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Interview: Ezra Claytan Daniels, Creator of Upgrade Soul, Talks to Lizzy Walker

Ezra Claytan Daniels

We were lucky enough to have the opportunity for one of our reviewers, Lizzy Walker, to interview Ezra Claytan Daniels, the creator of the interactive graphic novel Upgrade Soul, which she just reviewed for Monster Librarian. Thanks so much, Ezra, for taking time for us! We are looking forward to seeing what comes next from you! Check out Lizzy’s review of Upgrade Soul here!

 

Lizzy: Tell Monster Librarian readers about yourself.

Ezra: I’m a writer and illustrator originally from Sioux City, Iowa, and currently based in Los Angeles. I worked for many years as a trial graphics consultant, creating medical and technical illustrations, and charts and graphs for high-stakes trials. I worked with the Department of Justice to help present the case against former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich. That job was a huge influence on my approach to comics and storytelling.

Lizzy: What inspired you to create Upgrade Soul?

Ezra: The seed for Upgrade Soul came to me in my first year of art school. I moved to Portland, OR from a small town in Iowa, where I was kind of THE art kid. Then I started college, where I was suddenly not the best at anything. All the skills and ideas that had defined my identity my whole life, where suddenly not unique to me. So that existential terror of being made obsolete by someone who is better at being me that I was, is what eventually became Upgrade Soul.

Lizzy: What do you want readers to take away from your story?

Ezra: I wanted to challenge people’s ideas not only of what is normal, but what is good or bad, or better or worse. The central conflict in the book involves a person being faced with a clone that is smarter, stronger, and healthier than they are, but is severely disfigured. So the drama is, which version is better? The one that looks like the person we recognize, or that one that’s better in every measurable way, but because of the way they look, won’t be able to move through the world with the same ease? It’s this horror that our lives are governed and restricted by these arbitrary preferences for certain types of bodies, abilities, genders, or skin colors.

Lizzy: One of my favourite sections in the book is when Molly’s bandages are being taken off. The perspective shift is so well done, and the emotional reaction Molly has to her new body is so strong. What is your writing process like to be able to evoke so much emotion in your story?

Ezra: That specific sequence is an homage to a classic sci-fi trope. I think it first entered the lexicon with the “Eye of the Beholder” Twilight Zone episode, but you also see it in Robocop, and Tim Burton’s Batman, and I even just spotted it in that Tarsem Singh movie, Self/Less. But to answer your question, I love working within strict limitations. One of the main challenges I set for myself with this book was that I wanted to try to write a soap opera. I’m not a fan of soap operas, so the challenge was to write a soap opera that I would really love. So from day one, the main spine of Upgrade Soul was really big dramatic moments and heightened emotions.

Lizzy: What was the hardest part about writing Upgrade Soul?

Ezra: Writing Lina was by far the hardest part. She’s a character who was born with a severe disfigurement, which is not my experience. It took a lot of research, interviews, and introspection to write her in a way I felt comfortable with, but it’s still by far the part I’m most self-conscious about.

Lizzy: I have had the chance to explore the first chapter in the new app. It’s fantastic! Can you talk about the creation of the associated app? 

Ezra: The comic was actually originally designed for the app—that’s partly why the panel structure is so rigid and cinematic. But the whole idea with the app is to try to create a more immersive comics reading experience. The developer, Erick Loyer and I spent many, many hours working out how far we could use technology to push a comic before it stopped feeling like a comic. The main rule we established (you can see our whole philosophy at https://screendiver.com/digital-comics-manifesto/) was to never take control of time from the reader. The main immersive feature of our app is the original score, composed by Alexis Gideon. The score is reactive, so it keeps perfect pace with your progress through the story—you’re really controlling the pace of the music in the same way that you control the pace of the story. Every panel transition triggers a change in the music, so every emotional beat in the story is perfectly accompanied by the score, no matter how fast or slow you read.

Lizzy: Why should libraries be interested in this title?

Ezra: It’s an extremely dense book, loaded with references, homages, and entry points to other works. I worked on it off and on for 15 years, and every time I went back to it, I would add more layers from my life experience and current interests. I namedrop authors like Octavia Butler and Samuel Delany; I reference the history of pulp science fiction; I touch on concepts of experimental neurology and genetics; there’re primers for debates about transhumanism and eugenics. I see this book as a gateway to all sorts of other books and fields.

Lizzy: What else would you like librarians to know about your work?

I think about my high school self a lot. I’m constantly judging my progress and accomplishments through the lens of, “would 17 year old Ezra be proud?” I see my 17 year old self as my primary audience. I was a precocious kid who dressed weird, loved weird movies, and didn’t have a lot of friends. If any librarians know a kid who fits this description, I would love nothing more than to get my books into their hands.

Lizzy: What are you working on currently?

Ezra: I’m working on some non-comics stuff in the Upgrade Soul world. I have a new non-fiction zone that will be available at www.radiatorcomics.com in the first week of November, called “Are You at Risk for Empathy Myopia?”

 

Interview by Lizzy Walker

Posted on November 15, 2019 by , 1 comment

Book Review: The Deep by Rivers Solomon

 

The Deep by Rivers Solomon

Saga Press, 2019

ISBN-13: 978-1534439863

Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition, audiobook, audio CD

 

Yetu is the historian for the wajniru, underwater beings created when slave traders threw pregnant African women overboard into the Atlantic Ocean. Although the women drowned, their children, born in the deep of the ocean, were transformed and have founded their own underwater society. As historian, Yetu carries the memories of all the trauma the mothers of the wajniru and the succeeding generations alone, to protect the others, and has done so for sixteen years, suffering tremendously from taking the burden alone. Once a year, she gets a three day respite from the memories when the wajniru hold a Rememberance ceremony. At that time, she carefully lets the memories wash back into the entire population so they can feel it collectively. The experience is physically as well as emotionally traumatic– author Rivers Solomon describes it as a seizure– but all the wajniru go through it together, and once they have absorbed the memories and can take no more, Yetu takes them back. Carrying all the history, violence, and trauma of her people has emotionally, mentally, and physically damaged and weakened Yetu, and since she has been carrying these memories since she was a teenager, they have overwhelmed her ability to establish her own identity. This time, after giving the wajinru’s memories back to them, Yetu decides to escape so she does not have to take on their pain again and can have an opportunity to discover who she really is.

Swimming to the surface of the ocean, away from her kind, Yetu is injured and washed into a tide pool. Thanks to nearby humans, and especially the prickly Oori, she begins to heal. An awkward friendship develops between Oori and Yetu, out of discussions about the ocean, family, and the past. Oori, the last of her people, does not know her history, and the fact that Yetu gave hers up is upsetting to her and causes Yetu to rethink whether she can really develop an identity without any knowledge of her history. It becomes clear to her that the increasingly stormy weather is probably due to the wajinru’s group anguish and that she must return to them to retrieve their history.

This story powerfully brings the point home about the physical, mental, and emotional effects of generational trauma that many Black people still experience, even generations after the end of slavery. The situation that created the wajinru is also not the only negative impact the “two-legs” have on them, even down in the deep of the ocean, as drilling for oil not only has a negative impact on the environment but causes the violent deaths of enough of the wajinru that they rise up to wash it away in a tidal wave.  The Deep is not fast paced, as for much of it Yetu is trapped in a tide pool, but it is a story that can be felt deep in the gut.

The Deep is the third iteration of storytelling based on the premise of an aquatic people born from drowned pregnant African women kidnapped to be enslaved(although each version can stand on its own).  A musical duo called Drexciya first imagined it, and their music created a mythology for an underwater utopia born from this terrible oppression. The hip-hop group clipping then wrote their own musical version, “The Deep”, a haunting song about underwater beings who rise as a collective against the “two-legs” after they begin drilling for oil, leading to dramatic climate change and destruction of the oceans, that won a Hugo Award for best dramatic performance. This novella takes the repeated line “y’all remember” from clipping’s song and focuses on the effects of history and collective memory that follow the uprising, While I’m not familiar with Drexciya, both clipping’s song and Solomon’s novella tell powerful, complementary stories about the violence and horror caused by white supremacy and enviromental destruction. Recommended.

I received this as a complimentary ARC from Saga Press through NetGalley.

Posted on November 13, 2019 by , Reply

Book Review: Imaginary Friend by Stephen Chbosky

Imaginary Friend by Stephen Chbosky

Grand Central Publishing, 2019

ISBN-13: 978-1538731338

Available: Hardcover, Kindle edition, audiobook

 

Acclaimed author Joe Hill promoted Imaginary Friend by saying the first fifty pages would blow you away, and I 100% agree with that. The first chapter, which takes place fifty years before the rest of the story, is absolutely hallucinatory. Jumping to the present day, the central character is Christopher, a seven-and-a-half year old boy whose mentally ill father committed suicide four years ago, and is now on the road with his mother, Kate, who is fleeing a relationship with an abusive alcoholic. Chbosky does a great job of depicting the loving, if anxious, relationship between Kate and Christopher, and I think he shows a very realistic depiction of the effects grief, and the loss of a father, can have on the dynamic between a mother and son.

Christopher struggles in school. He is mercilessly bullied by the son of the richest family in town, which also owns the retirement home where his mother works, and dyslexia prevents him from succeeding academically. One day, his mother is late picking him up from school, and by the time she arrives he has mysteriously disappeared. When he is found after six days, he can’t remember anything about that time, but everything in their lives starts looking up, from his success on a math test to Kate’s winning the lottery. But Christopher is also starting to get terrible headaches, and he is hearing the voice of someone he calls “the nice man” who wants him to build a treehouse in the woods behind the house his mother bought with her lottery winnings. Is there something supernatural going on, or is Christopher manifesting his father’s mental illness?

The story starts to run off the rails for me here. According to Chbosky, Christopher is a second grader, seven years old. But he and his peers (both friends and bullies) aren’t acting or being treated like second graders. I 100% guarantee that an overprotective single mother is not going to allow her son who was recently missing for six days to go on a sleepover without making sure that the other child’s parents were right there in the house. But that is exactly what happens. Christopher and three of his friends trick their parents into thinking that each of them is going to a sleepover at another friend’s house so they can go camping in the woods in Pennsylvania in November and tirelessly build a treehouse from complicated blueprints, stealing wood from a construction site, with rare breaks for food.

There’s an echo of It or maybe The Body here in the depiction of the four outcast boys on a mission, but the kids in those stories are living through the 1950s, when kids had a lot more freedom to roam, and in both cases, the kids in those stories were older. Some of the actions of the kids in this book would have been more believable had they been older. Chbosky, best known for his YA novel The Perks of Being a Wallflower, might have done better to age his characters up to middle school. I’m  also pretty irritated that Chbosky refers to one of Christopher’s friends, who is in a special education classroom, by the nickname “Special Ed” , given to him by the school bully, throughout the book.

The story is also weighed down by a lot of unneccessary repetition. In the first chapter, every time David Olson is mentioned, it’s as “Little David Olson”, even though it’s quickly obvious that David is a young boy. It’s sometimes difficult to tell who is talking, or if they are talking or thinking, because the use of italics, spacing, font size, punctuation, and capitalization is irregular. I’m not sure if that’s intentional,or not, because it definitely adds to the sense of disorientation that Chbosky establishes from the beginning, but it also interrupts the flow of the story. Between the repetition in language and plot and the unusual formatting, the story started to exhaust me. There is also a heavy religious element that begins to take over the story and really dragged it out (there is an unexpected plot twist that jumpstarts things, but this book could still have been 300 pages shorter and been the better for it).

Where Chbosky shines is in character and relationship development, especially between family members. Kate and Christopher are at the center of the book and I am wowed by the way Chbosky portrayed their relationship. We also get a window into the lives of characters in the books who aren’t sympathetic at all, giving us a look at their generational or family trauma. I think Chbosky went a little overboard in getting into the minds of the characters of his very large cast at times. When he’s good, he’s very, very good, but when he goes over the top (and he does sometimes) he really misses the mark.

Chbosky also does an excellent job with creating truly disturbing creatures– I will never feel the same way about deer again– and it is painful, unsettling, grotesque, and terrifying to witness some of what he describes people doing to each other and themselves, over and over. This is a true horror novel that walks the reader through hell.

Imaginary Friend has received accolades from some prestigious review sources. In his acknowledgements, he cites Stephen King as his inspiration, and I can certainly see the influence. Ultimately, though, while there’s some really good stuff here, the book is flawed enough, and long enough, that many readers unfortunately won’t make it through to the end. Recommended for public libraries.

Contains: Violence, gore, body horror, child abuse, sexual situations, domestic violence, suicide, references to child sexual abuse, bullying

 

Posted on November 8, 2019 by , Reply
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