Comic-Con News:  Some of the most interesting creations to come out of a festival dedicated to the graphic arts like the San Diego Comic-Con are the posters created specifically to appeal to an audience that is very visually aware and oriented.   Movie and TV marketers are getting better and better at finding the right talent to create powerful images that appeal to the Comic-Con crowd, and this year’s crop of Comic-Con posters is off to a great start with Ryan Meinerding’s concept art-like image of Captain America battling the Winter Soldier (actually Cap’s re-programmed former sidekick Bucky) in an image that captures the conflict at the heart of the upcoming Captain America: The Winter Soldier movie, which debuts on April 4, 2014.  This design provides quite a contrast with the stark Captain America teaser poster the Marvel Studios unveiled earlier this month (see "First 'Captain America: The Winter Soldier' Poster").
 
Marvel Studios, which is as expected quite adept at appealing to comic book fans, also commissioned artist Charlie Wen to create a poster for Thor: The Dark World, and unlike Meinerding’s image, which has appeared in Entertainment Weekly, this stirring image of Thor’s ascension is making its debut at Comic Con.  Wen’s design has plenty of old school charm, thanks in large part to those faces that loom out of the background that should resonate with comic book fans.
 
 
 

The folks at Legendary Pictures (The Dark Knight Rises, Man of Steel) also know how to appeal to a geek audience.  Legendary’s big-budget Godzilla film is one of the company’s biggest gambles, which to succeed will have to appeal to the core Comic-Con audience.  The new poster for director Gareth Edwards’ Godzilla is a very strong design with rubble twisted into the form of the giant monster that works as a clever visual reference to Mecha-Godzilla.  The stark logo superimposed over painterly Japanese characters and the striking dark red and shades of gray/black color scheme make this the most graphically sophisticated design unveiled for Comic-Con so far.
 
 
But it’s not necessarily the most evocative.  There are numerous ways to reach out to the core Comic-Con crowd and one of them is to commission a work from an artist with a distinct style and following among comic book fans.  That is the tack that the AMC cable network chose by commissioning Alex Ross to create a poster for The Walking Dead TV series.  Ross, who is clearly among the most popular comic book cover artists of the past decade, doesn’t disappoint in this precisely painted image of the shambling undead.