A review by trike
The Art of Captain America: The Winter Soldier by Marie Javins

4.0

This is another excellent addition to the "Art of" series in Marvel's Cinematic Universe. There is a lot of terrific stuff here covering everything from characters to props and locations. My big criticism is that there is too much emphasis on storyboards. The many wonderful drawings of The Falcon have little version numbers on them, and the highest number I saw was 28, but there are actually only about a dozen drawings. Instead, that space is taken up by page after page of storyboards. I would much rather see actual preproduction art as well as some finished digital models rather than storyboards.

While we do get to see quite a bit of the secondary characters like Batroc, oddly one of the most interesting characters for the movie is absent: Arnim Zola. There's quite a bit of art of that sequence, but nothing pertaining to him. In the comics, Zola is one of those silly creations, existing as a guy who has transplanted his brain into a robot body, while a television on the robot's chest shows his face. The way they did it in the movie was much more interesting, yet Zola was entirely missing from the book. It's as if they had the idea and went straight to drawing it.

Other than the lapse of Zola and the over-abundance of storyboards, this is an excellent art book.