Artist Ryan Meinerding Talks Thor In-Depth; New Concept Images Revealed!

For “Thor,” I worked on designing the costumes. [I] worked on Thor [but] didn’t end up doing the final design, worked on Odin, did helmet designs, and Odin’s final design. [I did] rough passes on all the characters, and then did quite a few key frames, [trying] to help elucidate the more important sequences.

[Jack] Kirby’s Thor costume is fairly simple, so a lot of the stuff we were trying to pull in was more shape themes from Kirby’s Asgard and the crazier takes that he would have on Odin’s costume, trying to bring some of those angular pieces to Thor[‘s costume].
As far as more recent takes, the [THOR] covers that [Marko Djurdjevic] did I think were pretty inspirational, maybe more so in tone than actual resolve. I think how he ended up doing the arms--how he did the armor on the arms--definitely inspired the directions that we took some of that stuff. But yeah, I think the overall direction was trying to realize Kirby’s vision for Thor in a real world.

Credits for this image goes to Charlie Wen.

Well from a character design level you’re trying to create contrast between the characters, and that’s one of the things that a lot of the comic designs do very easily. [They] have great starting points for dynamically different characters. I mean, just look at Thor and Loki. Just their helmets create such a profound silhouette contrast. That sort of stuff was a very easy starting point. In terms of the more difficult challenges, I would say that with Odin’s helmet, trying to get the huge horns and the huge wings [on the same helmet] and have it not feel ridiculous was a little hard. They aren’t shapes that naturally go together. You’d usually think of having one or the other, so that was a challenge for me. Charlie [Wen] ended up designing the main characters Thor and Loki, [but] I had done some earlier takes on Loki and the horns coming off the head are not a simple challenge either. They have to be so dimensional and the curves have to be so perfect and so perfectly balanced with the rest of the design of the helmet.

"I don’t think so; some of Kirby’s early designs don’t have tall horns. I think we saw it as an opportunity to create something unique with him. I don’t know if it came through as a strict mandate to keep [them], but from an artistic point of view it was a challenge that we really wanted to try and accomplish, because it becomes such a powerful part of his costume. Thor has the six disks which will always identify him; six disks and the red cape. Loki’s specific design themes are a little less clear. I think there is obviously green and gold or yellow, but there’s not a huge amount of consistent design themes other than the horns, so trying to make that the statement of the costume were definitely things we were trying to accomplish.

"I’ve got to say it was a little bit hard at first. Most of my designs are typically rooted a little more in reality than, say, Charlie, who can do the more fantastical things very easily. I usually try and find some sort of basis for grounding, and I think some of the designs I ended up doing for “Thor,” at least at the beginning, did feel down a more traditional, almost Viking-like route. But pretty quickly you understand that it’s just not the tone of the show, and you try and switch over and find the fantastical part of the work as opposed to the grounded reality.

On a very simple design basis, most of our “Iron Man” stuff is dependent on function, and “Thor’s” stuff is supposed to be function we don’t necessarily understand. Function doesn’t necessarily come into it; it’s more of a unifying aesthetic than anything, a fantastical concept of what these gods would wear out to battle and around the house.

There’s definitely a sense of trying to make all of these characters come together for “Avengers,” [but] I think first and foremost all of these movies have to stand on their own. I think that the tones need to be similar enough to be in the Marvel Universe, but I think we were really conscious of designing the costume for “Avengers” to come together a little bit more, as opposed to back when you’re working on the Thor movie you’re just trying to make the best movie you can.

In the end we’re people executing the ideas or the design direction that we get from Marvel and the directors. So when you look at the direction that was coming in, I think the reason they chose not to do the more traditional Viking thing was probably because it would be harder to see a Viking standing next to Iron Man than it would a man in a more high tech looking chest plate. There are some really base level conceptual directions that we are given that are probably aimed towards those ends.