“Upgrade Soul” Is a Story that Refuses to Be Contained

Note: Text has been edited and does not match audio exactly.

Sam Danis: Hi, I'm Sam, Audible sci-fi and fantasy editor, and I am delighted to be here today with Ezra Claytan Daniels, writer of the Audible Original Upgrade Soul, a thrilling, at times terrifying, and often thoughtful sci-fi tale that asks the question, "What does it mean to be you?"

Ezra has a fascinating body of work. He's a writer, illustrator, and designer who's worked on projects ranging from graphic novels—like Upgrade Soul, which won the Dwayne McDuffie Award for Diversity in Comics, among other accolades, and his latest, BTTM FDRS—to animation, video games, documentaries, and more. He's recently been working in television, as a writer on HBO's Doom Patrol.Thanks for being with me here today, Ezra.

Ezra Claytan Daniels: Thank you so much for having me. This is great.

SD: So, Upgrade Soul has had an interesting history. It's adapted from your critically acclaimed self-illustrated graphic novel. It was also an app, complete with immersive music and audio effects, and now it's in development as a feature film. In a way, audio-only felt almost like a logical next creative step for this story. Can you talk a little bit about the background, what it was like to adapt it?

ECD: Yeah, Upgrade Soul was my magnum opus project that I was chipping away on for nights and weekends for about 17 years, from beginning to end.

SD: Wow.

ECD: It was the first project that I started working on after my first self-published graphic novel, which is called The Changers, that I did in my early 20s, which I don't stand by anymore, but it was my entry into the comic book world. And The Changers got a little bit of buzz. It was pretty successful for a self-published book, and I felt like I was in a good position to try to come up with a new idea and actually sell it to publishers, because my dream was to be published. So, I came up with Upgrade Soul and I started working on it. And I just couldn't get any interest from publishers. For years, I worked on this thing and every once in a while I would hit a milestone, like I would finish writing the entire thing and doing some sample pages. I would pitch it and I wouldn't get any interest. I would finish illustrating the entire first chapter, I would pitch it, not get any interest. Drawing the second chapter, I would pitch it, not get any interest. There just wasn't a market for the story at the time.

And a friend of mine named Eric Lawyer, who's a developer and interactive artist, came up with an idea for an interactive comics platform for the iPad. And this was the very beginning of the iPad. This is 10 years ago, 2012. He wanted to do this interactive comics reader for it, and we'd worked on some projects before, so he asked me if I had any ideas that would work for it, and I was like, "Well, I've been chipping away at this 300-page science fiction epic. Maybe this would be a good fit." So, he said yes. The original version of Upgrade Soul was this interactive app that I did with Eric, and we worked with a composer from Pittsburgh named Alexis Gideon who created a totally immersive, reactive sound score for the whole thing.

That was really the first version of Upgrade Soul, and it only existed in that format because I couldn't get any interest from publishers. So, it was kind of an act of desperation for me to get the story out. We serialized it on the app over the course of a few years, and when I finally finished it, I submitted it to the Dwayne McDuffie Awards, just as an unproofed PDF of the entire thing, as a self-published thing. And shockingly, I won the Dwayne McDuffie Award for Diversity in Comics. The cynical side of me is like, “Once I was vetted by an institution, then suddenly all the editors and all the publishers that wouldn't give me the time of day before were suddenly very interested in this story.” And then once we found a publisher, I sold the film rights to it, and then selling the film rights opened up all these opportunities, including the opportunity to adapt it to audio.

SD: That’s amazing to have that kind of perseverance to work on this story. And you describe it as ahead of its time. I feel like the app, too, was a little bit ahead of its time. So, you illustrated this graphic novel as well as writing it. When adapting it to audio, I have to ask, is it difficult to give up the visual control you have over the story in writing something for a nonvisual medium? Or is there a little bit of freedom that opens up there?

ECD: I love this question, because it's something that I spent a lot of time thinking about. And it actually goes back to the app that I developed with Eric, because when we were talking about developing this app, we had a lot of long, philosophical conversations about what a comic is and what it means to experience a comic. And a lot of it came down to the reader or the user's control of the element of time. So, nothing happens in the Upgrade Soul app that the reader isn't controlling on their own. And part of that was just understanding the fundamental difference between comics and film and any other medium. Writing comics is really all about putting yourself into a very narrow lane of what you can control and how the collaboration with the reader or the user functions. Like, what the reader is bringing to the project. And I love working within those constraints. I love working in a narrow lane and seeing how far I can push against the edges.

"I love working in a narrow lane and seeing how far I can push against the edges."

And so working in audio was the polar opposite of working in comics. It's a very narrowly defined lane, but the lane is defined in the polar opposite way that a comic is defined, because in audio, you control all the elements that you have no control over in comics. In audio, you're working with the control of time, but you can't lean on the visuals. So, I really thrived under the constraints. I thought it was so fun.

I'm a huge old-time radio fan. Even before podcasts were a thing, '50s and '60s sci-fi radio shows, like X Minus One, Dimension X, 2001 AD, I listened to those audio dramas when I would draw my comics. I've been doing this for a long time. Before there was podcasts, I was listening to old-time radio drama and I always dreamed of writing something for that format. So, when the podcast genre came out and new scripted audio stuff started happening again, even when it started happening 15 years ago or whatever with the iPod, I was like, "I want to do something in this format." It just took me a long time to get around to it.

SD: That's amazing. I find it so interesting, having read both the graphic novel and listened now to the audio, the center of this story is this experiment gone awry where these people put their trust into this experiment and end up becoming disfigured clones. And in the audio, you're really giving a lot of freedom to the listener to imagine what happened and what the outcome of this is. And it makes it extra terrifying.

ECD: That's great to hear, I love that. In the comic book, I was really trying to walk this fine line between something that was unsettling and something that was extremely appealing. So, I wanted the clones to look like babies. There is some physiological urge that we have when we see these characters, to nurture and to love this character, but then there's something blank about their faces that makes them really difficult to read.

So, I really wanted to toe that line. I think that was probably the biggest challenge with converting it to audio was because it's such a fine line to walk, and in doing the designs for the characters, which I spent a lot of time fine-tuning, it was so visual that I never thought about how these characters would sound when they talked. So, it was actually really exciting to be able to collaborate with other artists. Because the process of making the comic was such an isolated, singular project, it was just me locked in my bedroom for 17 years working on this thing. I wasn't working with editors or collaborators or anything. This is purely for me.

It was really interesting to sit down with Phil LaMarr, who is one of the first people we cast and one of the first people that we were working with on this. If you don't know who Phil LaMarr is, listeners, he is one of the most legendary voice actors in the history of animation. And he is a genius of his craft. So, when I won the Dwayne McDuffie Award for Diversity in Comics, he was the host, and he gave me the award and we chatted a little bit. And I was actually able to bring him onto Upgrade Soul when we started casting because we were talking about who the dream people we'd like involved were and I was like, "Obviously Phil LaMarr," and I just so happened to know this man. So, I reached out to him and he signed on.

But the initial meeting with him was so interesting because he brought such depth and nuance and intellect and intent to what he brought to the role. And he brought science to the role. The clones in the story are about three feet tall. So, the first thing Phil did was imagine what does the voice of the smaller diaphragm sound like. It was so inspiring and was such an exciting experience to just be able to be put in a position facing an artist of such an immense talent like Phil, and just being able to put my hands up and be like, "I trust you. I have implicit trust in whatever you want to do with this character, because this is yours now.” And that was a really exciting process for me.

SD: That's amazing. It's like past and future colliding. You were deeply familiar with these characters, Molly and Hank Nonnar, the elderly couple who are undergoing this experiment called Upgrade Cell. Phil LaMarr, Marcia Gay Harden, Wendell Pierce—how did hearing the performers affect how you saw your main characters? Did they add a new dimension for you?

ECD: Oh, absolutely. I hate to use the word surreal because I feel like it's overused, but it was a surreal experience to hear these characters. Hank and Molly in the book were very specifically inspired by my grandparents. So, there's just a lot of very specific nuance that I ascribed in creating the characters. And I think that's one of the reasons I was able to work on the book for so long and not get bored with it, because the two main characters are based on the two people I loved more than anything in the world, my grandparents. And so it was really interesting to hear those characters reinterpreted by people who’d never met my grandparents, who were bringing in something completely different.

"The two main characters are based on the two people I loved more than anything in the world, my grandparents."

And I loved it. I loved that process. Wendell and Marcia, they added such depth. There's a pathos in this story that was a struggle to get across in the artwork sometimes, and my strategy as an artist, for this particular story, was to lean into the sterility of the artwork, to let the reader impose the pathos onto the characters, rather than trying to explicitly express it through the character art. So, it was really interesting to see that centralized in the depiction of these characters by these actors who completely got it. The first time I met Wendell, the first thing he said to me was, "Are you okay, brother?" Because he was so disturbed by this story. And I was just like, "Yes, I'm okay, and I'm so glad you understand the pathos of this story."

SD: Oh, that's fantastic. Going to the story itself, some of the elements have changed a little bit in this adaptation. The character of Victoria, for instance, is a little bit different. Test subject is a horse instead of a dog. To me, it almost feels like a bonus if you're an existing fan of the graphic novel. They're going to find a slightly different spin to things in the Audible Original. Can you tell me about the choices behind some of the changes that you made in adapting it?

ECD: Yeah. I did want to create a different experience for people that have read the book. That was definitely a goal. The other goal was, I'd spent so much time with this story and I love the story in its original form, but when you spend so much time with something, there's new ideas and new nuances and new themes that you kind of wish you could have applied to the original, but once it's out, it was too late to make those changes. So, I kept a mental note of those changes after the book came out, especially knowing that we may be working on a film adaptation of it. I had all these ideas for things I might like to add to it or change or simplify or smooth out or focus on differently.

And then, in the several drafts of the audio drama that I wrote, it went through a few different permutations. Upgrade Soul, the original book, is not chronological, it jumps back and forth in time. So, one of the first things I wanted to try was what does the story feel like if it's told chronological? And what kind of gaps do I need to fill in if I tell it in that way? So, that was really exciting and that opened up some new ideas for me. And then I decided to go back to the original, non-chronological structure. Some of the stuff from the original draft of the chronological story stayed in. But primarily there was some new ideas that I wanted to explore and I felt like I'd become a more confident writer in the intervening years from the publication of the book and when I started working on the podcast. So, I felt more confident to take on some of these issues that I maybe shied away from a little bit with the original version of the book.

SD: Talking about themes, in Upgrade Soul, you tackle the trials of aging, of race, of ableism, of bodily autonomy, and overall questions of what makes us who we are. What are the origins of these ideas in the story, and what do you hope listeners are taking away from this work?

ECD: There's a very specific origin for this story. I came up with the original idea when I was 21 years old and I had just moved from my hometown of Sioux City, Iowa, to go to art school in Portland, Oregon. And in Sioux City, Iowa, I was the art star kid. I was like the kid that all my high school teachers knew, "This guy is going to go and be an artist."

SD: Right. Big fish in a small pond.

ECD: Yeah, totally. I was a teenager. So, obviously that kind of stuff is going to go to your head. So, when I moved to Portland to go to art school, suddenly I was faced with all of these people who were better at every single metric that I had previously defined myself as being the best at. I think that was my first taste of existential terror, where I was like, “If I can't define myself in the way that I previously defined myself, what value do I have? What can I contribute if I'm not able to contribute the things that I previously thought that I would be the best at contributing?”

So, that was the origin of the idea. At the same time, I was thinking about my grandparents a lot and imagining how my experience feeling suddenly obsolete in this world of superior artists might have mirrored their experience of aging out of the workforce. And I started to see these parallels between the two experiences. I just started imagining how my grandparents felt at that phase of their life, being faced with young whippersnappers coming up below them who are faster and smarter and were better at the new technology in their jobs than they were, and that fear of being pushed out and made obsolete. And that felt like such a strong, sharp terror.

"I just started imagining how my grandparents felt at that phase of their life, being faced with young whippersnappers coming up below them who are faster and smarter and were better at the new technology in their jobs than they were, and that fear of being pushed out and made obsolete."

The original goal of the story was, I wanted to come up with a story that was the scariest thing I could possibly imagine. And that's where I kept on going to, because that seemed like such a terrifying prospect. So, that was really the original premise of the story. And then, to your second question, what I hope readers will take away from it is taking a step back and considering what metrics we use to define superior and inferior. And I think that duality is what opens up the door to all the things that you were talking about, like ableism and bodily autonomy and racism and sexism. It's this idea of, someone has decided that A is better than B, and why. Why do we take that for granted, that someone has said, "This is better than that," and do we have to?

SD: Right. And what if that person deemed better than you is literally a stronger, better, faster version of you? It's a terrifying idea. I don't want listeners to get the idea they're going to be absolutely terrified. It's also funny and touching and thoughtful and all of that. But there is definitely a threat of terror running through. You've mentioned a film, you have adapted it to audio, and it seems like there's more to come. What do you think, will you keep going with this story?

ECD: That's a really good question. Because I don't want to come across as egotistical in any way, and I don't want to come across as cynical, because I'm tempted to say, "As long as people are going to throw money at me to adapt the story, then I'm going to keep doing it." But I do feel like there's some things that are inherent to the story that I feel are valid and worth communicating. And I think any opportunity that I have to communicate and disseminate those ideas, I feel a duty to the idea and I feel a duty to myself as an artist to take those opportunities to disseminate those ideas.

But I do think that it's contingent on me finding new, interesting ways into the story, which is something that I think I've learned with the audio drama adaptation. It would have been a lot more difficult if I was asked to create a very literal one-to-one adaptation of the book, because I think it would've been harder for me to find new angles and new excitement within the story that I've spent so much time with.

SD: Right. So, you've worked on a very diverse range of creative products—narrative concert series, documentaries, writing for film and television, animation, to this, audio-only. So, what is next for you? Can you see yourself working on more audio-first projects, adapting any of your other existing work to audio?

ECD: Yeah. I would love all of it. I love challenging myself, like I said, with new creative parameters and limitations. I think it’s so interesting and so fun. I think I kind of gravitate toward those kinds of challenges. I would love to come up with an original idea for the audio format. I'm really interested in interactive storytelling. I've been very interested in that format for years, but since I don't have any coding ability, it's been hard for me to figure out how to actually approach that. But that's something that's been a dream of mine for a long time. I would love to work in video games. Indie video games are my favorite art form in the world, so I would love to do something there.

I felt for a long time that interactive storytelling will be the epitome of human storytelling. Because I think there's something about the collaboration between the creator and the user/reader that interactivity can bring something truly special and moving, and ways that I think we've very rarely seen in video games. I think very few people have even scratched at it. But when it works, it's just incredible.

SD: Yeah, I hope I get to see some of that in the future. That kind of leads into my next question, which is, this is one of the latest graphic novels to get the audio treatment. Over the past years, we've seen others like Neil Gaiman's The Sandman, Mira Jacob's Good Talk, Noelle Stevenson's Nimona. What do you think the future looks like for these immersive graphic novel experiences?

ECD: I don't know. It's exciting that the dramatic audio industry is aiming its sights on the graphic novel world, because there's thousands of amazing stories in graphic format that could potentially work really well in audio format. A good story is a good story, right? And there's a lot of good stories in graphic novels, so I think it's very exciting. And it's exciting for my friends and peers in the comic book world, who are going to be going through the same process that I went through. I'm thrilled to see what else comes out of this.

SD: Yeah. So, what are you working on next?

ECD: I am working very hard on multiple projects that I can't talk about right now. I'm working on some stuff in film and TV. I have a new graphic novel that hasn't been announced yet. But rest assured, I'm working very hard on multiple things that hopefully I'll be announcing soon. Oh, the one thing I can say, though, is that Season 4 of Doom Patrol comes out on December 8. I wrote an episode and a half of the season.

SD: So that brings me to my last question, which is what are you enjoying right now?

ECD: I have been on a Danish film kick lately. There are a couple of Danish filmmakers and writers that I absolutely love right now. Eskil Vogt is a writer-director who did a movie called The Innocents and one called Thelma that are two of my favorite horror movies of the last 10 years. Another filmmaker named Anders Thomas Jensen did a film called Men & Chicken and Riders of Justice, both starring Mads Mikkelsen. They're Danish films, and they're so exciting and so weird and so thoughtful and so Danish that I've been having a lot of fun with those.

SD: Very cool. Ezra, I want to thank you for talking with me today, for taking the time. I thoroughly enjoyed listening to the story, and I really think our listeners will as well. And listeners, you can get Upgrade Soul only from Audible right now. Thank you again, Ezra.

ECD: Thank you so much for having me. This was super fun.