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Drawn to the Marvel Universe The new animated series What If…? offers alternative storylines featuring Peggy Carter, Tony Stark, The Hulk, Nick Fury and many of the other fan favorites.
T
he summer of 2021 is shaping up to be a great time to be a Marvel enthusiast. In addition to enjoying the much-anticipated live-action feature Black Widow and the Loki series, fans can also dive into the beautiful, animated world of What If…?, the muchwritten-about new series based on the comic series and created by A.C. Bradley. The show is directed by Bryan Andrews and exec produced by Kevin Feige, Louis D’Esposito, Victoria Alonso and Brad Winderbaum. Marvel veteran Ryan Meinerding is in charge of visual development. Bradley, who was a writer on DreamWorks’ Trollhunters and story editor on 3Below, began work on What If…? in the fall of 2019. She says she was pretty excited to join the team and to come up with concepts for the project. “I love the opportunity to play in this toybox,” she tells us. “These were iconic characters if you grew up reading comic books — and if you are just living and breathing right now in this century!” The show creator loves the fact that the top brass at Marvel allowed her and story editor Matthew Chauncey to go in any direction that
they thought was fun and interesting. “The one rule we had was that we couldn’t do anything that is happening in the movies or the TV shows,” says Bradley. “I mean, we did what a lot of fans do after they see the movies: You go out and have burgers with your friends and try to guess what might be coming up next or what you thought would happen when you play with these characters.”
Polished to Perfection Bradley says she enjoyed the luxury of being able to really polish the 10 episodes of the first season of What If…? compared to her work on Tales of Arcadia, during which she had to write about 78 episodes in three years. She
notes, “Our biggest challenge, however, was setting up the animation pipeline. My preference for the show’s animation was originally 2D, but producing 2D animation is actually more difficult because there are not too many animation houses that are available to do the work. However, the design is very complex and lends itself better to a hybrid style of animation. I think we were able to pull it off beautifully. Each episode is allowed to have its own visual style, but the whole show definitely has a very cinematic feel.” Andrews, who has worked as a storyboard artist on a wide variety of acclaimed animated shows such as Samurai Jack, Star Wars: Clone Wars and Primal and most of the Marvel
‘One of the things that drew me to this project was that I wasn’t pigeonholed to write for only the female characters ... I got to write Dr. Strange in one of our episodes, and I’m not a six-foot-tall, vaguely British man.” — Series creator A.C. Bradley
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august 21
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