Meet the comic illustrator whose Iron Man drawings helped kickstart the Marvel Cinematic Universe from a flat in Leeds

Granov is the man behind the seminal graphic novel Iron Man: Extremis which inspired the 2008 Iron Man movie, starring Robert Downey Jr, and helped to kickstart the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

He has since worked as a conceptual illustrator on the two Iron Man sequels as well as many other films including The Avengers, Avengers: Infinity War, Endgame, The Amazing Spider-Man 2 and Black Panther 1 and 2, designing characters and creating keyframe illustrations. His career has brought him well-deserved international recognition and last November he was awarded an honorary Masters degree by Leeds Arts University.

“I was very honoured to receive the award,” he says when we meet at his home near Ilkley. “I had to give a speech to the students and one of the points I really wanted to make was that if you put in the hard work and follow your passion, you can achieve your dreams. I have gone quite far with it and they can go even further than me. I also wanted them to know their worth – without artists, the world would be a much poorer place.”

Granov, who was born in 1977 in Sarajevo in Bosnia, then still part of the former Yugoslavia, started drawing from an early age, inspired by the picture books and comics that he read and the movies he was watching.

“I was always interested in visual stuff,” he says. “And being able to draw and create something completely new seemed wonderful to me, so even as a little kid I saw it as a fun thing to do. A lot of my friends also drew but they gave up and I just kept at it. It wasn’t until I was 13 or 14 that I started to see that actually I was better at drawing than most of the kids around me.”

It was at this point that he began to think about the possibility of a creative career. He applied to a specialist high school to study art and was accepted on to a four-year graphic design programme after which his intention was to go on to university, but all his plans were disrupted by the outbreak of the Bosnian War.

“It started in 1992 when I was 15 and then, on and off, we would have some semblance of education from time to time,” says Granov. “The first year it was chaos and in between, when there was a ceasefire, they would reopen the schools.” Eventually, after two-and-a-half years of war, in 1994 he and his mother and younger sister made the decision to leave.

It was partly through his artwork that they managed to finance the first stage of their journey. “Through a teacher at the art school, I got an unpaid job to do some artwork for a bar that French UN soldiers used to frequent and they asked me to do drawings for them in exchange for food – they asked me what I wanted and I said Coca Cola and chocolate which I knew I could sell. It wasn’t a huge amount of money but it was enough for us to be able to pay our way and get to Zagreb in Croatia.”

While they were in Croatia, the family made a successful application to the US refugee resettlement scheme and they arrived in Portland, Oregon, just before Christmas in 1995. Granov was placed in a high school where he did well, despite not having much English – “most of my English was learnt from song lyrics and Arnold Schwarzenegger movies” – and later he enrolled at the local art college.

The following year he got a place at the Art Institute of Seattle where he excelled; his portfolio was so strong that at his graduation ceremony he was offered a job as a concept artist at Nintendo where he worked for two years, before joining his mother and sister who were now living in Chicago.

It was while he was there working for a Canadian comic book company that, out of the blue, he received an email from CB Cebulski, an editor at Marvel Comics. “He said he really liked my work and that if ever I was interested, the door was always open for me at Marvel.”

It was an offer he couldn’t refuse. His first two commissions for Marvel were comic book covers for Iron Man and She Hawk. “My Iron Man cover bumped the sales of the book quite significantly and I was then asked to illustrate the whole relaunch of Iron Man – I did a series of six books. It turns out that Jon Favreau really loved those books and he was using them as a style guide.”

When Favreau was announced as director of the film, it wasn’t long before Granov was approached to design the poster and he was then hired as a concept artist on the movie. “At the time my wife and I were living in this tiny flat in Leeds and I was getting these phone calls from Jon Favreau at 2am to talk about Iron Man – it was all a bit surreal,” he says, laughing.

“Those drawings and paintings I did set the tone for the look of the film and technically set the overall mood for the Marvel Universe. I think I brought something new to Hollywood. For a long time, there was a certain ‘look’ that everyone was going for and my work was completely different – and that’s probably why it spoke to him.”

Granov did go out to LA briefly to work with the 3D artists on interpreting his ideas. He says it was “a fascinating experience” to see how Hollywood works from the inside, but he didn’t necessarily expect to work on another film.

“As it happened, the movie was a huge success and not long after they started on Iron Man 2 and I jumped onto that, but I don’t shy away from doing different things. Comic book covers are probably what I enjoy doing more than anything because you have the most artistic freedom on them.”

It was also art that brought Granov and his wife Tamsin Isles together. He was living and working in Chicago and she was the Ilkley-based moderator of an internet art forum where he posted some of his work. They got chatting online, later visited each other and eventually got married in Las Vegas in 2003. They settled in Leeds for a few years before moving to Ilkley.

Most recently Granov has been working on Black Panther 2, which kept him busy from August 2020 through to last summer. More Marvel projects are forthcoming, he has also been doing some album covers and posters for his favourite band, American cult rockers Tool, and designing an action figure for a company in Hong Kong.

“I always have a few things on the go,” he says. “It seems to be the theme of my life that I have been in the right place at the right time. I think I always had this belief that as long as my art is good enough, the rest will come – and for me it really did work out that way.”

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