Marvel Studios’ Ryan Meinerding Talks Character Conceptualization and Design Secrets

Ryan Meinerding has been a part of Marvel Studios since the very beginning, serving as a concept illustrator on Iron Man in 2008. Since then, the artist has risen to the ranks to vice president and creative director of visual development at the Burbank-based outfit. Though he focuses primarily on Marvel’s live-action output, Meinerding led the charge on visual development for What If…?, the first animated project Marvel Studios ever did.

We recently caught up with the artist to chat not only about his time on What If…?, but some of his other work at Marvel Studios and beyond. Keep scrolling to read through our entire chat.

ComicBook.com: So you guys are working on What If…? and you’re developing and designing these characters keeping in mind, obviously, it’s with Marvel’s first animated project. How much are you changing your workflow to design these? Are you designing these characters in the actual animation style or are you doing your normal painting quality concept pieces?

Ryan Meindering: No. I was involved very early with this project, trying to figure out the style of the show; which included developing the style. So yeah, I’m doing more actual drawing. I actually have some drawings on paper, with pencil, which is really fun for me to get back to, the notion of … So much of my work is digital, either Photoshop paintings or sculpting things on the computer, that this was a real joy for me; to be able to break out some paper and pencils and actually start drawing.

But most of the work, frankly, was done in 2D; figuring out the style through drawing. And then, because the characters are actually 3D in the pipeline, we did do a little bit of sculpting the faces and overall body proportions, to try and really make sure that when we pass things on to vendors that they were able to translate something that was as close to what we were looking for as possible. But each one of the vendors has been such a great partner in developing the look of the show. It’s been a really incredible experience.

But to answer your question, I mean, drawing and painting as a workflow is important. The thing that’s actually similar is the way we’re treating the show, right?

We’re still working directly with the directors, we’re still working directly with the producers; where I would do drawings and show them to Bryan Andrews. I’d do like four versions of a character and he would say what he didn’t like and what he did like. And then I’d do eight more and then we’d have more conversations.

But yeah, the notion of most of that work was done in 2D, it’s mostly drawings.

When you’re conceptualizing these characters, are you conceptualizing these characters strictly as animated projects? Or do you have that thought in the mind: we also need to take into consideration maybe these characters have to live-action at some point too?

I mean, I don’t know what any of the plans are for the future for any of the characters. I think we’re always just trying to work as hard as we can on the project at hand. Being Marvel Studios‘ first animated show, trying to create something at the same level of quality as all the other MCU content, we’re really just trying to make them the best animated characters that they can be.

And ideally that means that people love them and that they want to see more of them. But yeah, I think the challenge for this one was really just figuring out that style, figuring out how the characters are going to look within that style, and doing the best drawings that we can to create sort of a north star for everybody that’s going to work on the show.

The show is called What If…?, so were you and your teammates asking yourself, “What if we use some of these concepts that we had to throw away at one point?” Were some of these guys designed before What If…? was a show? Or are they all new after the show was announced, strictly for this show?

No. For every character, as they appear on screen, there are probably 200 or 300 versions of them laying around that weren’t used. So there is definitely a wealth of that on the servers of Marvel. But realistically, I mean, because so much of this is about how a character looks like in the MCU. And then there’s a very specific what if that’s giving you a direction, right?

So if you start with What If…?, T’Challa with Star-Lord, that’s a very specific direction that we don’t have any concepts for. I guess what I’m getting at is, the fun of the show is also the super inspiring part of the show, that you get to sit down and think about these things in a fresh context and then do a new drawing.

So I think, as starting points, we will often show … if we’re going to do things for Doctor Strange, a lot of it is, “Hey, look at these 300 concepts that we didn’t use. Is there anything compelling?” And maybe one thing, like a collar or something, will come out of that. But the concept of an evil Doctor Strange is something that we never explored. It becomes almost like a brand new character, right?

It’s not just like, “Oh, we have this old thing we can repurpose,” it’s, “This is hugely inspiring and exciting. What can we pull out of the stuff from the MCU, but twist it in a cool and interesting way?”

So, I don’t know. It would have been awesome if we could have reused some things. But I think, for the most part, everything feels pretty much from scratch.

Right. Right. Right. How early are you and your team brought into the process? Are you talking with Ashley [Bradley] about ideas? Is she saying, “Well, I might write about this character, so can start working on some designs and stuff like that?” Or do you wait until the scripts are finalized?

I guess what I’m trying to ask is there have been rumors about Nova in the original Guardians of the Galaxy. You work on all these projects. How many characters do you actually design that don’t even make it into the project? Or do you specifically only work on characters that will be in the final project?

Honestly, we’re really early. On this project, I was very early. I think, because of it being the first animated thing that Marvel Studios was going to do, I think there was a notion of getting to work on the visuals as soon as possible so that people could really see whether it was going in a direction that they could get excited about.

To answer your point generally, we don’t really get asked that often to work on stuff that’s not going to end up in a project. It happens occasionally. If you look at how many characters we’ve done that are actually in the movies or in the shows or, or wherever, versus how many times somebody has asked us to work on something that didn’t end up going somewhere … even if it’s early, we only really work on stuff that’s really got a clear trajectory towards a project.

Just out of personal curiosity, you’re working on the concepts for this tentacle beast we’ve seen two times so far. You probably can’t share the exact file name, but are you naming these concept drawings Shuma-Gorath.JPEG? Will we find out what this tentacle beast is?

I probably can’t speak to anything that has to do past the episodes that you’ve seen. I think Bryan Andrews, as a director, has been very influential in this series in a lot of ways. His cinematic storytelling style. The action is all him, as being an amazing storyboard artist and director.

But so much of his aesthetics come through too. And he always loved the idea of Cthulhu beasts. So the idea of the huge tentacle monster is coming from him. I don’t know if there are plans for it to represent something else. But so much of that really came out of his love for that type of … I can’t even say what … is it horror? Is it sci-fi?

That type of creature, I guess, is the best thing I can end with.

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The first four episodes of Marvel’s What If…? are now streaming on Disney+.

What What If… storylines do you hope to see in the series? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section or by hitting our writer @AdamBarnhardt up on Twitter to chat all things MCU!

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Cover photo by Laurent Viteur/Getty Images