We were able to talk to the creative team (sans Stan Lee) behind Disney/Marvel/Stan Lee’s most recent written project. It’s called The Zodiac Legacy and Book One: Convergence was recently released. We get to talk to the Stuart Moore (co-writer), Andie Tong (illustrator), and Nachie Marsham (editor). The story follows a Chinese-American teenager, named Steven, who is thrown into the middle of an epic global chase when twelve magical superpowers are unleashed on the world. He’ll have to master strange powers, outrun super-powered mercenaries, and unlock the mysterious powers of the Zodiac. You know you’re already interested, but check out our interview just so you understand exactly why you should be even more excited. Stick around at the end of the interview and enter to win your very own copy, along with original character sketch by the talented Andie Tong.
To get the interview started, here’s a short introduction from the Marvel master himself, Mr. Stan Lee.
http://youtu.be/PUJBGtpwRR4
Intro from the creators:
Mr. Nachie Marsham (editor): A little bit of quick background on the project itself, a couple of years ago, I think this might have been back at the beginning of 2012. My boss, who is the associate publisher here at Disney Publishing, Rich Thomas, handed me this proposal for this story. That was from Stan Lee, through his company, POW! Entertainment. And he was like I think this is something that could come through Disney. And I think it’s something that could be really exciting. Can you take a look and see if this is something that you think could be an interesting book or a book series? There’s a lot of story in this kind of core bit of story. And I kind of thought he was jerking me around a little bit at first. So, I was like, oh, wow, okay. We got this in from Stan Lee. Of course, it’s Tuesday. That makes total sense. But it was, obviously, an actual thing that had come in from Stan. And when we were going over it, it sounded like the sort of thing that could be a really exciting story. And essentially, they were very excited clearly about working with us a lot and being able to help develop the story so that it could be the best possible book that we could have and to be able to work with us on the story and the art a lot. So, I reached out to Stuart and Andie, who I had both worked with a little bit in different capacities in my previous life when I was working at DC Comics. And both of them have a lot of experience both with prose and with comics. And this was really at heart a story that melted the core, the classic kind of thing that Stan had created in the past, but that he was excited about doing as a book, and we thought could make a really interesting book both just because the story’s was interesting but also from a kind of logistical standpoint.
You know, it’s kind of like he hadn’t done this. And he was excited about coming to this with this story as a book instead of a comic or a graphic novel or a series of books like that because he wanted to play in this pool. And not too shockingly, we were very excited to get the chance to do exactly that. So, again, that was a few years ago. And we’ve been working with Stuart and Andie ever since then, from the very early days of Andie sending in some character designs and us going back and forth with Stan and getting notes in and refining the look and the feel of the world, to us bringing in Stuart to actually get into the meat of the story and figure out how to make everything really, really work as well as it did in the final story, in the final book itself. And so, that’s kind of the foundation or the nuts and bolts, and probably the least sexy parts of the story itself that I could be beginning to talk about. But for the book itself, as you hopefully have seen from some of the materials and now, it’s the story of a 14-year-old Asian American teen, a kid named Steven Lee. He comes from the Northeast near Philly, who gets his eyes opened to this world full of magical super powers and larger than life threats. And he ends up getting taken on this global adventure where he finds out about this world where these 12 pools of magical energy, each of which is embodied by one of the animal powers of the Chinese Zodiac, gives people–both which turn out to be heroes and villains–super powers. And we go off on this roller coaster of a story from there. So, and I really can stop rambling and let Stuart and Andie chime in, as the people who are actually bringing all of this to life, a little bit if you’d like.
Mr. Stuart Moore (co-writer): Well, yeah, I’m just happy people are finally able to read the book because we have been working on this for a long time. It’s been very exciting. I won’t take up too much time, I want to get to the questions and everything. But one challenge of this book is because it is based on the Chinese Zodiac itself, there are a lot of characters. There were a lot of personalities we had to figure out. There were a lot of alliances we had to make sure worked between the villains and the heroes. And a lot of that will shift in future volumes, too. Things will not stay the same. We wanted to keep everything very firmly focused on Steven as the protagonist. But it’s also a very large canvas with a lot of room for different stories. And that’s pretty exciting to me.
Mr. Andie Tong (illustrator): Well, when I was first approached, I, you know, couldn’t believe it because A) it was from Disney, and B) it was from Stan Lee. We’re working on a major project with a legendary creator. So, the way I was first approached, the character was mentioned to me. Basically, I was born in the Year of the Tiger. And since Steven Lee also has the power of the Tiger, I thought this project was meant to be. I decided to try my best to create the characters and foresee them the way I thought would accentuate their powers and all that. The main character was decided and the powers that he would have. The others, I had the leeway to choose ethnicity and sex of the characters and which powers go to which one, although the powers were already divided into villains and heroes. But essentially, I got to create the characters from the ground up and to bring forth the look and feel of each character, with the guidance of Nachie and Disney. And it was really good. It was an exciting project, definitely. I thought this is not just superheroes. I didn’t want to completely go with them in tights. I just wanted to bring it down to realism, in the sense that they were wearing normal clothes. And the villains are more military-based. But they have these awesome powers. That’s something that’s different than a lot of hero stories out there. So, yeah, I hope I did a good job. I found working on the project was challenging because I came from a sequential background. And telling stories in panel is easy, but to tell a story in one image or rather just one image with everything in the background was something I was looking forward to.
(The Interview starts on the next page ——->)
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Interview
I know this is a trilogy. It seems like so much happens in the 450 pages of this one book. Are there plans to take this beyond just a book? Are there plans to make it a comic or movie or anything like that in the future, depending on how well this does?
Stuart Moore: I’m utterly buried in Volume 2 right now, which is actually turning out even longer than Book 1, and we may have to cut it down a little bit. But, that’s my main focus. That being said, it’s likely, I would say, that this will expand into at least one other medium. It’s also likely that I’ll be involved in it. But it’s too early to announce that at this point.
I guess my question is for both of you. How do you find the writing and the art different from working with Disney versus the writing and illustrations for Dark Horse or Image Comics? Did you find yourself having to limit yourself or censor yourself? Or were you given the option to kind of go with the flow with the sequences and violence?
SM: Oh, the violence. Well, there’s almost two different questions there. And one is about writing for kids, which I think is what you’re asking. But, the other is about just the different media writing comics versus books. And I actually wound up having a lot of experience over the last couple of years involved with superhero stories in prose form. So, that’s something I’m still learning how to do. You’re always still learning how to do this stuff. But I’ve gotten a little more comfortable. Fight scenes are tricky because what you can show in three panels in a comic book is tricky to describe sometimes in prose. It goes by much faster on screen or in a comic. But as far as the rest goes, we knew we wanted to write a book that was not at all talking down to kids, but that was kid friendly. So there are certain places you don’t go. There are certain limitations on that. I don’t think about it too much as I’m going. I just set it as parameters in my head, and then it’s no problem writing as I go along. The other difference is, of course, that if you’re writing a lot of comics, and then you switch to writing novels, a novel is just a hell of a lot more words. So, it’s a lot more involved. That said, you can spread out a lot more. You can get inside people’s heads more. You can take a lot more time letting a scene breath. You have a lot more flexibility in terms of making certain scenes longer and other ones shorter. So, it’s a much bigger canvas, and I think we all tried to take advantage of that.
Also, Andie’s illustrations were a constant inspiration too. I would just commend him. Nachie sent me a set of new designs for Volume 2 just as we were getting to the polishing stage on that book, and it just kind of gave me a nice shock in the arm. It let me picture the way the characters would look after a little time had passed from Volume 1. It’s a nice back and forth. It’s not quite as quick a back and forth as you’d get with comics, where you write a script and get pages right away. But, it’s very inspiring to me as we go through the writing.
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Andie Tong: Similarly, when I was approaching the artwork for this, obviously thinking in the back of my head that it’s got to be kid friendly. There’s a little bit more fighting in this book. So, no, I just had to make sure I toned it down a bit and not show too much full on blood and guts and all that. But, essentially the difference between working in comics and prose, I had a bit of experience in terms of working in comics. But at the same time, I was working with other companies, working on children’s books. I drew on that as much as possible, and I love telling detailed little things in the background when I draw an illustration. It was challenging and very different from comics, but I love being able to tell one story within one image. There’s so many things happening in the background, little/small things, and it’s not essential. It’s not the main part of the story, but just maybe a guy talking on the phone or whatever he could be doing. Like the first scene, I think, when they were walking into Hong Kong. Basically I was trying to give the impression that everyone’s on their phone nowadays. Literally everyone’s on the phone. And everyone’s just talking and walking on their phone. They’re either playing with their phone or on the phone talking. So that’s what I was trying to portray, the busy scene of today’s world.
You guys talked a little bit about the creative process and the things you go through to create a book from both an illustration viewpoint and a written standpoint. Did you guys have to do a lot of research regarding the Zodiac and the different elements that you have incorporated into the book?
SM: I did. I mean I did a certain amount. I wasn’t terribly familiar with the Chinese Zodiac. I did a certain amount of book research. I probably did more research, actually, on what it would be like to be an Asian American kid growing up in America in the Northeast because that seemed to be absolutely crucial. I actually wound up with enough material to write a whole different kind of Young Adult novel if I wanted to, because this is at heart a superhero story. That had to be the main focus, but, we wanted the Chinese Zodiac stuff to feel real. We want that to draw on an actual tradition, and, of course, you want it not to be insulting to anyone’s culture. So, there was a certain amount of research.
AT: I tried to help out as much as I can. Basically from my family’s background, we are Chinese and I was born in Asia. Then I moved to Australia and west, and so I had a little background. I wasn’t too in tune with it. I would always go back and ask my mom, “Hey, is this right?” There were certain things I remembered, and my mom would tell me, or my wife would tell me, as she’s a bit more in tune with the Chinese culture. I’ve been told I’ve been westernized too much. There’s a lot of research on my part in the sense that I want to make sure the dragon elements were correct and all that, and the tigers. So being brought up in a Chinese family, we followed a lot of these traditions and the Year of the “Blank”. Like the rat will take on certain characteristics, and someone that was born in the Year of the Tiger will tend to be this, that, and all that. Even with the Tiger Zodiac, there’s so many elements. There’s wood. There’s metal and all that. So, there’s all those different variants that I tried to tap into using my family resources. So that was my research.
The novel reads very visually. When you’re reading it, you can picture the things in your head. So, I was just wondering about your collaboration together. Tell us a little bit about your process. Did some of the drawings come first or the text, or how does that work?
SM: Some of the drawings did come first. There were definitely designs when I came on. And I think Stan had been involved in the early stuff. There were even some suggested scenes. I actually wrote the scene about the siege on the headquarters where the Vanguard Team drops down and ropes out of the copter. I think that was a sample piece Andie had done. It suggested a nice scene that worked right in with the story. So, yeah, it did go back and forth, some of it. There was a certain amount in the outline, there were some things Stan wanted. And there was some stuff that had come out of Andie’s mind. One of the things I did was string a lot of it together, but in a way that made sense. There were also early drawings. Some of them are quite beautiful, that just didn’t wind up fitting the story. So, they were cut in the end, I think.
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Mr. Nachie Marsham: Yeah. There was definitely about a handful of stuff from some of the parallel line that was going on in the early development, where, like Stuart was saying, there was some art that came in and then it actually inspired specific scenes, ended up kind of fleshing out some of the short moments in the book and vice versa. From the early days, especially when we were going through the character design stuff, that was a lot of the first rounds of collaborations between us here at Disney and Stan and Andie. As Andie had mentioned, as he was casting everyone and trying to match these powers up with people in ways that might be as visually interesting as possible. That was definitely a stage when we were going back and forth both internally with some of the hardened design folks here and also with Stan. There’s actually one thing that I wanted to mention in particular that had come from him, which I always kick myself for not catching in the first place.
The first round of character designs that came in, we all fell in love with, it was some of Andie sort of playing with the manifestation of the powers and the way that the animals kind of swirl up around the people when something was about to happen, and Stan Lee was specifically talking about some of the woman characters between the heroes and the villains. He was saying, like, oh, normally this is where I do a terrible Stan impression but, I’ll spare you all: ” This is where we should have just like a little bit more visual differentiation between the body types because we’re going to be creating these fight scene. And I want to make sure that if someone is looking at eight characters at the same time and you’re only seeing them in silhouette, you can tell that Horse is a little bit brawnier and bulkier, as opposed to Snake, who should be a little bit more lithe. We should even make sure that even when they’re not using their powers you can kind of tell who should be who. Rabbit was always a young, short girl and so her profile was always going to look different than Jasmine as the Dragon, right?”
But that was one of the first kind of places where I was like, oh, all the pieces of this are actually really coming together. All of the collaboration is really totally going to pay off between all of the people and all of this. It was very exciting. That’s not just a matter of telling the characters apart visually, but it helped with the general theme of diversity as well, where we wanted characters with different body types, we wanted characters from different countries, we wanted characters with very different backgrounds and physiques and everything else.
Now I see a lot of Stan Lee’s “signatures” throughout the book which I thought were fantastic. I see Excelsior on one of the ships, Stan’s “signature”, right away one of the first things I noticed. I was very curious, in terms of personal “signatures” based on past work, are there many in this book?
NM: On the Stan side, I think it’s actually pretty light in terms of stuff like that, because it’s so easy I think it would be a little bit of a trap. None of this is actually coming from him either, which I was really excited about. He wasn’t trying to be super self-referential like, we’ll have a kid from Queens in glasses in the background of one of these books or something like that. I really appreciated that because when you’re working with someone who’s such a legend in the industry in the first place, I think there’s a lot of ways where you could make it into a series of spot the Easter eggs from Classic Marvel stuff or from Stan himself or anything like that. So, Excelsior notwithstanding, which I always kind of liked, and I think that might have been Andie actually.
AT: I think that was me. Yeah.
NM: But I think from Stan’s side of things, that’s kind of the only bits you’ll see from that.
SM: I can’t really answer the question how much of it’s me and how much of it’s him, because there was a certain amount of back and forth. I will say anytime you do a story like this, so much of the modern superhero genre is infused with the DNA of the stuff that he and his collaborators created in the 1960’s. So, I’m sure I’ve written superhero stories that owe more to him even than this one does in a lot of ways because it’s just so much part of the mythology now. It’s the language we use when we tell these stories. And that’s why it was interesting to take something like this and try and flesh it out, use the broader canvas that you get in prose as opposed to comics, where you’re kind of limited to 20 or 22 pages at a time. It was a great experience. How much of it’s him and how much of it’s me, I can’t say.
AT: Design-wise, art-wise, I think I’ve grown up reading Stan Lee’s comics. Spiderman is my favorite character. So, I think a lot of it. When I’m drawing stuff, I’ve been influenced throughout my lifetime. I’ve been reading comics and drawing and all that. So, yeah, a lot of it I would say is coming from Stan in a subtle way. I try to create the characters as much as possible, but still blended with realism. I didn’t want to go too much superhero. Nachie gave me the brief and we were pretty much to say, well, let’s stay away from the superhero types for now, and given that brief I just kind of ran with it, and with the guidance from Nachie and this is where we ended up. I think it works. I think it works very well. So, yeah, I’ve been influenced by Stan Lee quite a bit.
Can you talk a bit more on diversity in YA fiction and in comic books?
SM: That’s a big topic, obviously. The thing I always just try to make sure of when I go into a story is I want to be respectful. I don’t want to be insulting, and I just don’t want to get anything wrong. There are all different kinds of people in the world. The United States is no longer an all-white country, which it never was. People used to think it was, and you can’t approach fiction with those blinders on the way you could in earlier times. So, I just try to be careful not to do that. I don’t know if that made any sense.
AT: Similarly, when I character designing, conceptualizing, I wanted to make sure that a lot of multicultural, a lot of different ethnicities in characters. I think early on in my first comic project, I didn’t realize. I mean I was brought up with a lot of American TV, and back then it was very one-sided racial TV. When I was working with Mike Baron on the comic book, I didn’t realize his character was meant to be a different race, and I drew him white. I learned from that even though I’m Asian and I’m from a different race. I was quite naive back then. In this day and age, it’s just everyone’s everywhere. And there’s so much awesome culture around the world, and I try to mix it all in there with the artwork. So when I approached the artwork that’s what I tried to do.
NM: And honestly, from my standpoint, when the pitch first came in, and the beats to the story and the beats to characters first came in from Stan, it was one of the things that excited me the most about it because in lots of ways in the story, it was trying to do more with the classic idea of this good versus evil and superhero storytelling and a large, kind of over the top, bombastic action. And to start from there and then try to do more, but then like Stuart was saying, really flesh it out. Make sure you get in all the characters’ heads. But just because there is so much world and characterization to all of the heroes and the villains, it was really exciting to me to help bring something to the table that would tap a world in this book that was more like the world as it exists. But if we’re trying to be more present with more now, I think, with representation, it’s super important. And I think that it helps to have not just kind of like, okay, here’s your team of six people, and here’s your one girl, and here’s your one person who’s not white or something like that. But you can really kind of get into it and have all these characters coming from different places. And a lot of the fun of the character interaction with both the heroes and the villains is just that they clearly do have different backgrounds it’s through their actions and the way talk and the way that they’re actually doing things in the book that’s coming about it, as opposed to something that’s more surface level. And I think that you only get that when you really start trying to mix up who all your characters are and what they look like and where they’re coming from. So, yeah, I think something that I love has been something about pop culture and comics and YA fiction in general that is starting to happen a little bit more regularly. I feel like it’s no longer, like, the crazy anomaly when someone’s like, oh, the lead character, and he’s not a white guy with brown hair. I used to be really surprised by that. And now I’m now I’m like partially surprised by that. And it’s great to be part of getting more of that out there.
After reading Convergence, what takeaways do you hope the young audience may have? Are there central themes you hope may spark a conversation or encourage character building in our youth?
SM: I think a crucial thing in the first novel in particular, the one that just came out, is the idea of having some respect for your own heritage, understanding the importance of where your parents came from, where your people came from. At the same time, that you may consider yourself as coming from somewhere else, like as being more of a citizen of the world, but Steven in the book considers himself much more American. He doesn’t really think much of his Chinese heritage. And as the story goes along, he starts to think about it a bit differently. I think that’s a good jumping off point for anyone to think about.
I know you guys talked about how Stan Lee was really your inspiration. I loved comics because of what Stan Lee and the group of people back in the ’60s did. What do you want out of this book series? What kind of impact do you want to see it have on comics and just this generation?
SM: Wow. Thait’s an ambitious question. I mean first of all, obviously, we hope people enjoy the book. We hope kids relate to it on some level, see a bit of themselves in it. In terms of influencing a whole generation, I don’t know if we could even hope to have the same kind of effect that Stan and Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko did back in the ’60s. That was a real revolution in the culture. So, I’m trying not to think that big right now.
AT: My hope is that it will eventually become its own universe. And then maybe there might be an amalgamation of the Marvel Universe and the one we created. That would be so cool.
SM: I will say too, as Andie said earlier, one of the things we tried to do with this series is keep it somewhat grounded, not get too deep into the world of super villains and superheroes. Nachie and I had a discussion about that when we were planning Book 2, whether we should introduce any costumed characters or other villains into the book besides the main ones. And we kind of decided to keep it to the Zodiac powers and build it slowly from there because we do want it to be relatable. We don’t want to jump in too deep with some superhero trope.
Is Convergence kind of like Disney and Marvel’s way of kind of trying to organize the two universes?
NM: Man, let me tell you. It’s a complete coincidence. It’s part of what Stuart was talking about earlier in terms of the difference in production speed between books and comics. We’ve been talking about this one for a few years now. And in terms of a book title, it actually in some weird snake eating its own tail kind of way, we were talking about, you know, originally I think it was the first book. We were just going to call it The Zodiac Legacy. And we were looking for a title, title. And this was after Stuart’s first draft had come in. And the whole opening scene kind of took place with this convergence of these powers, and Maxwell trying to access all of these powers, and Jasmine’s sabotage Maxwell’s trying to take the Zodiac powers, and Steven getting powers from there. And basically everything got kicked off from that first giant kind of set piece in the first act of the book during the convergence. So, we were talking about it internally. We were like, oh, that totally holds together. And that sounds great. And then, a couple of months ago, or however long it was. I think it was one of the people on the sales teams here was just kind of like, hey, DC’s new brand is called Convergence. And I was like ‘we’re not changing anything!’ because I think we had already printed the book by then. It was too late.
SM: Yeah. There’s a convergence in the movie Thor: The Dark World too. So, it’s common enough.
Do you guys have one scene that you really couldn’t wait to get into writing or illustrating as you were going through the storyline in the book?
SM: I need to think about that for a second because my head is all in Volume 2 right now. There definitely are scenes there. Andie, do you remember anything in particular?
AT: Not off the top of my head.
Or was there one that when you finished it, you were like, yes, that’s exactly what I was going for that maybe turned out differently than you’d originally thought?
SM: I did really like the recruitment of Rabbit. I thought that all came out nicely. I really like her character. And I like this little girl who’s just kind of teleporting all over town. And they’re chasing her everywhere. They’ll never catch up with her because she can teleport. And she’s so good at running away from things. I like that whole sequence quite a bit.
Andie, you’ve had a very successful and varied career in illustration. I know that a lot of people who read comics are inspired to draw. I just wondered what kind of advice you have for those people who want to pursue it as a career or just enjoy doing it?
AT: I think everyone has a different path, and every artist experiences different things. For myself, I went the safe path first. I’m actually a multimedia designer in my profession. I graduated a graphic designer, but I always liked drawing. So, whenever someone asks me, I always say have a backup plan because illustrating is very competitive. There’s so many artists out there. So, you got to be the best at what you do to be noticed. I know networking’s also important, but essentially, for myself, if illustrating fails for me right now, I will attempt to go back to design. The long short of it is you want to do something that’s fun. And design is the closest thing I could find to illustrating that’s just kind of creating still. But in terms of illustrating, just keep drawing every day. Keep drawing. My mom told me off when I was growing up, and I would always have my study book on top and my drawing book on the bottom. So, you’ve got to study, of course, as well. But just keep drawing every day. Just draw something, and that would be my advice to you. To improve, for me, look at other artists and what they do. You know you don’t have to copy exactly, obviously. Give credit if you’re doing that. But just take bits and parts from every different artist in what they do best for that particular artist. Maybe he or she draws the eyes very beautifully. Maybe you just take that bit from that artist and then I guess use it in your style. Eventually, as an artist, you will find your style.
Which super power would you or Andie choose for one another? Which super power do you see yourself as?
AT: If I could merge Tiger and Dragon, that would be cool as a power. I could fly.
SM: Yeah. I like the Tiger power. I’m a Tiger too. We’re both Tigers, actually.
AT: Oh, cool. This book was meant to be for us.
SM: Yeah. It really was. And I do like the Tiger power because it’s just kind of like vitality and energy, you know? It’s almost like you can harness it in so many different ways. So, yeah, I guess I identify with that one too.
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This interview should have not only been informative, but should also have gotten you beyond interested to read the first installment of this new series. Now, before you run out the door to buy a copy, enter out exclusive TYF contest to enter to win a free copy, along with an original illustration from Andie Tong.
(Contest is on the next page ————->)
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