Upgrade Soul has moved!

If you’re looking for the latest Upgrade Soul news and events, please go to and like our Facebook Page, which is updated on the regular.

If you’d like more information on Upgrade Soul, such as trailers and specs, check out Opertoon’s Upgrade Soul page.

Or, if you’re ready to get down to business, just download the app, FOR FREE, on the App Store!

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

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.

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.