Reviewed by
Michael Kobre
At a moment when the cultural and
box office behemoth that is the superhero movie seems, at last, to be faltering
(as evidenced, for example, by the disappointing returns for Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania and
the historic box office failure of The
Flash); when even the director of the upcoming 33rd film in the
Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Marvels,
concedes that “superhero fatigue is absolutely real” (qtd. in Sharf), Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is a
notable exception. With rapturous reviews, as good or better than those for its
2018 Academy-Award-winning predecessor Spider-Man: Into the
Spider-Verse (which Zahed also did a book for), Across the Spider-Verse was a critical success that was almost universally acclaimed.
Even the august New Yorker devoted
not one, but two articles to comment
on Across the Spider-Verse’s “comic
book aesthetic” and “post-racial vision.” At the box office, Across the Spider-Verse overtook the
first film’s total returns in two weeks and went on to earn over $600 million
in ticket sales around the world in a single month. Moreover, the film, even
more so than its predecessor, was seen as triumph of representation. NPR
reported that “In North America, exit tracking found that the audience was
about one-third Latino another third Black and Asian, diversity percentages far
higher than for most superhero films” (Restrepo). As Jay Caspian Kang wrote in The New Yorker, “If there were an award
for ‘the most universally enjoyable and palatable vision of race in a
blockbuster film,’ ‘Across the Spider-Verse’ would win going away.”
So the book Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse: The Art of the Movie offers
fans of the movie—and, to be honest, count me as one too—an opportunity to
immerse themselves in the film’s lavish, comics-inflected aesthetic and its
many densely imagined worlds. Like the film, the book is a visual feast, filled
with character and set designs and other production art. Details we glimpse in
passing on the screen as the plot and action hurtle forward are displayed here
on page after page, giving the film’s multiple worlds and legion of Spider-Men
and Women even more texture and variety. A two-page image by Jesus Alonso
Iglesias, for instance, features designs of ordinary bystanders in crowd scenes
(at least that’s what I think we’re looking at), who are each beautifully
differentiated and diverse, with clothes, body types, postures, and expressions
that suggest distinct lives and personalities. A section on Pravitr Prabhakar’s
Mumbattan on Earth 50101 opens with a double-page image by Felicia Chen of a
densely cramped cityscape of skyscrapers decorated with stone carvings of
Indian temples, towering over layer upon layer of roads that crisscross between
them in a crazy mosaic of underpasses and overpasses. Turn the page too and we
see image after image of the taxis, trams, maps, and signs that fill this city.
Indeed, throughout the book, as we wander through all its worlds, we see
detailed images of stores, bedrooms, offices, even stairwells, filled with
props and objects that evoke depth and character.
And, of course, we also see lots and
lots of Spider-Men and Women. A section
on “Other Spider Characters” features four pages of artist Kris Anka’s
designs for some of the other Spider-beings moving through the background in
the Spider Society’s headquarters in the film’s third act, including a robot, a
zombie, the Spider-analyst we see briefly onscreen before the film’s main
characters crash through the wall of his office, and various other men and
women in multi-colored costumes with radically different body types, including
the kind of ordinary body types we see everyday in our world too. As Anka
explains in the book’s text, “While I was able to add forty-plus pre-existing
characters into the movie, there’s always a need for more, so I ended up
creating almost an additional one hundred completely original Spiders. These
are supposed to be Spiders from all over the multiverse, which allowed me to
experiment wildly with both the costume designs and the render style” (120).
But the book not only details the
people, places, and things that fill the film’s many worlds; it also
illuminates the different visual choices and techniques used to depict these
worlds—choices which ground the film’s comic book aesthetic. “We were inspired
by the look of those early comics which were made with the more limited
printing processes of their times,” art director Dean Gordon says in describing
the visual style of Miles Morales’ world, Earth 1610. “They used two or three colors, and frequently
misregistered color, floating inside and outside the lines that define figures
and environments” (138). Miles’ world, like much of the rest of the film, also
feels like a comic book in its use of half-tones and Ben-Day dots, a signature
of color printing in old comics, to create texture, along with what look like
hand-drawn lines over the tops of CG figures. Other visual influences that the
book details include 1970s Indian Indrajal Comics on Earth 50101’s Mumbattan
and the work of futurist Syd Mead, whose film designs include the Dystopian cityscapes
of Blade Runner, on the look of Nueva
York on Earth-928 where Miguel O’Hara, Spider-Man 2099, has built the
headquarters of the Spider Society. Among the most interesting choices for me
was the influence of comics artist Robbi Rodriguez’s covers for a 2015 Spider-Gwen series on Gwen Stacy’s
world, Earth-65. Rodriguez’s silhouetted figures are combined in the film with
abstracted backgrounds that are rendered in a way that looks like watercolor to
evoke Spider-Gwen’s state of mind. “The look of Gwen’s world combines the
graphic styling of her comics with watercolor,” visual effects supervisor Mike
Lasker explains, “and the relationship between the two is driven by Gwen’s
emotions and focus. Far distances are painted with washy brushes to push back and
simplify detail. Inversely, the foreground uses linework and sharper brushes to
bring the details forward” (132).
The text of the book is written by
Ramin Zahed, but its cover only features the corporate logos of Marvel and Sony
Pictures Animation below the book’s title, which is fitting for a book that
feels more like a corporate product—one of many that will be rolled out to
accompany a successful franchise, of course—than the product of an individual
author’s vision. Consequently, for all of the valuable information that the
book offers, the prose itself is bland and serviceable and given to
self-congratulatory paeans to the filmmakers’ and the studio’s vision. We’re
told many times in the opening pages, for instance, about how much bigger and
more ambitious the new film must be. The filmmakers’ “common goal,” Zahed
writes, “was to make Miles Morales’s second cinematic adventure even more
mind-blowingly cool and engrossing than the original” (8). And there are many
attestations, in particular, to the genius and leadership of writer-producers
Phil Lord and Christopher Miller. In the words of Joaquim Dos Santos, one of
the film’s three directors (along with Justin K. Thompson and Kemp Powers), “One
of the greatest assets of being in a Lord and Miller production is that
everybody has a voice in the room. If an idea is working or playing, it doesn’t
matter where it comes from” (18). But this self-congratulatory tone also
glosses over a more complicated reality of the movie’s production that was
revealed in multiple news stories after the film’s release, about the crushing
work conditions for the movie’s animators, which caused more than 100 of them
to quit the film during production. In contrast to the book’s description of
Lord and Miller’s collaborative spirit, many of these animators complained that
they were “forced to constantly revise their work due to Lord's nonstop
tinkering. Insiders said Lord wanted final approval on every shot in the film,
overshadowing the project's directors” (Price). In the book though, whatever
difficulties the animators faced are simply waved away. As art director Dean
Gordon says, “Our mission is to create the art and then hand it over to the
technical departments” (27).
There are a few frustrating
omissions in the book’s text too. While the artists for every image are
carefully identified, we’re never given any sustained discussion of how the art
department was organized and functioned. How were the characters and worlds
parceled out among the different artists? The images in the book suggest
answers to some of these questions—as, for example, when we see the work of Ami
Thompson, which consistently focuses on facial expressions and body language in
sequences of small close-up drawings for many of the major characters—but the
breakdown of responsibilities among all the artists is never clearly explained.
It would help too if the book included at least some captions to accompany the
images and comment on what we’re seeing. What, for instance, was the purpose of
that two-page image by Iglesias of ordinary people that I mentioned earlier?
Where they, in fact, designed to be bystanders in crowd scenes? When did they
appear in the film, or was this just preparatory work in the early stages of
imagining the film’s worlds? Other pages show what look like painted
storyboards of key scenes, such as the confrontation between Gwen and her
father early in the film. But how exactly were these images used? When were
they created in the production sequence? Some discussion of what we’re seeing
would make the book even more informative.
Because, at bottom, the book does offer a deeper look at what seems
now like a classic of animation and a late masterpiece in the overwrought genre
of superhero movies. Yes, Spider-Man:
Across the Spider-Verse: The Art of the Movie, with its clunky but
functional title, is a corporate product created as part of an entertainment
franchise, but it’s an informative book (though not as much as it could be)
and, best of all, it’s beautiful to look at. The work of these artists across
these pages is consistently vibrant and kinetic, colorful and expressive, and
vividly detailed and imagined. However difficult the movie’s production may
have been, Across the Spider-Verse is
the best realization so far of that comic book aesthetic on the screen. This
book helps us understand why.
Burt, Stephanie. “The
Comic-Book Aesthetic Comes of Age in “Across the Spider-Verse”” The New Yorker, June 14, 2023, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-comic-book-aesthetic-comes-of-age-in-across-the-spider-verse
Kang, Jay Caspian.
“The Post-Racial Vision of ‘Across the Spider-Verse.’” The New Yorker, June 16, 2023, https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/the-post-racial-vision-of-across-the-spider-verse.
Price, Joe. “Over
100 Artists Quit ‘Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse’ Due to Working
Conditions: ‘They Couldn’t Take It Anymore.’” Complex, June 26, 2023, https://www.complex.com/pop-culture/a/backwoodsaltar/artists-quit-spider-verse-working-conditions
Restrepo, Manuela
Lopez. “The new Spider-Man film shows that Representation is a winning strategy.”
NPR, June 6, 2023, https://www.npr.org/2023/06/06/1180502629/spider-man-spider-verse-miles-morales-reviews-box-office-representation.
Sharf, Zack. “’The Marvels’ Director Says Superhero Fatigue ‘Absolutely Exists,’ New MCU Film is “Really Whacky and Silly’ Compared to Others.” Variety, August 11, 2023, https://variety.com/2023/film/news/the-marvels-director-superhero-fatigue-exists-wacky-silly-1235694441/
Zahed, Ramin. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse -The Art of the Movie. Titan Books, 2018
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