Hi from Ben!

So, you're here! Maybe you're thinking "Wow, I've followed one or more of these creators for years and I'm all in on any stories they have to tell." Or perhaps you found the campaign on Booktopia, thought it looked cool, and pledged on that basis alone. Or a friend referred you, promising that it's awesome.

However you got here, I want you to feel at home, so today I'm going to share a bit more about the creative journey that led to the development of American Geniuses. But to understand the beginning, I have to start at the end, like one of the movies that gives the audience critical information before any of the characters know it!

I spent twenty years in the film and game industry, developing and producing dozens of beloved movies and shows, and not knowing that I was neurodivergent. I didn't know until January of this year! But art tends to tell on the artist. We write the secrets about ourselves into fictional characters before they ever reach our conscious mind.

American Geniuses is my reflection on living life as a person stuck at the intersection of giftedness, ADHD, and autism. It's a deeply personal story that explores the struggles of kids who are celebrated for their differences, as long as their differences don't make other people uncomfortable. As many "formerly gifted kids" discover as they move into adulthood, the promises that adults made to them—that they were special, they they would change the world, and that they were destined for achievement at the highest levels—quickly meet the reality of bills, make-work jobs, and burnout. The spark fizzles and they wonder what happened to their potential. They feel like failures who could have succeeded if only they had more energy, more motivation, or more executive function.

I was one of the lucky ones: I masked well enough (more or less), learned how to turn fear of imminent failure into adrenaline-fueled productivity, and found myself telling stories that enough people cared about to support my career in the arts. I'm still working in the arts, happier than I've ever been, making stories, games, and music as a full-time career.

But so many of my closest neurodivergent friends hit the burnout wall and had to give up their dreams. And after twenty years making movies, I hit that same wall during the pandemic and crashed. Hard.

Returning to the world of American Geniuses felt like returning to a story that, despite its fantastical setting, was deeply personal. I hadn't been trying to write "normal characters." All of these kids knew they were special—that's what everyone always told them!—and were still at a place in their lives where they believed in themselves and their futures. And so I started wondering what would need to change in their worlds for them to realize their potential and make a real difference. What were the forces that would soon start demanding conformity and compliance from them? What would they need in order to retain their spark of genius as they moved into adulthood?

The answers are what this story is about. In one sense it's wish fulfillment: "What if we kept our dreams and passions alive?" In another, it's a recipe for reclaiming the weird, broken, and often hidden parts of ourselves from the people who just wanted us to shut up and be normal. Mostly, it's about community and mutual aid. The more we understand and see each other, the more we can SUPPORT each other and start to rekindle the sparks of genius that we each carry.

Writing manuals and teachers say to "write what you know." I'm not sure that's accurate. Maybe we should spend more time writing what feels good, or true, what makes our hearts alight. Even before I knew what I was doing, it felt right to create characters who weren't "normal." Instead of the Hollywood "everyman" character, meant to stand in for the audience's point of view—not too smart, not too different, just average and relatable—these kids would delight in their special interests without worrying about whether an average movie-goer would get the details. There would be no designated "audience translator" to rephrase their words for easy comprehension. They could be experts.... no, GENIUSES. Unapologetically.

At the end of the day, I love the original definition of "genius." We all carry it. Genius is the part of us that makes us unique, where our passions, loves, hopes, and dreams reside. It's what makes us different. It's the part that so much of the world does its best to kill. Genius typically doesn't make money for the machine. Genius is busy getting excited about a cool new flower, or the history of ants, or perfecting poached eggs. Genius is letting ourselves be drawn into the joy of discovery.

This story was where I let my own "genius" free to play. As the characters came alive, and began making demands of the narrative, they all engaged in that same quest, for the freedom to be who they were. And they ultimately made the hardest discovery: that they couldn't do it alone.

I'll share another day about the "American" part of the title. (As a recent emigrant from the USA to Canada, where I'm now a citizen, I have complicated thoughts.)

Thanks for reading!

The two weeks after a campaign are always a strange sort of limbo, but as of today BackerKit has released project funds and we can officially get to work!

Here's what to expect in the upcoming months:

Stay tuned, we have so much more to share!

- Ben

Wow, thank you all for your support on this experimental campaign... for a project that you haven't read yet!

Michelle, Natalie, and I are stunned by the early trust you've shown for us as creators and we can't wait to share the story of American Geniuses with you.

Over the next few weeks and months, we'll be inviting you to our private working Discord server, where you'll get to experience new pages long before they reach the public. We'll have fun including you in the process as we prepare pitch packages for potential publishers, enhance and deepen character relationships, and continue to translate words into images worth many more words than would FIT on the page.

And of course, thanks to your generous support, we'll be putting together and manufacturing a beautiful, collectible, and very exclusive deluxe printing of our first issue. That's pretty exciting!

(As a reminder, our prologue and sketch book are available right here, to give you a taste of the story that we're telling.)

With gratitude,
Ben, Michelle, & Natalie

When a project is at an early stage like this one, before its public release, pledges often happen on the basis of trust in the creators, or interest in the story, or other in tangibles. After all, you haven't seen enough to fall in love with the story yet!

That's why the team thought it might be fun to annotate the pages that we've released so far, so we can hint at the story and development that's gone into the process.

PAGE ONE

Before we could create this page, we had to research the history and symbolism of Chinese jewelry. In addition to resources on the internet, we visited museums, checked out several books, and then had to decide where to deviate from historical practices for story purposes. We also decided that Xiumei's amulet, which dates back to the Ming Dynasty, had probably been rebuilt several times over the centuries. After all, it's been in active use for almost seven-hundred years—parts are going to degrade and decay, aside from the pearl at its center.

Before China closed its doors to the outside world, the country was part of a vast ocean-based trading network that stretched through South-east Asia and all the way to the east coast of Africa. During the Ming Dynasty, seven treasure fleets were commissioned to engage in trade, bringing back wonders from across the known world.

While his work has been debunked, we were inspired by the work of pop historian Gavin Menzies, who proposed the one of these treasure ships circumnavigated the world in 1421. There are also fascinating archeology artifacts on the west coast of the Americas suggesting that ships from China and Japan occasionally ended up on those continents (intentionally or not). From there, it wasn't hard to imagine a treasure ship blowing off course, getting lost in the Pacific Ocean, and.... well, you'll see for yourself.

We chose a ship from the seventh and final treasure fleet, so that its loss at sea could help motivate the end of that program (although politics were much more to blame.)

The ship design is based on historical paintings, photos of modern Chinese models, and a ton of reference photos that Ben took of a model in the Chicago Museum of Natural History.

While we originally imagined a mechanical sphere device capturing part of the ship and dragging it under the ocean, after much discussion and research about the pressure that different materials could withstand at different depths, as well as the limits of human endurance under fast pressurization, we switched to what you see on the page here. Is it magic? Is it technology? That's not answered for another hundred pages. In either case, it maintains safe pressure levels, because we said so.

This looks so much better as a double-page spread!

We went through many color palettes for this sequence before settling on the sepia tones of old film. While more vibrant versions were beautiful, these colors will help differentiate our flashback from when we jump to the present.

This scene didn't exist in the original screenplay! It emerged out of the storyboarding process, through a half-dozen iterations. Similarly, the text in the prologue was the last piece of the puzzle. We didn't write it until the art was complete. The prologue was originally much more of a mystery, but since we know the entire story, it became an opportunity to seed all of the elements that pay off later in the script.

This moment was part of the plan for the very start. We know that the deckhand had to come back up, that it had to be much later, and that he needed to be transformed by his experience. It also meant developing visual answers to a number of things that we won't see until Volume 2 or 3, so that it's consistent with our worldbuilding when we finally arrive at wherever he's been for the last hundred years.

Another page that was supposed to be all images, with no text, but the opportunity to tease a context that won't become clear until the final pages for the story was too good to miss. Bookends are so narratively satisfying!

This piece of dialogue has had more discussion than anything else in the 140 page script! We'll probably keep editing it. It's so very 80's Cartoon Villain, but we know that the desire for geniuses has to be stated explicitly to set up the title page. Stay tuned for more rewrites, or to tell us in the comments how you would do it.

This piece was so much fun! It's not part of the story: we decided we want to do some kind of class photo to introduce the characters, their relationships, and their personalities. It's a trip seeing these characters after writing and rewriting them for so long, especially knowing their hopes, dreams, secrets, and wounds. They're all kids who are trying to navigate a world that doesn't understand them, all while maintaining social cool and keeping their insecurities hidden. 

So we're curious: without having read the first volume, who do you think these people are? What do you imagine each one wants?

With that, thanks for reading and we'll catch you with the next update.