SDCC 2019: ‘Stan Lee’s Alliances: A Trick of Light’ Author, Co-Creators Talk Creating A Universe, Working With Stan, And More!

I’ve always been a huge reader, but as life shifts and changes, and commuting takes up more of my day, I found myself not making as much time for it. Then I discovered Audible, and it changed my world! In the couple of years since joining Audible I have listened to almost 50 different titles! A lot while commuting, but also while cleaning, gardening, getting ready in the AM… you get the picture. So naturally my interest was piqued when, shortly before commencing my first SDCC trip, I received an invitation to have an experience and do an interview with the creators of a new Audible Original, Stan Lee’s Alliances: A Trick of Light!

Not only was this an Audible project, but it was also one of the final collaborative projects from the illustrious Stan Lee, in a totally new universe, with totally new characters, created for a totally new format! Needless to say, my interest was extremely piqued. That being said I almost didn’t jump at this opportunity because I didn’t know if I was a good choice for the job. It’s not like it would be my first interview (I interviewed my face off at last years PAX West) but this project just felt so precious and special, and like it needed to be handled with such respect and skill. I wasn’t sure if I could do it justice. However with much support and encouragement from my Geekscape mentor (AKA Derek!), I decided to say yes to this amazing opportunity!

On Thursday, July 18th, the first Full day of SDCC, I was able to head into the A Trick of Light activation. This was a super neat experience, and I wish everyone was able to try it out. The activation allows you to experience excerpts from the story, narrated by the incredible Yara Shahidi, accompanied by captivating lighting sequences and effects. There are no characters or scenes laid out in front of you, you are required to create the image of the characters through your imagination, but the way light is used inside the activation creates an atmosphere that plunges you directly into the story alongside the characters.

The activation kicks off by having you experience the storm that changes the life of one the main characters; through lights, and mirrors, and narration you feel immersed into this character’s experience. You are then lead into, as Ryan so eloquently described, a light labyrinth. Here you find yourself turning corners and coming to dead ends, where there is a cone of sound around you, allowing you to have a private-feeling experience of the narration, while being mesmerized by an accompanying lighting sequence. As you go to leave, you are lead down a hallway, accompanied by Stan Lee’s voice, and I doubt I was the only one to tear up at this point in the experience!

Saturday hit and that meant it was time for the interview! This was meant to be a round table interview, which means that a group of interviewers sits down (in this case at a literally round table) with the people to be interviewed, and take turns asking questions. My expectation was this would be beneficially because other people would have really smart questions that I would get to hear the answers to, and that it would be extra stressful because I would be feeling self conscious in front of peers. I was very wrong.

As it turned out, during the time slot that I was there, it was myself and one other interviewer, Josias Arebalo with The Comic Syndicate, accompanied by co-creators Luke Lieberman and Ryan Silbert, as well as co-writer Kat Rosenfield. Turns out I needn’t have been nervous at all! Everyone was very nice, and the interview went off without a hitch. Together we asked a few good questions, and more importantly heard a lot of really great explanations about how this project was developed, the process of making it come to life, and how important and exciting it is to have developed it for the Audible platform.

So please take a read and enjoy getting inside the head of these incredibly creative and talented humans!

Josias Arebalo: All right guys, we are here reporting from San Diego Comic-Con 2019. We’re here with some very special guests from Stan Lee’s Alliances: A Trick of Light. Please feel free to introduce yourselves.

Luke Lieberman: Luke Lieberman. I’m one of the co-creators.

Kat Rosenfield: Kat Rosenfield, author.

Ryan Silbert: Ryan Silbert, co-creator.

JA: And we have another very special guest.

Mikaela Maxwell: I’m Mikaela Maxwell, I’m with Geekscape.

JA: If you guys could please just break down exactly what this experience is and how it came about. Start off with a little bit of everything, that way our listeners can get a better background.

KR: I think we should talk about the book first. This is an Audible Original. One of the most innovative, and one of the last collaborations that Stan [Lee] completed in his lifetime. It’s a totally immersive experience and it’s the story of, I’m gonna keep broad strokes here, two young people who have gifts and whose connection with each other is so powerful that it could save the world or it could destroy it.

JA: Awesome premise already! Since it is one of Stan’s last projects he was working on, how did it grow from there? How did it come about and what was the collaboration process?

LL: I met Stan in the year 2000 when I was a film student at NYU. At that point Stan was very excited about the Internet and what it could mean for us as a tool to communicate ideas, and for people to communicate with each other. Cut to about a decade and a half later, Stan was my mentor so I knew him throughout, but you cut to a decade a decade and a half later and he became much more keenly aware of how that tool was being misused and how the Internet had become a tool for division. Manipulating people’s perception and manipulating people, and how the anonymity of the Internet was causing us to dehumanize each other. This story is very much about finding real connections in a, you know, virtual space. The idea of A Trick Of Light is that all of these digital realities, virtual realities, augmented realities, and just what you see on your phone or on your screen every day, that’s not real. That’s A Trick Of Light.

RS: Just the brass tacks of it: this was a multi year process of working and world building, creating many characters and many story threads, and the foundations of what became Alliances. Then, once the choice was made to introduce the story through A Trick of Light, bringing it out as an Audible Original was something very exciting for all of us, especially Stan, because it allowed us to tell this story and introduce this universe in a really immersive way. These are characters developed for audio, and it allows you then to have a very personal connection and, co-authored with Kat here, it brings you inside the journey of Cameron, Nia, Juaquo and Zoll, and all of the other characters, in a way that really no other format allows. So that’s what was really special for us in terms of how we decided to release the project.

RS: Now in terms of where we’re sitting right now, we are at SDCC at what was a mind blowing experience for the three of us because we walked in here, and it is a completely dark room [with] basically a light labyrinth that brings you inside of the story in a way that I have never, ever, experienced. Truly I wish all the listeners could come step into Fourth Avenue and walk through the A Trick of Light installation because it is mind blowing!

KR: This activation really encapsulates perfectly how gripping it is to be told a story in audio. So many of the other spaces at Comic-Con rely on visual spectacle, in here it’s really just about the story; and it’s about the voice of Yara Shahidi, our incredible narrator.

JA: The writing process for this, how long did it take?

LL: As Ryan was saying, the world building started years ago. We were just building out characters and story threads, and when Stan decided that he wanted to introduce this universe through a long form narrative, then Audible became an opportunity. First of all for Stan I think just working the audio medium it was something he hadn’t done a million times and at that point in his career that got him excited.

RS: Yeah.

KR: He’d never done it, it was completely new!

LL: Right. Exactly. Finding a new storytelling medium for Stan Lee in his 90s…

MM: What an incredible opportunity!

LL: That’s when we took this this universe that was created, and the characters, and started to focus them into a single narrative, which is A Trick of Light, the story that introduces you to the characters in the universe.

RS: The foundations of the Alliances universe come from the question that Stan asks in the intro which is: ‘What is more real? The world we’re born into or the one we create for ourselves?’. You know as fans you wait your whole life to hear Stan ask that ‘what if’ question. Cause we’ve read all of that work, and to hear that it unlocked so many opportunities and potential, to develop Alliances, to introduce Cameron and Nia through Trick of Light. That question is is so meaningful to all three of us and Stan.

JA: How big is the space we are in right now? [For the A Trick of Light SDCC Activation]

LL: Well there is this room, which is where you’re first introduced to it, then there’s a hallway that takes you to a larger space, and then there’s a hallway with Stan’s audio that brings you out.

RS: For listeners [or readers] you walk in and it says here ‘The Great Beyond’, and that’s where you experience the beginnings of the journey of the story. Right, and you go into the great beyond…

LL: The great beyond lies within.

RS: ‘The great beyond lies within’, which is from the book. Each space is developed and each little experiences develop from a piece of the narrative. There are massive audio modules that allow you to focus in on Yara’s terrific performance and the terrific writing of Stan and Kat, and really walk out of this experience with a different understanding of the story in a way.

KR: I just want to add on, because we haven’t actually made this explicit yet, what you’re doing in this activation is that you’re experiencing our main character Cameron’s transformation from an ordinary person into something a little bit superhuman.

LL: Cameron 2.0.

KR: Yeah, Cameron 2.0.

JA: I know you’ve been working on the project for years, but for the activation in general how long did it take to put something like this together?

RS: We don’t know.

LL: We are the wrong people to ask!

RS: We create the world, there are geniuses here that create this world. I think what’s really moving about this installation, not only as people who have worked on the project for so many years, is Stan has such an amazing connection with fans. We’re sitting at this table because he built the fan community basically brick by brick prior to the 60s and then into the 60s with the Marvel Age. You know, through soapboxes and through his talks on campus, and then came connections, and then came the Internet. Prior to that was sending letters around from penpals, through the fan pages. Here it’s great because you get to experience the Stan Lee story with fans. Then on the way out Stan, is no longer with us, but he is present. As you exit the intro plays and it’s very very moving. For us during this part of the experience we really miss him, because this is what he really enjoyed so much, he was a long [time] mentor of Luke’s, and you know this is really special activation experience.

KR: He feels present in this moment, not just because you hear his voice as you leave this experience, but you just see how excited everyone is to share in this story, and we’re so excited, and it really just feels like he’s kind of here.

LL: Also actually when you leave and you’re hearing his voice it just remind me of how excited he was to work. This was a project he was excited about, and you sort of hear it. And Stan’s excitement is contagious, it’s infectious, and it gets all of his collaborators excited, it gets you motivated.

MM: So Alliances is a universe, does that mean there will be other things to come of this?

KR: Well for the moment we are very focused on the release of the Audible Original, we’ve been working on this for a long time and couldn’t talk about it for the longest time because it was all under cloak and dagger and it was super secretive. So you know, we’ll say that universes tend to expand and it would be a little weird if this one didn’t. But right now we’re very focused on A Trick of Light and just getting the fan community excited to be part of this journey and to get in with these characters.

MM: Do you think that this particular Audible Original could expand into VR or something? Because walking through this experience I could totally see sitting at home in like a VR world kind of experiencing the light and sound and stuff all at once.

KR: That is a cool idea.

RS: I think one of the things that’s so beautiful about audio is that, I believe and we all believe because we’re working in it, it is like the most immersive experience. There’s a lot of spectacle to virtual reality, but when it comes down to it 52% of your experience in a film, probably more but let’s just go with 52% percent, is the sound. You forget it because it becomes part of the story, it becomes part of the backdrop, but it is so important. So I think the most immersive way to experience the story would be through audio.

KR: I will say we we have a print edition coming out in September. So you know there’s a lot of raw material here that I think can function really well in any number of mediums.

LL: When we were talking about how [Stan] was excited about the opportunity to do something he hadn’t done before, which was an Audible story, one of the things that got him excited was the idea that his fans would collaborate with him and that they would visualize the story, and that they could be the [Jack] Kirby or the [Steve] Ditko and they would create their own versions of the characters. We didn’t really overly describe the characters because we wanted everyone to be able to sort of visualize their own version of Cameron and Juaquo and Nia… and Zoll… and Six [and another character that I could not make out on the audio]

KR: You just named off every single character!

RS: You just named off every character!

KR: We never talk about Barry, the old man.

LL: Yeah we really should, he is like one of my favourite characters.

MM: Just out of curiosity I feel like I’m noticing a trend of technology and humans kind of intermingling in a way that they haven’t previously, in comics and movies and stuff like that. Do you have any ideas on why that is, why that’s happening at this point in time.

KR: I think it’s happening in real life! [Said simultaneously with one of the guys, to peels of laughter from everybody]

KR: What this story is really reflective of is what it’s like to live right now, in a world where technology influences our lives, where it’s our primary medium for connecting with and communicating with each other. Sometimes it’s even our exclusive medium for knowing somebody. So I think that this story is another way, a different angle, to explore the anxieties and the questions and the concerns that arise from already living in an age where technology is so much a part of our lives. It’s already a part of our identities, you know, you shape this self online. So I think it flows very naturally from something that’s actually happening.

LL: We’re not experts in technology, we’re not scientists or anything, but we did a lot of research to just kind of see where things were at, and what was coming and what was around the corner, to sort of inform the storytelling.

RS: With A Trick of Light, as Luke was saying, we did do real world research, we went up to Cornell, Stanford, the Human Interaction Lab where the Oculus was created and were informed by a lot of the real [technology] that the fantastical was developed off of. But all of Stan’s stories, and I think this is why his stories tend to stand the test of time, they are mythologically based, they’re character based, but they also are set in a world that’s familiar to ours. With [Fantastic Four] or with the Hulk, these are amazing characters that can develop and be set in different kinds of context, but where they were set originally were and things that felt very real like: Spidey swings down Sixth Avenue, Hulk is dealing with the nuclear age. We hadn’t been to space at the point at which Reed Richards [of Fantastic Four] went up there [to space]; Kirby and Stan rendered that from their imagination. So great storytellers, I do think on trend, will notice and be able to set great stories and great characters inside of things that feel familiar to us. And I think that’s something that in this story Kat and Stan achieved.

JA: You know any goal starts with an idea. I’m gonna ask you guys and odd question, but it might be different for each of you as far as the answer goes. What was the most difficult thing about the project to get it to where it is now. Did you find a certain stage where it was like we’re not getting this, or part of the script, or was it more the technological aspects?

LL: The nice thing is that we have a very very experienced storyteller to kind of help. We had a Gandalf guiding us through the path, and it was a team sport. So you know, if you’re bumping up against something maybe Kat has a solution or maybe Ryan has an idea you can throw out. That I think was the benefit of the collaborative process.

KR: Yeah, I will say that when I came on board I expected it to be so much harder than it was. You know I’m coming from a background of writing novels and in my experience that’s always been a very lonely solitary thing. You spend two years just rattling around in your head trying to create something, it’s just you and hopefully you emerge at the end, back into the sun with a manuscript that’s in decent shape. Getting three more brains into the mix I thought would be difficult, you know, to kind of create that mesh. I was like oh my God how is this going to work are you going to be able to see the seems in this narrative where each person contributed something, but it’s not like that at all.

RS: The hardest thing that I bump up against is just getting creeped out every time a certain sequence happens in the Audible Original. I can’t help but hear it and be like ooh super spooky.

KR: What creeps you out?

RS: Well I don’t know, no spoilers here.

LL: Have you met Six? [All laughing]

KR: I have I lived inside his head. [laughing]

RS: Yeah. Creeps me out.

LL: Have you met Zoll?

RS: What do you mean, that happens on Sixth Avenue every day!

JA: For our listeners and audience can you let us know where we can find you, and if you are working on anything that we can get on board with?

LL: I have a mini series out now called Red Sonja: Birth of a She Devil. I also control the Red Sonja franchise so I’m sure you know everything else that’s being done on the publishing side for us!

To learn more about these crazy talented people you can find them on social media at:

Luke Lieberman: @TheRealRedSonja on Twitter

Kat Rosenfield: @KatRosenfield on both Twitter and Instagram

Ryan Silbert: @RyanSilbert on Twitter

And if you are looking for a new listen, or want to get in on the newest Stan Lee endeavour, I highly recommend heading over to Audible right now to get started on Stan Lee’s Alliances: A Trick of Light!