Actor Daniel Wu is joining forces with comic book creator Sean Chen (Iron Man, Wolverine, Batman Beyond) to bring the world of Evermind to the comic book medium. Evermind is a sci-fi series set in the near future following scientist Lucas Zhang, who creates a technology that allows the human mind to control robots. It’s being used in the military and at a theme park, but the two worlds will collide, causing havoc and mayhem.

Daniel Wu is no stranger to sci-fi and fantasy with projects including American Born Chinese, Westworld, Reminiscence, Into the Badlands and Warcraft. The upcoming Evermind series has him teaming up with 247 Comics and Sean Cean, including lending his likeness to the character of Lucas Zhang.

247 Comics has turned to Kickstarter to help new readers and fans discover the project, and it has already surpassed its goal of $10,000. Currently, it has over $24,000 in pledges, and there’s still time until the campaign ends on October 19, 2023.

“It started out with this drawing that I had a long time ago,” Chen tells Nerd Reactor. “I did, maybe 20 years ago, a picture of a robot gorilla and a robot girl. And I noticed that people kind of went back and looked at that drawing quite a bit. And I’m not sure exactly what they saw on it, but it seems like it had potential for a story. So I brought Carl Choi [247 Comics], and when he looked at the image, he says, ‘Well, I think there is a story here, so why don’t we try to develop it.'”

The two would work on the project for a couple of years, and once it was put together, Chen asked Choi, “What does the main character look like?”

“Draw Daniel Wu,” Choi replied.

Chen designed a character who looked similar to Wu but made him a lot older to give him more of a professor look. Later on in the process, Choi had the idea of bringing Wu onto the project, and the rest is history.

“I came on a little bit later in the process,” Wu explained to Nerd Reactor. “But yeah, I was pleasantly surprised to see this character that looks kind of like me. And so obviously, Carl’s trick worked by bringing me in. I was very interested in that realm already, being kind of a comic book fan when I was younger, for sure. And then fell off, like I would say, in the early 2000s, for a bit. And then more recently, in the past few years, getting back into graphic novels. My daughter is 10, so she’s into it. So I kind of got back into it with her.”

The creative side of comic books has been enlightening for Wu due to it being a faster process compared to TV and film.

“The TV and film world can be frustrating sometimes because things take forever to get done,” Wu said. “I was telling everyone the other day that I was working on a project for five years, and then the bottom fell out from it. So you get a much slower, cumbersome process because it involves a lot more people. And then you put inhibitions on yourself like budget and this and that because you got to make it at some point. Whereas in the comic book realm, you don’t have to put those limitations on yourself.

“Really, what we’re limited by is what Sean can draw, and everyone knows Sean can draw everything. So it’s really about how much time he wants to put into that. And so then it becomes a very uninhibited creative process where there’s a lot of world-building in this. And there’s a lot of really interesting characters that we can explore fully. And you don’t get that in the TV film world oftentimes. So it was a nice way to go carte blanche creatively, and just go crazy on it.”

Family is an important element in the story, and Lucas Zhang struggles with balancing his professional life and his private life.

“We see this oftentimes, like people who are geniuses at things out in the outer world, but their personal life is in shambles,” Wu said. “I think Lucas Zhang is not immune to that. He’s had this singular desire for success because certain things have happened in his life that have given him this tremendous chip on his shoulder. And because of that, he’s neglected things like family and the things that should be really important to you. And so that then becomes the engine and the driving force of the story.”

For more information and to pledge, visit Evermind’s Kickstarter page.

You can check out the full video interview below: