Ezra Claytan Daniels has racked up many deserved accolades this past year for “Upgrade Soul” (Lion Forge) his scifi/horror graphic novel about an old couple looking to extend their lives into new bodies, with results that seem terribly awry and yet provoke deep questions about human limitations, connectedness, identities, and transcendence. Besides being compulsively readable, it’s also hauntingly profound and artfully presented.
“Upgrade Soul” began as an innovative comics project originally launched as an app, and this week, the app returns to app stores with the unforgettable first chapter available for free. A video preview of the app is available here.
Along with the re-release of the “Upgrade Soul” app, an original soundtrack by musical artist Alexis Gideon that accompanies the graphic novel (and believe me, I’ve tried reading and listening together– it’s a perfect accompaniment to augment and heighten the experience) comes out in a regular black vinyl and limited studio edition from FPE Records.
We had a chance to speak with Daniels about his award-winning book and the multimedia experience the Upgrade Soul App and Soundtrack provide us.
“Upgrade Soul” was one of my favorite books last year. So thrilled to talk to you about “Upgrade Soul” upon its re-release alongside the accompanying soundtrack and revived app. Congratulations on the book’s success!
Ezra Claytan Daniels: Thank you so much! It’s certainly been the wildest year of my career.
The first chapter of “Upgrade Soul” has one of the most tenderly funny openings I’ve read in comics, chock full of personality. But then it veers quickly into its darkly Twilight Zone-esque scenario with huge existential concerns, while still keeping that mature characterization. That opening made me think, “this book has the confidence and wisdom of a veteran creator’s carefully-crafted and well-honed opus.” Turns out, it was! You allude to this in the book’s prologue, but can you tell us about the road to the publication of “Upgrade Soul” last year?
ECD: Upgrade Soul has taken an extremely winding road into existence. It began about 15 years ago as a normal graphic novel pitch that I just couldn’t get any takers for. When a friend of mine, Erik Loyer, started working on a music-focused comics reader and asked me if I wanted to do something for it, I said, “absolutely!” I was initially on board out of desperation for an outlet for this thing–I hadn’t given much thought to digital comics before that. But once we started working on it, and Erik and I started getting into the weeds with the narrative theory and comics philosophy, I became incredibly interested in the immersive potential. I even wrote up a Digital Comics manifesto around the ideas we developed. When I started drawing the comic, it for the app, which meant a certain type of screen-friendly panel compositions, and layering the art in a particular way.
We launched the app with 2 completed chapters 2012 and it made a pretty big splash in that industry. It racked up 40,000 downloads in a few weeks of launch, and since it was one of the only apps of its kind at the time, it instantly became part of the global conversation around the future of comics and digital storytelling. Erik and I have been invited to Europe countless times to lecture about digital comics, and I collaborated with a Dutch producer called Submarine on developing a digital comics database (www.screendiver.com) centered around my digital comics manifesto. But even with all that, the app wasn’t making much money, so we put it on hiatus about halfway through updating the chapters. I kept working on the comic, and finished it a few years later. I submitted my unproofed PDF to the Dwayne McDuffie Award and actually won it! Shortly thereafter, I got an agent and we found a publisher to collect the story in a print edition, which came out last September. But I’ve always considered the app the definitive “Upgrade Soul” experience.
Like I said, the book’s an amazing experience. But what did presenting this story on an App allow that might not have been possible in tradition media? And what new constraints did you find? Was there a way the App lent itself to the concerns and mood of “Upgrade Soul” in particular?
Continued belowECD: There’re a few novel features in the app, like dynamic parallax depth effects that make every panel feel like a 3D picture box. There are also behind the scenes features. But the star of the show is the way “Upgrade Soul” centers music as a major component of the narrative. Erik’s comics engine marries Alexis Gideon’s score to your reading pace, so every panel you swipe in triggers a subtle change in the music that amplifies that emotional beat. This is a language that’s been honed in film for over a hundred years, and when it works, it creates undeniably heightened moments of drama, and sometimes unbearably amplified stretches of tension. Think about Bernard Herman’s shower scene strings in Psycho, or the nerve-shredding drone that accompanied Heath Ledger’s Joker scenes in The Dark Knight.
Yeah, the immersive sonic experience is really forceful, especially given how effective the story is all on its own! “Upgrade Soul” is full of twists and turns that keep it gripping, so I don’t want to give too much away and ruin the reveals. But the premise is that a pair of loving, enterprising, intelligent, and aging folks decide that they’ll opt in to a radical experiment to transport their souls into livelier, younger, improved bodies, with alarming results and haunting consequences. What inspired you to tell this story?
ECD: The original nugget of this story came to me when I moved away from my home town to go to art school. I’m from Sioux City, Iowa, and in high school, I was kind of defined by being the standout art kid. When I moved to Portland, Oregon for school, I was suddenly surrounded by kids who were better than me at everything I defined myself by, and I had sort of an existential crisis. That fear of being made obsolete by someone who’s better than you at being YOU is what eventually grew into “Upgrade Soul.”
That’s interesting. I’m curious about how that existential crisis leads to the main characters we meet in the story. When you and I met at CXC Columbus (great to meet you!), you were kind enough to draw a little doodle of one of the protagonists, Henry, in my copy of “Upgrade Soul.” Henry and Molly are wonderfully monstrous and so sympathetic at the same time. What went into your design of those characters visually?
ECD: (It was great meeting you!) There’s also a really complicated answer to this question– haha! My original intent with the designs of the clones was for them to look both grotesque and appealing at the same time. I wanted to play with the physiological appeal of infants, which made sense for the story. So the basic inspiration for the clones is a 10th-week fetus. I came up with a design I was happy with, but by the time I’d drawn about half the book, I started to really hate the way their faces looked. They were just too expressive, basically. I wanted the reader to feel more unsettled by the fact that their emotions can’t really be read clearly—almost like they’re above emotions. So I redesigned the faces, and then had to go back and redraw the clones in every panel they appeared in. Little perfectionist decisions like that are definitely a big part of why it took so long to finish this book.
“Unsettled” is a good word for the impact of the sci-fi and horror world you create. It feels like we’re in a renaissance of social relevance for genre work, with examples like Get Out and Us, or the afrofuturist visions of Janelle Monae or Coogler’s Black Panther (or Coates’ “Black Panther” for that matter). Do you see “Upgrade Soul” in conversation with these movements in arts, maybe particularly Black popular arts?
ECD: I absolutely hope my stuff is someday considered in conversation with those works. Like I said, I worked on “Upgrade Soul” for YEARS, but it kind of wasn’t until the success of Get Out that gatekeepers really started giving stuff like this a chance.
Your art is so captivating and really suited to the story. Who are some of the artistic influences or affinities that you’d claim? I’m reminded of Rob Guillory, the Hanuka brothers (Asaf and Tomer), and maybe Jack Kamen or one of those EC masters. Am I way off base here?
Continued belowECD: The Hanuka brothers for sure, especially with their use of color. Junji Ito, Charles Burns, and Vittorio Giardano, are also huge influences. David Cronenberg, Samuel Delaney, Olaf Stapledon, Octavia Butler, Ursula K LeGuin. There are actually Easter eggs in the book that reference almost all these creators.
Haha, that’s going to send me back for another re-reading to look for those influences!
Listening to the Alexis Gideon soundtrack while re-reading “Upgrade Soul,” I felt my impressions from my first reading confirmed and enhanced by the music’s multi-toned timbres and the sometimes harmonics/sometimes dissonance of the synthetic and natural. How did you two as creators communicate and work out what the soundtrack was going for?
ECD: Alexis is an old friend of mine from the Chicago DIY art scene. We share a very particular taste for cult films and weird horror, and I just loved his music. He’s one of those artists that makes you feel sad about the state of our culture because in a just world, he’d be a household name. I didn’t have a hand in the music other than giving Alexis a list of emotional tones we needed to hit, and sharing music back and forth that we liked that was in line with the tone we were going for. Goblin, John Carpenter, Enid Morrison’s, The Geinoh Yamashirogumi, Wendy Carlos, Steve Reich. Erik Loyer actually composes a few of the songs that appear in the app, but not on the record.
Hank, one (or two?) of our main protagonists, is a creator AND an inheritor of “Slane,” a blaxploitation era character/IP who seems like an exemplar of Black cultural creations being funneled into certain channels by white dominated industries. It seems like a commercial necessity, and maybe it has parallels in music and other pop culture?
ECD: It was once considered a commercial necessity that everybody really bought into. I can’t tell you how many editors told me no one would want to read a comic about an elderly mixed-race couple. But that conventional wisdom has always been bullshit in my opinion. I’m always bring up the Fast and Furious movies in this conversation. This is one of the most successful and long-running film franchises in film history, and it features a wildly diverse cast that isn’t centered around a white lead. But the lesson film execs chose to take from the outstanding success of this franchise wasn’t that audiences like to see diverse casts, it was that audiences like to see crazy car chases.
In comics, look at Los Bros Hernandez. They’re the most legendary and persistently relevant creators in all of comics. Why hasn’t their success blown open the doors for other Latinx comics creators? Forever, people just took for granted that the only audience that mattered was white men aged 14-35 or whatever, and that they would only engage with stuff in which they were reflected. It was never accurate, and I think, thank god, that’s finally changing. People just want good, interesting, fresh stories. With Get Out, I really credit Jordan Peele with creating something that you can’t separate from its political message. When gatekeepers look at the success of Get Out, what lesson can they take other than that people are hungry for meaningful genre stories?
Right on! With the success of “Upgrade Soul” and this year’s “BTTM FDRS” with Ben Passmore, you’ve made a mark. Are future projects in the works? Is there anything you can tell us about on the horizon?
ECD:I have a bunch of stuff in the works that will absolutely blow peoples’ minds, and which I Legally can’t say a word about haha. All I can say is to follow my on social to stay up to date: @ezracdaniels
I also have a new non-fiction mini-comic I’m really proud of, called “Are You at Risk for Empathy Myopia”, which will be available from www.radiatorcomics.com Nov 1.
Thanks so much for taking the time to talk with us!
