Grimlock ♥ Ultra Magnus

So far, Andy Park, Charlie Wen, Roberto Fernández Castro and Ryan Meinerding are my favorite artists.   Not that the others are bad, but these four nail it in my mind.   They have a more painterly style - and while I'm not opposed to, and in fact love much digital art, I have issues in this book.  Some of the art that looks more digital is a bit more convoluted and/or unclear.  

As for the one scene that's been storyboarded that they've shown as of yet, the artist isn't bad, and might very well be one of my favorites if he weren't storyboarding.  I understand the purpose and use of storyboarding and I also have spoken to people about storyboarding: it's fast, it's furious and you're required to get the scenes parsed in a very, very short amount of time.   I fully appreciate storyboarding and storyboard artists.   I salute them, but unfortunately, I don't think 'fast' is the best way to produce art.   It's very clear what the artist was portraying ad which scene and which characters, but the artwork felt rushed - because it was, because it had to be, because that's his job.   And so it simply wasn't my favorite part of this book, although I did appreciate seeing how the storyboards worked, and what they looked like.   Honestly, my favorite part of the storyboard aspect was hearing what got added because the storyboard artist included it, like Cap's broken shield which Joss Whedon liked so much he kept.

Overall, this is a fascinating book.  I'm working on taking in both the art and what little writing there is.   (I'm actually quite grateful for this. It's interesting to hear how they came up with a lot of the preliminary designs, and how the script changed things when they started designing before they got the full script, but with minimal text a lot of the art stands on its own)

I'll probably come back later and just gawk at the art I liked the most, but for now, I'm making steady progress as I put the two together.  I'm very much regretting not picking up Art of Guardians of the Galaxy now, though!