Review by C.J. Bunce
With all the production design and art design departments heads and thousands of concept artists that have worked on movies and TV series in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, you wouldn’t think one guy’s vision drove the entire thing. It turns out that was the case. Ryan Meinerding was first tapped to contribute ideas to Iron Man by Jon Favreau. It wasn’t long before Meinerding was in charge of the look of Marvel for the coming decades. In the new book Marvel Studios: The Art of Ryan Meinerding, fans of all things Marvel will get their biggest fix yet of the concept artwork behind the movies and TV series.
From Iron Man to She-Hulk: Attorney-at-Law, Eternals to Spider-Man: No Way Home, Netflix’s Daredevil to The Falcon and the Winter Soldier and Moon Knight to Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, everything your mind’s eye recalls began with an image created by Ryan Meinerding. Just out from Abrams, Marvel Studios: The Art of Ryan Meinerding is a giant celebration of art and Marvel Comics, available here at Amazon.
Written and compiled by Tara Bennett and Paul Terry, this is not a book with lots of text. After a foreword by Kevin Feige and introductory story about Meinerding, his background in art, college experiences and early projects, and how he came to work with Marvel, the book features primarily full-page spreads featuring Meinerding’s character design creations.
The sheer volume of characters in the MCU itself is staggering, but to see the first looks of each of them came from one person’s pen is particularly impressive. Tony Stark in the garage working on an Iron Man suit and his key scene testing the boots? That came from Meinerding, as did Spider-Man’s CGI supersuit eyes that were altered to mirror the emotional shifts seen in the comic strips and comic pages.
The work on Captain America: The First Avenger and Captain America: The Winter Soldier resulted in art pieces and ideas used in the Smithsonian Institution exhibit seen in the latter and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier TV series. Meinerding designed the suit for The Wasp, and even worked on Marvel’s Netflix series, creating the costume we would see on the small screen for Daredevil, later revisited in She-Hulk: Attorney-at-Law.
Meinerding’s work often begins with black-and-white renderings. He also frequently looks to comic book pages and covers when adapting the stories to the screen. Hardly an image from Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame didn’t begin as a Meinerding concept piece.
Even more fun are the images of the B-characters, like Jake Gyllenhaal as Mysterio, Wyatt Russell’s U.S. Agent in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, The Watcher in What If…?, and Patrick Stewart as Professor X and Captain Carter in the third Doctor Strange film. The concepts for the return of all the Spidey characters for the third Spider-Man film in the MCU are also impressive.
If you loved the Marvel movies and TV series in the Disney era, you’re going to love this book. Aspiring concept artists will also see this as the next iteration of inspiration that began back in the 1970s with Ralph McQuarrie’s concept art for Star Wars.
Marvel Studios: The Art of Ryan Meinerding is available now here at Amazon in a full-color over-sized hardcover edition.
