More from POW! at Royal Armouries

As promised on Tuesday when I wrote about my day at the Royal Armouries in Leeds I’m writing now about my second trip to the Comic & Film event.

Iron Man was there again as you can see, more about that later on in the article. There were quite a number of other characters around and about including Batman, Judge Dredd, Punisher and Deadpool.

The Batmobile was there. This was a replica of the 1960s version from the Adam West TV show.

Sadly it kept raining so it was obscured by a gazebo and VIP red cord. But it looks cool nevertheless. 

There was another round of fights between Deadpool and Batman. There was a lot more support for Batman as might be expected. Not many people knew who Deadpool was, I think some warmed to him.

Here pictured with Thor (Ashton) and Captain America (Jayden). My friend Kelly was a little surprised how well this encounter turned out.

Kelly and the boys were only there for a short visit on Thursday. They had been on Tuesday (out of costume) with a bunch of friends.

I attended two talks on this visit, one I had to miss on Tuesday and the other was only on Thursday.

The first was a talk on the way real designs of weapons and armour influence what we see in films. This talk was presented by a member of the Royal Armouries team, Carl. Carl can often be seen dressed in character and in demonstrations of weapon use – for example he was one of the cowboys at a shoot out in my article A Wild west Hero back in February.

Carl explained some of the changes in materials used, for example instead of heavy chain mail actors used to wear knitted versions. Now a much more realistic alternative is used made from plastic. As I explained in Tuesdays article there are always little extra nuggets of information in these talks – such as the fact that one of the Royal Armouries Curators has self styled himself Curator of Middle Earth following his consultation with Weta for the Lord of the Rings films.

The other talk was regarding comic designs transfering to the big screen. This was presented by Peter Doherty, a popular comic artist who has drawn Judge Dredd and currently doing Colours and Letters in Mark Millar’s MPH. His guest for this one off talk was Adi Granov.

Adi Granov was the artist who was charged by Marvel with the task of modernising the look of Iron Man. His design was then adapted, by himself and a small art team, for the Iron Man films.

That picture at the introduction of this article is of Adi posing with a replica suit built by Mark Pearson for the Armouries. Adi is on the left as you look at the picture and Mark on the right.

The talk lasted a little over an hour I think and was packed full of engrosing detail. We were treated to anecdotes about his career with Marvel starting initially with illustrating covers, then six issues of Iron Man through to and his time working on the Iron Man and Avengers movies. We also saw a large number of design sketches and final paintings by Adi.

Now Adi is responsible for designs for the many franchise deals Marvel make around the world. He is currently working on designs for

With Marvel now owning the Star Wars franchise Adi has painted a cover for the forthcoming Darth Vader comic.