I drew a number of Early Reader Books for the Disney Book Group.
They included origin stories for the iconic Marvel characters
The Hulk, Captain America and Wolverine. Thor was my favorite.
The Disney books are in a different format than regular comics.
My pencil art was digitally colored and used as illustrations to
accompany the line or two of prose per page. Rather than the
standard comic book format of panels and dialogue, each page
would have a couple of "vignettes" - individual drawings.
These were drawn oversize so they could be cropped to suit
different printing formats for publishing around the world.
The books were drawn first in layout sketches and then final
pencils. The layout sketches are loose and evocative. This set
has Thor in his classic uniform and that's why I wanted to show
them here. I think he looks so much better this way. But Marvel
had us change it to the movie based monstrosity using the
helmet with the silly metal wings. They also made me change
Odin's cool helmet to one that looks too much like Loki's.
That's how you see them in the second set showing finished
finished pencils.
I've always disliked the changes and never understood why.
The parents buying these books for their kids grew up with and
the love the comics version. Movies come and go. The books are
in print for a long time. It doesn't make marketing sense to me.