INTERVIEW: ‘Upgrade Soul’ expands its reach with new app, vinyl soundtrack
Image courtesy of artist / Provided by Superfan Promotions with permission.
Upgrade Soul, the graphic novel from Ezra Claytan Daniels, continues to give the writer-artist many rewards. For starters, the beloved title was highly respected by critics and fans last year when it was first released in book form by Lion Forge. Now, Daniels has released an accompanying vinyl soundtrack and innovative app to complement the story.
In Upgrade Soul, a retired-age couple agree to a bizarre experimental scientific procedure, which is meant to rejuvenate their failing bodies. Instead, something horribly goes wrong, and they must deal with the dire consequences: intellectually superior clones.
The interactive app has actually been a project-in-the-works for seven years, but now Daniels and media artist Erik Loyer (author of Chroma) have polished it off. The app features an original score by composer Alexis Gideon, and this same soundtrack is also be available in two vinyl editions for the true collector.
Recently Hollywood Soapbox exchanged emails with Daniels about the expansion of his graphic novel. Questions and answers have been slightly edited for style.
Were you surprised by the overwhelmingly positive reception to the graphic novel’s release last year?
Yes and no, to be honest. I worked on this book off and on for 15 years. I wouldn’t have stuck with it if I didn’t have at least some confidence in it. I always expected that the book would find an audience, even if that audience was super small. But I was definitely surprised by the accolades and industry attention. I’d just gotten really used to making stuff on the margins.
What can fans expect with this October’s release? What’s new?
There’re a few cool new features in the app, like dynamic 3-D parallax depth effects and bonus features. But the main attraction is Alexis Gideon’s score. My collaborator, developer Erik Loyer, created a comics engine called Panoply that syncs the music to your reading pace, so every panel you swipe in triggers a subtle change in the music that amplifies that emotional beat.
Our main goal was to create a more immersive comics reading experience, but we were very conscious about staying true to the feel of reading a comic, which a lot of ‘enhanced’ comics really struggle with. Animation, spoken dialog or even sound effects can create a jarring, discordant feel in digital comics, that make it feel like you’re watching a broken cartoon or something, but there’s nothing about music that defies the feel of reading a comic — particularly when the music, just like turning pages, flows at your pace.
In fact, there’s something about the fact that you as the reader are triggering these moments that somehow makes for an even more immersive experience than film. That’s the power of comics.
Why did it take so many years for you to write and draw this story?
Mostly just because I couldn’t get it published. I self-published a graphic novel called The Changers in 2003, which was really well-received. I felt certain that the success of that book would’ve led to publishing opportunities for my next story, Upgrade Soul, but nobody wanted to touch it.
It’s a weird story, and the industry is also just wasn’t as open to diverse characters as it is now. But anyway, I really liked the story, so I just kept working my day job and working on other comics-adjacent and collaborative projects while I chipped away at it off and on on nights and weekends.
During that time I wrote BTTM FDRS; wrote and drew a full-length graphic story for a chamber concert series, called Black Violet; made an animated short film with animator Adebukola Bodunrin called The Golden Chain that actually landed in the permanent collection at the Whitney. I was really just taking any opportunity that arose to tell stories, mostly out of desperation to get my stuff out there.
Why was it important to move in the multimedia direction for this project?
To be honest, the addition of synchronized music makes for a vastly more immersive reading experience than the comic alone. I mean, this is a language that’s been honed in opera, film and even video games for decades and decades. When story and music align, I feel like that’s where some of the greatest achievements of human artmaking live, and with the technology we have now, there’s no reason we shouldn’t be harnessing that in comics.
Do you often ponder about the societal themes that the graphic novel brings up? Are these big questions that you struggle with?
Absolutely. Comics is a slippery medium to be working in, in terms of standards for relevance. A lot of this industry, even as it bleeds into Hollywood, can’t see the difference between escapism and distraction. I’ve always felt that if I’m lucky enough to have a platform where people are listening to me, no matter how niche it is, and I don’t use that platform to try to make a positive change in the world, that platform is totally wasted on me.
And I fully believe you can have it both ways. You can entertain and provoke all at once. But if the only goal is to entertain, then what’s the point, ultimately?
Who were some of your creative influences when growing up?
I had no restriction on the media I consumed as a kid. My childhood was spent watching worn-out VHS bootlegs taped off of HBO, with the whole fly-through HBO logo opening and everything. Robocop, Terminator, Predator, Nightmare on Elm Street were on constant rotation. A little later, I got into anime like Akira and Ghost in the Shell, Lensman, Venus Wars.
I’m 40, so this was before Pokemon. This is in the mid-’90s. And then foreign art films I scored from the Blockbuster bargain bins because folks in my small hometown didn’t know what to do with stuff like [Andrei] Tarkovsky’s Stalker and Claire Denis’ Beau Travail. I was into comics when I was a kid, but kinda fell out of it for while until I moved to Portland and discovered indie comics. Charles Burns, Phoebe Gloeckner and Vittorio Giardano were huge early comics influences.
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Upgrade Soul, and its new app and soundtrack, are now available. Click here for more information.
