Worlds Beyond Number premiered in March 2023. The show and company were started by TTRPG powerhouses and close friends Brennan Lee Mulligan, Aabria Iyengar, Lou Wilson, and Erika Ishii. Their first epic fantasy campaign was “The Wizard, The Witch, & The Wild One.” Now they are bringing that story to life on the page! Partnered with Skybound, Worlds Beyond Number is adapting “The Children’s Adventure” into a graphic novel. The project was fully funded on Kickstarter in only four minutes. Following this, fans have continued to raise funds for the project, with over $1.75 million raised.  

Thus far “The Children’s Adventure” has been a story only available to Patreon members. A prelude to the larger epic of “The Wizard, The Witch, & The Wild One” was the summer this trio of heroes met. While at Grandma Wren’s cottage, these three mischievous rascals are brought together through a series of unexpected events. This magical summer they form a bond only children can, fueled by love, curiosity, friendship, magic, and more.

In an exclusive interview with Temple of Geek, Mulligan, Wilson, and Ishii share details about their Kickstarter graphic novel. They praise artist Sarah Webb, writer Jadzia Axelrod, and Skybound. They tease what fans can expect from the adaptation of the “Children’s Adventure,” including Ishii’s one-shot. The trio also shares their hopes for future adaptations of Worlds Beyond Number stories.

Worlds Beyond Number Cast Is Beyond Grateful For Their Fans

Temple of Geek: This Kickstarter has made more than a million dollars.

Lou Wilson:

Unbelievable!

Brennan Lee Mulligan:

Caitlin, you’re not lying. That’s wild. That is wild. From the bottom of our hearts, an enormous thank you to everybody who’s not only joined us by the Fireside, but everybody who has discovered the campaign, whether through Kickstarter or whether through us partnering with Skybound, or just people that are fans of the incredible work of Jadzia Axelrod and Sarah Webb, who were delighted to have led the vanguard on creating this incredible book, and their work has been just stunning. So, it’s a huge gift and an honor.

Temple of Geek: How did it feel to take a solely audio project and move it into a fully visual medium? It’s not a book where it’s written; it’s a comic; it’s a visual medium. So, you sort of flipped on the opposite side of a podcast.

Brennan Lee Mulligan:

Yeah. The two extreme polarities. I think I made a joke somewhere that if you listen to the podcast while reading the graphic novel, your brain will synthesize it into watching an animated movie. It will be both.

Lou Wilson:

It’s going to work. That’s how it works. That’s how we planned it.

Erika Ishii:

Well, you know how you’re like, oh, “Dark Side of the Moon”; if you start it and then you watch “Wizard of Oz,” it’s like the full experience. That’s what it is; you have to listen to “Children’s Adventure” as you’re reading it for the full experience.

Brennan Lee Mulligan:

Precisely, precisely.

Capturing The Whimsy Of The Children’s Adventure In Umora

Temple of Geek: Can’t wait to do that! Brennan, what was most important to you for the visuals of Umora and having that shown to people? What were the key aspects where you were like, “I want to make sure this is included and this is the feeling that people get from it”?

Brennan Lee Mulligan:

Skybound had brought a number of incredible artists to us, and I think that Umora is a very vast world that has a lot of influences, but I think that for me it was less about depicting simply the world of Umora and really dedicated and focused on depicting the world of “The Children’s Adventure.” I think that was really significant to us. Sarah’s art is just pure magic. Whimsy sometimes has like a connotation of just being childish, but I think actually what Sarah’s work does is it’s soft and glowing and magical and warm but also expansive.

And it also has that thing that part of why we did “The Children’s Adventure” first is there are so many TTRPGs and, by the way, so many fantasy properties, actually more broadly, that start with the whole world. You go to “Lord of the Rings,” and Galadriel, the first “Fellowship of the Ring” movie, starts with Galadriel being like the last alliance of elves and men. You start really, really big and then you go small. And I think what was interesting about Umora was that that’s actually the opposite of how being a child works.

You know Mom and Dad before you know people, and you know your house before you know your city, and you know your city before you know your country, and you know you find out the history of what produced you after you already understand your position and your family. And so much about the visuals of Umora is like you meet Umora through Grandma Wren’s cottage, and piece by piece the world gets larger.

I think that was a really fun thing to try to do stylistically in how even the paneling and the framing of how Sarah and how Jadzia also scripted out how the story would be told. It’s a beautiful introduction to an expansive fantasy world through something incredibly domestic and whimsical and familial.

Temple of Geek: I could not agree more. From the sneak peek on Patreon, it had that very unique feeling when you’re a child and everything feels bigger.

Brennan Lee Mulligan:

Yes, yes, yes, yes! I really appreciate that. That everything feels so much larger and more magical. And once again, too, we do start with a little bit. We start with the Citadel. Eursulon starts in the world of spirits, but it all comes back to this cottage. Which is also how I felt as a kid, where it’s like, yeah, obviously that weird, scary bush outside, like at the perimeter of the forest line, that’s a door to another world. I know it. I know it deep in my heart. You can’t fool me.

“That Feeling Of Your World Expanding & Meeting Somebody For The First Time”

Erika Ishii:

It was interesting when we were looking at different artists; Sarah had given us a test couple of pages to show her style and storytelling, and it was the meeting of Suvi and Ame. It was that feeling of them, of your world expanding and meeting somebody for the first time, that it’s going, this is for life, and it just blew me away. I think I wanted that intimacy, those relationships, so badly to be at the forefront, especially Ame, because this is for her first summer of having friends. So that was very important to me. And also, as a huge fan of comics, I wanted to make sure that we weren’t just retelling what we had already said or that it was taking full advantage of the medium.

Lou Wilson:

100%. And I feel like going back to even the beginning of us recording the first episodes of the podcast, I had thought a lot about what adult Eursulon looked like, but actually not until we got on mic was I like, “Oh, I actually need to retrofit this like 15 years earlier to make him like a child.” So, I don’t know. I remember when I saw Sarah’s first depictions because I think the test that Sarah did for us was the meeting of Ame, Suvi, and then the snack chase of Eursulon and his sister. And I just remember being like, “Oh, you’ve nailed it.”

Because I do think there’s like … I remember playing Eursulon in the children’s campaign, and I wanted him to feel alien and weird, but there was also this kind of warmth and sweetness to that. And I think that Jadzia and Sarah captured that perfectly of like this little cuddly thing that, as excited and intrigued as he is by the world he’s found himself in, is also scared. And we also feel that, and we feel that empathy for that kind of, as Brennan is saying, what happens when you go past that bush and now you can’t see your house and now you’re not sure how to get home?

Temple of Geek: What was maybe the most surprising part of the process of bringing “The Children’s Adventure” into a graphic novel for you guys?

Lou Wilson:

I mean, I can say for me it was definitely the precision with which I think Jadzia especially captured the tone and feeling of the story with words I’d never said before. It was just to have this story take on a color and character that felt so much of it, but of someone who wasn’t. I mean, this is an incredibly intimate art form, the storytelling side on our end, and I think it just really felt like we had found the right collaborators when people could write words that felt like mine but were theirs, which I think is something we’ve talked about a lot of. It’s very much of this medium to be collaborative, but I think it was, I’m very used to it with these four, and it was amazing to bring in two more people and have them immediately pick it up and start running.

The Matsuri One-Shot Will Be Included In The Graphic Novel

Temple of Geek: So, a lot of times we’ll kind of see that adaptations will, like I said, tighten it, but they’ll also sometimes go beyond what we’ve seen in the original. Do we see that in this at all? Is it something where we go past, maybe not “The Children’s Adventure,” but have aspects of the story that we haven’t heard before that were incorporated into this?

Erika Ishii:

Yes. I’m very, very excited about that because our medium is improvisational, and it is just by the grace of these brilliant friends that we have the ability to pull out motifs and bring back themes and sort of slip things in there that really truly makes sense in the moment and in the bigger picture. However, spinning that out and having little scenes or even perhaps little characters that don’t necessarily appear in the moment that we have improvised, but that really drive home the themes and are true to the heart of the narrative.

And seeing that and seeing the ease with which Jadzia and Sarah just brought those to bear in our tiny adventure was such a surprise. Because there’s a certain amount of trust that we all have at the table that has been developed over years. And they were able to pull up seats to the [table] and immediately were off and running with it. We would just receive the scripts and go, “Yes, this,” or receive the pencil sketches and go, “Oh, that was definitely what I meant in the moment and should have said.”

Lou Wilson:

I think they’re really also cool flourishes that we get to do in this medium. We did the children’s campaign, wrapped it up, did it beautifully, high fives all around. And then about a year later, Erika ran this beautiful Matsuri celebration and that takes place in that timeline, but we recorded separately from that. But that has now been integrated back into “The Children’s Adventure.”

So, it exists now in the narrative of “The Children’s Adventure” as we know it. But with this new piece of storytelling that exists in the same time but wasn’t part of The Children’s Adventure” as we presented it at the start. That has now found its way into the story, influenced it, changed it, and now we have this even more full tapestry of their time at Grandmother Wren’s Cottage.

Temple of Geek: Lou read my mind because that was my next question. I’ve loved how much you guys have talked about what Sarah and Jadzia have brought into this. What was something that they maybe brought to the table that helped enhance the story in a way you couldn’t have predicted?

Brennan Lee Mulligan:

Anytime you’re working with collaborators that love what you do but know their medium really well, it’s the best of both worlds. Because I think there’s a fear in collaboration of like, “Oh, are you going to keep the spirit of what we did alive?” But I love, Erika has said this a number of times now that I really agree with, which is if you have no intention to change the source material that you’re adapting, that’s an indication that you shouldn’t do an adaptation, right? If you’re going like, “There’s nothing to be changed here in this new incredibly different medium.” It’s such a, well then, okay, you’re just saying that your podcast was perfect, and basically someone should just put drawings on the transcript, right?

That’s not what we’re saying. And I think it’s a really prescient point and it’s really well put because graphic novels are a beautiful medium. My mom was a comic book author and wrote a series of graphic novels, and it’s its own thing. And so, Jadzia, I think as a fan of “The Wizard, The Witch and The Wild One” and “The Children’s Adventure,” you go, “Oh, I understand what the heart of this is and what will best serve the story in a new medium.” When we told it in a podcast form, we made the choices that were best for it in a podcast form, but the story itself has been strengthened for this new medium in the ways that it has been changed and altered.

A couple of silent panels of character action do what would take myself and one of the players like five to seven minutes to narrate through, and you can do it on a single page with a couple of different panels really evocatively and expressively. I think that was like the thing that was, I didn’t even want to say it was surprising, but the thing that was so joyful to see is the ways that the story was enhanced by people that loved the story but know their medium down pat.

Lou Wilson:

I would tag that. I mean, I think just to emphasize that, I think there is, I don’t know if it’s crazy to say, but I’m not a child, right? I’m a grown man, and I’m a grown man. We can all agree I’m a grown man.

Brennan Lee Mulligan:

Raise your voice more when you say that. Raise your voice more when you say that.

Lou Wilson:

Yeah. I’m a grown man, but I don’t know. I think that there was even, I can feel that sense of like, I’m a grown man trying to inhabit the brain space of a seven-year-old. And I think that there is something in the flow of this adaptation that gets us just a little bit closer and earnest to that sensation. I think that Sarah’s art style feels so wondrous and childlike, and I think, as has been said, captures that sense of whimsy that I think inherently feels like the wonder of childhood. Which is something I can do my best as a grown man to perform, but I think that in this medium we really capture it.

Erika Ishii:

You are a grown man.

Lou Wilson:

Thanks guys. I would just, sorry to take a section of this interview to just kind of affirm my age, but I appreciate us creating this space.

“To See A Child Hear The Thing They’ll Spend The Rest Of Their Life Chasing”

Temple of Geek: And then like I said, I’m very happy to see the little sneak peek on Patreon. Super loved that we’re getting Nicholas and Taro and Ame’s little bit of rivalry with them. That was so fun to see in the comic. I’m wondering if there’s maybe a moment that each of you, once you got to see it on the page, were just like, “Oh, I love this even more than I did the first time.”

Lou Wilson:

There’s a panel where Eursulon hears honor for the first time that it’s very special to see that visually in a way that, like Brennan is saying, I can narrate the expression, I can make sounds, I can do my best, but I do think there is something to, what does it mean to see a child hear the thing they’ll spend the rest of their life chasing? And I think that there’s a panel where that happens where I think Sarah and Jadzia nailed it.

Erika Ishii:

It’s so cute, but it’s also so grand. Oh my God. Yeah. Also, again, about diving deep into the medium when we were first having meetings with Skybound and I said, “Here’s my list of the kinds of things that I want when we adapt it into a different medium.” And paneling and just the storytelling specific to graphic novels was huge for me. And yeah, they nailed that specifically, definitely with Eursulon and with the world of the spirit, and with the way that panels are laid out, that was so thrilling to see, I think.

Yeah, there’s so many; seeing moments for the first time is, I don’t know, it is overwhelming. It was overwhelming, and there were times that I would, just reading the script or just seeing the test pages would cry just from a feeling of overwhelm that I can’t believe that these things that we said in this one way we get to see now.

Temple of Geek: Can you guys talk to me a little bit about working with Skybound? And why did they feel like the right partner to work with on bringing “The Children’s Adventure” to comics?

Brennan Lee Mulligan:

Skybound has been an unbelievable partner in this process. Huge shout out to Alex Antone and the entire great team over at Skybound. Their reputation speaks for them self. I mean, their relationship to Kickstarter and crowdfunding, making their campaigns really fun, really exciting. How much they understood right off the bat is that we have obviously our first most dedicated relationship is to our patrons over by the fireside. And anytime you’re taking something like a podcast that’s an ongoing project and it makes sense to be a kind of month-to-month relationship with your viewers, with your audience, versus something like a graphic novel that you make and print, you can do further printings, but it is a finite, beautiful art object, and it makes sense to fund that like it is a one-off event.

They were so understanding of how, sort of first and foremost in our minds, are our friends by the fireside. And also they just were huge fans of the work. I mean, anytime you’re approached by somebody who says, “Hey, we see this tremendous opportunity to make something really special that will be beloved by fans of Skybound’s incredible reputation with sequential art, graphic novels, and comic books; create something brand new that will serve your existing audience and allow us to make something new and exciting together.” Just top to bottom, it was very clear from the first conversations that they were the right partner for us, and it’s been a dream working with them. They’re phenomenal at what they do and also a hoot to work with, which is delightful.

Worlds Beyond Number Hopes To Continue Their Stories Through Comics

Temple of Geek: I hope that you guys are looking to expand the world of “The Wizard, The Witch, and The Wild One” past “The Children’s Adventure” into the rest of their adventures!

Erika Ishii:

We cannot confirm nor deny that there will be any comics past this one Kickstarter that we are doing with Skybound. Of course, it is our dearest wish, and speaking for myself, going rogue here, I will say that I want the full campaign. I want Solari. I want us to start in on “Solari” because I want a sort of Mobius-style comic of “Solari”, and Cram Daniel deserves its own single issue.

Brennan Lee Mulligan:

Single. Well-

Erika Ishii:

So far! Cram Daniel.

Brennan Lee Mulligan:

I will say, Caitlin, this project funded in four minutes, and I hope this does not scan as false modesty. Sometimes members of our audience will be like, “Oh, you guys must have known that we were never going to not blow this out of the water. You must have known.” You have to understand that this podcast is … There are entire echelons of success that I would have been blown away and very happy with so far, under a million dollars in 33 hours. It’s just staggering.

And for our purposes, I think that we are so floored by it. So, funded in four minutes, a million dollars in 33 hours, I think all of us are looking at that and we go, “Whoa.” I’m doing a bit. I think that there’s truly, like, looking at that feedback from our audience, is they’re excited for this work. And I think for us, we’re taking a minute to make sure that we really nail this campaign and get this right.

But after that, I would be fooling you if I didn’t communicate similarly to Erika that it feels like the sky’s the limit and that there’s so many exciting adventures to go on with this story and maybe more to the point with our audience and the people that have supported this story since day one. So, we don’t want to let you down with this campaign, but after that, baby, all the dreams are big.

Lou Wilson:

Yeah. I think that it really had similar feelings to when we launched the Patreon the first time. And I think that to Brennan’s point, it’s like nobody has to show up. We like telling the story. We’re excited to do these things, but I think it would be … I would never put us in the basket of people who are like, “It’s going to be a slam dunk.” I think we love what we do, and we hope that it resonates with people, and the continual signs of support and excitement around this work and its many forms, I think, just gets us excited to keep doing what we love to do.

Erika Ishii:

Yeah. Also, not to be a bummer, but making things is hard. Not just the process, but right now the supply chain and costs and also the industry at large. I don’t want to gloss over that aspect of it as well because nothing is guaranteed for art right now in any of the industries, and comics is not excluded from that. So, I want to live in a world, though, in which independent art can continue to be funded and can continue to be made for everybody in the industry and for us, and I’m not going to ever take that for granted.

The “Worlds Beyond Number: The Official Graphic Novel” Kickstarter will end on July 15 at 12pm PDT. You can donate here to back this project now.