Book Review: Spider-Man: Brand New Day - The Art Of The Movie

Uninspiring

The movie was great but this book isn't. If you have the previous Marvel movies artbooks, you can already guess the visual style with this Spider-Man artbook, and it's exactly how you imagine.

The artworks in this book are mostly in the speedpaint-style and there are only a few sketches. As mentioned in previous reviews, design of these characters are pretty much fixed so don't expect anything surprising. Everything seems familiar with slight changes. Unfortunately this seems to be the trend with superhero movie artbooks nowadays.

There are several designs of the Spider-Man suit but to the untrained eye, they all look quite similar. You get to see the characters and locations as shown in the movies, but all are in speedpaint-style. They look ok. They won't make you go "Oh I wonder how they painted this" or "this composition or framing is amazing". Maybe it's because I was too distracted by the speedpaint.

The selling point of this book is for the commentary. There's a lot to read about how the designs came about, and what visual changes were made.

It's a good book for fans of the movie that's for sure. But if you're looking for an artbook where the art will inspire you, this book is not going to inspire you. So after I wrote this review, I saw that this book only has 3/5 star rating on Amazon. I'm not surprised.

Here are direct links to the book:
Amazon.com | Amazon.ca | Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.de | Amazon.fr | Amazon.it | Amazon.es | Amazon.com.au | Amazon.co.jp

This book was borrowed from Basheer Graphic Books for review purposes. You can order the book from them. Check with Basheer on Facebook.