balance in interpreting the comics–it’s great to see the creators of the comics get some attention.
It’s a fun step back more than a decade to see how it all came together for the first time. at the best of a decade of great superhero movies. Fans of the film and the Infinity Saga will not want to miss The Art of Marvel Studios’ The Avengers, available for pre-order now here at Amazon and coming to bookstores next July 30.
