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Bringing the planet-eating threat of Galactus to the Marvel Cinematic Universe meant that Marvel Studios head of visual development Ryan Meinerding didn’t only go back to the source material, as he revealed during an appearance at San Diego Comic-Con 2025. He also looked to the 1970s design and visual effects work behind Star Wars, as well.

“When we're looking at the comics, we were looking back at the Kirby designs,” Meinerding said about the primary inspiration for much of First Steps during the Saturday afternoon Marvel: Comics to Screen panel at SDCC 2025 — which was a different angle of approaching translating Marvel characters to the screen than was often the case.

“A lot of times, in the suits we do from Iron Man onward, we're trying to add sophistication to it,” the designer continued. “We're trying to add things that make it feel more sleeker, or, you know, more designed in a way that feels modern. And I was looking at the big, bold, blocky shapes from Kirby and just saying, like, how can we keep that?”

The answer was, according to Meinerding, to play with scale — and let the Kirby and the sophistication mix in unexpected ways that call back to an entirely different blockbuster franchise altogether. “If you see [Galactus] at a distance, he just looks like a straight Kirby design, but the closer that you get to him, you just see that there's endless amounts of detail, so he ends up feeling more like the Death Star or Star Destroyer, and that there's actually tiny little lights in there that actually communicate some of the Power Cosmic as well. And then, it's just sort of this unknown scale, so when you see him, he looks massively gigantic, even when you can't see him next to something.”

The Fantastic Four: First Steps is in theaters now… and best appreciated on a very large screen, considering.

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