The Zodiac Legacy: Convergence is the newest project from Stan Lee, Stuart Moore, and Andie Tong. Hypable talked with Stuart Moore and Andie Tong about the project and building the world of Zodiac.
The Zodiac Legacy: Convergence is the latest project from Disney Press and Stan Lee’s POW! Entertainment. The story follows Steven Lee, a fourteen year old Asian American, visiting China for the first time. While on a tour of the Hong Kong museum Steven stumbles into a magical ceremony that leaves him with the power of the tiger from the Chinese zodiac. Banding together with others who have gained the power of the zodiac they must fight off Maxwell, a mercenary general who has captured the power of the dragon. Action packed and beautifully illustrated, Zodiac Legacy: Convergence is the first in a planned trilogy.
Nachie Marsham is the editor of the series. He recalls how in 2012 his boss brought him the proposal from Stan Lee’s POW! Entertainment and he thought it was a joke. “My boss, Rich, 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.” From there a team was formed with Stuart Moore set to co-author and Andie Tong set to illustrate the full length novel.
Andie Tong began work right away designing the characters. “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, of course, and Disney.”
When discussing the how much research went into the project author Stuart Moore said, “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– that’s absolutely crucial. I actually wound up with enough material from that to write a whole different kind of Young Adult novel if I wanted to, because this is at heart a superhero story. And that had to be the main focus. But, yeah, the Chinese Zodiac stuff, we want that 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.”
Tong is Chinese and was born in Asia, however he wasn’t as knowledgeable about the zodiac as he would have liked. “I would always go back and ask my mom, hey, is this right? 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. So, 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.”
Stan Lee was involved in every step of the process. Marsham recalls early on when they were designing the characters, “Stan Lee was specifically talking about some of the woman characters between the heroes and the villains. He was saying, 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.” They also made sure that the characters had different body types, were from different countries, and had very different backgrounds.
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