Back on the horse, and steeped in filmic inspiration.

After several months of distractions, including moving back to Chicago, a deluge of freelance illustration and design jobs, and an almost supernatural mental block, I’m finally back to work on Upgrade Soul. I’m currently recoloring the first chapter, having decided that, instead of hiring a single colorist on whom I would be dependent, it would be safer to devise an extremely simple and efficient coloring style myself which could the be mimicked by one or more colorists down the road. So far so good. The style is very closely in line with how the comic has always looked in my mind.

Also, now that I’m back to my old set-up in Chicago, I’ve been excited about getting back into my working-while-Netflix-streaming routine. With all the noise about Netlix’s recent plan restructure, it seems like I’ve been having a lot of conversations about the value of a streaming-only plan. I stream a lot of movies, and, at the risk of sounding like a commercial, I can say for certain that there are a huge number of fantastic titles, both well-known and obscure, that are currently streaming on Netflix. And now, because a number of people have asked me for recommendations, following is an uncomprehensive and unorganized list. Enjoy.

HIGHEST RECOMMENDATION:

Heavenly Creatures *

Fearless *

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid *

Iron Giant *

Bonnie and Clyde *

The Piano Teacher *

Who Are the DeBolts? *

Toy Story 3 *

RoboCop *

Misery *

The Thing *

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest *

Rumble in the Bronx *

4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days *

Buffalo ’66 *

Clockwork Orange *

Ponette *

Blade Runner *

The Fly *

Please Vote For Me *

Dead Man *

Being John Malkovich *

Contact *

The Gods Must Be Crazy 2 *

Iron Monkey *

Blade 2 *

2001: A Space Odyssey *

The Exorcist *

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind *

They Live *

___________________

ALSO RECOMMENDED:

Valhalla Rising

Suspension

The Long Goodbye

Survivors (BBC)

The Long Good Friday

Mary and Max

Straight Time

Hombre

Dogtooth

She

Origin: Spirits of the Past

Unforgivable Blackness

Vexille

FLCL

Marathon Man

Sherman’s March

Lupin 3: Castle of Cagliostro

Red Road

Oldboy

This is England

eXistenZ

The Terminator

Brick

Stuck

High Noon

Heavy Metal in Bagdad

I Start Counting

Marwencol

Grace

Mystery Team

How to Eat Your Watermelon…

The Vicious Kind

Amreeka

Sin Nombre

Steel Dawn

Dead Alive

The Landlord

Wendy and Lucy

Ichi the Killer

The Bad Seed

Streets of Fire

The Italian Job (1969)

The Eclipse

Art & Copy

Dear Zachary

Enter the Dragon

The House of the Devil

A Very Long Engagement

Odds Against Tomorrow

Thomas in Love

A Boy and His Dog

Somers Town

Let the RIght One In/Let Me In

35 Shots of Rum

Batman: Under the Red Hood

Cry-Baby

The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman

The Hired Hand

The Secret of Kells

Surveillance

Escape from New York

The Vanishing

The Housemaid

My Name is Nobody

Cronos

The Fly 2

Mad Max

Giant

The Fury

Across 110th Street

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans

An American Werewolf in London

Mother

Brother’s Keeper

Sphere

Do the Right Thing

See No Evil, Hear No Evil

Double Dare

Peacock

The Good, the Bad, the Weird

Day Night Day Night

Return of the Living Dead 3

Richard Pryor: Live on the Sunset Strip

Exit Through the Gift Shop

The Princess and the Frog

The Stranger

Blackboard Jungle

Firefly

Repo Man

Paranoid Park

Blue Velvet

Harlan Ellison: Dreams With Sharp Teeth

Collapse

The Puffy Chair

When We Were Kings

Noise

To Sir, with Love

Classified X

Dial M for Murder

Touching the Void

Ulee’s Gold

Wristcutters: A Love Story

SherryBaby

Half Nelson

Microcosmos

I Am the Cheese

Ponyo

Radio Bikini

Red

Anvil

Time Indefinite

Harold and Maude

I Think We’re Alone Now

Last Night

The Corporation

The Machinist

On the Waterfront

Delicatessen

Them (Ils)

Billy Jack

Leviathan

The General

Dirty Harry

Tell No One

Winter’s Bone

White Material

Four Lions

I Saw the Devil

Iceman

Helvetica

The Man from Earth

Zu Warriors

Double Indemnity

Audition

Every Which Way But Loose

The Man in the White Suit

Reprise

Gamer

Fire and Ice

Lake Mungo

Funny Games (1998)

Chop Shop

The Taking of Pelham 123 (1974)

Police Beat

Dog Day Afternoon

Nobody Knows

Shinobi

Dreamscape

Stone

Chapter 2 is done!

I moved to Portland right after I finished, so progress on Chapter 3 has been slow, but I’m ecstatic about the move, and even more so about a possible shared studio space I’m hoping to get in on here. I’ve never had a personal work area away from home, so I’m anxious to see how it’ll effect my workflow.

We’re also in the process of hiring a new colorist for the project. I recently fell in love with Kevin Mutch’s The Moon Prince, and the simple, mostly flat color aesthetic he’s employing. I feel like a color approach like this would be a great match for the essentially clean-line drawing style I’m using for Upgrade Soul. Here’s a style test I did for the cover of chapter 2.

If anybody out there is interested, please contact me about page rates and send some samples to capitolitch@gmail.com

Upgrade Soul Theme

Alexis just finished the title theme for Upgrade Soul! This is the song that will play over the opening credits. There will be an extended album-only version of this song featuring a guitar solo, vocals and a rap breakdown. We’re saving that for a special occasion.

Upgrade Soul Theme Sample

Chapter 2, Scene 1 (uncolored).

This is the uncolored first scene of the second chapter of Upgrade Soul. This also happens to be the first scene I’ve drawn since I did the first chapter on spec 3 years ago. I’m relieved my natural drawing style hasn’t changed perceptibly, though that may not speak well of my growth as an illustrator.

Leviathan.

It’s always exciting to me when I revisit something from my childhood and find fairly obvious seedlings for my future interests and aesthetics. I recently rewatched Leviathan for the first time since I was a kid, and was kind of surprised to find a few elements I may or may not have subconsciously cribbed, both in Upgrade Soul (the distanced controlling presence accessible only via videoconference), and another horror script I wrote a few years ago. The weird thing is that I don’t at all consider Leviathan to be a noteworthy part of my childhood cultural experience. Not like Robocop, Predator, Aliens, Terminator, Ice Pirates, Mad Max, or even Galaxy of Terror, to name a few. In recent years, however, I have fallen in love with Leviathan’s screenwriter, David Webb Peoples (12 Monkeys, Blade Runner, Unforgiven, Blood of Heroes), so maybe the film’s influence was more insidious than I give it credit for.

Gestation 2.

Around the same time Tom Herpich did his Upgrade Soul character designs, I illustrated a sample scene as a tone test. This scene was later cut from the script, and the art style I’m now employing is vastly different, but if I’d committed to finishing Upgrade Soul then, there’s a good chance this is what it might have looked like.

Gestation.

Upgrade Soul has gone through several metamorphoses to get to where it is now. In 2007, with a mind toward taking the story down a slightly skewed path, I hired the utterly amazing Tom Herpich to create designs for the story’s main characters. While we never pursued our collaboration beyond these illustrations, I cherish them no less. Tom went on to become a character designer and storyboard artist for Cartoon Network’s Adventure Time series.

Death Theme.

The first track completed by Alexis for the Upgrade Soul score.

“Death Theme”

The Team.

Upgrade Soul is a highly collaborative project. In addition to previously described contributions by myself and Erik Loyer, Upgrade Soul will feature an original interactive score by experimental hip hop luminary Alexis Gideon. I’ve been a fan of Alexis’ singular musical sensibility from the first time I heard it, and Alexis and I collaborated, with Shelley Short, Becca Taylor and Cynthia Star, on his psychedelic animated rap opera, Video Musics 2: Sun Wu Kong. Erik’s design for the Reader features music as a prominent element, and Alexis’ music will dynamically accompany a truly immersive comics reading experience.

Introduction.

I first began working on Upgrade Soul at the same time that I began working on my first graphic novel, The Changers, in 2001. I self-published The Changers in 2003, and intended Upgrade Soul to be a fairly immediate follow-up. Many factors have contributed over the years to the prolonged gestation of Upgrade Soul. Most notable among them was that I simply lacked the confidence to commit to it. I didn’t feel comfortable enough as a writer to tackle what had grown into a very dense plot and I didn’t feel comfortable enough as an artist to do justice to what I’d determined would be the most realized story I was capable of writing.

In late 2007, I completed the final draft of the script and pitched the book to publishing contacts I’d made following the success of The Changers. By then, however, any momentum I’d achieved after The Changers had slowed to a halt, and I was unable to find a home for such an uncommercial story from an unknown creator. I sat on the story for three more years, during which time I did, among other things, two interactive comics projects with acclaimed interactive artist Erik Loyer. One of these projects was the experimental interactive comic, Ruben & Lullaby, for the iPhone.

In the spring of 2010, Erik described to me an interactive comics reader he’d begun developing for iPad. The Reader pointed toward nothing that’d been done with comics before, promising a new level of depth and immersion by taking full advantage of the unique capabilities of the iPad platform. Erik expressed his interest in adapting Upgrade Soul for the reader, as the inaugural release for what I felt certain would become a groundbreaking way to read comics electronically. After some hesitation, and even after spending some time collaborating with Erik on a new story, I decided this outlet would be the perfect impetus to finally complete Upgrade Soul, almost exactly 10 years after its conception.