CLARA: Hi everyone and welcome back to Physical Kids Weekly. I'm Clara, here with Dani, and we're breaking hiatus once again to talk to Lilah Sturges and Lev Grossman about Alice's Story. Alice's Story is a graphic novel adaptation of the first book in the Magicians series, told from Alice's point of view instead of Quentin's. Pius Bak's stunning artwork complements the writing, offering a new way of understanding the story within. Lilah, Lev, welcome to Physical Kids Weekly. LILAH: Thanks for having us. LEV: Thank you. CLARA: We also want to thank you for helping with a recent project of ours to raise money for The Trevor Project, a suicide hotline for LGBT+ teens and youth. We raised $3,773 over the last five weeks. More if you include company matches. And I think a lot of people, they shared personal stories of reaching out to friends, family, therapists, even relative strangers when they needed it and how that impacted their lives. CLARA: And we heard a lot from other people who felt like they maybe couldn't do that or they couldn't reach out, saying that it really did make a difference to them, so I'm really excited about that. And we're going to announce the winners of the raffle at the end of the episode, and thank everyone who participated then. But for now, on to Alice's Story. Dani, you want to start us off? DANI: Sure. I guess the first thing we want to know is just how did this project happen? What made you think, "oh, this book needs to be a graphic novel and why tell that story from Alice's point of view?" Lev, maybe you can answer this one? LEV: I think that's multiple questions in one question. I can definitely speak to aspects of that. I always wanted The Magicians to be a comic. I always, always wanted that. I think in part because it has so much sort of comics DNA in it, so much of it comes out of Dr. Strange and especially Alan Moore, Miracle Man and Watchmen. LEV: It takes so many of its cues from comics that it made sense to me that it ought to kind of, it would express well in that medium, and it's also just very visual. It's a very visual story, you know with, there's a lot of stuff that's cool to look at. And then at the same time, the characters have all this kind of interior action going on, and comics sort of have a special gift for doing the visuals but then also giving us the interior lives of characters. And that kind of dovetails really well with just how the book works. CLARA: What did the process for the adaptation actually look like? Like where do you start? Lilah, why don't you start us off with that and then Lev you can jump in if you have anything to add. LILAH: Sure. We started out by sort of going back and forth a little bit about what the books should be, what the angle should be. And I sort of came out of the gate swinging with this idea that I wanted to do it from Alice's perspective because when I went back and re-read the novel in preparation to do this, I thought Alice is kind of the protagonist here in some ways. Quentin is the main character, but Alice makes a lot of the choices that drive the story. And that really fascinated me. LILAH: And I wanted to get a sense of what she was feeling and what she was thinking throughout all this. And so I kind of pitched that idea, and I think Lev was a little hesitant at first, but the editors really loved it. And I don't know if we bullied Lev into it or if he just relented, but I think I came up with an outline that sort of explained how it all would work, and then everyone thought, yeah, this seems like a good idea. Let's do this. CLARA: I love that. LEV: Yes, it's funny, I don't think I got it until I saw the outline. It's just funny some people's stories are shaped ... their lives are shaped like stories and some people aren't. And I sort of thought, well, if you told it from Alice's point of view, would it have kind of a beginning, middle, and end? The way story's supposed to. But the way Lilah shaped it, it just felt very naturally like it should be there. And also, Alice really, in the books, hardly ever gets to be a point of view character. CLARA: Almost never. LEV: We really only have a couple of pages in her head, and yet you know that lots of really, really cool stuff is going on in her head, because she thinks all the time and sees everything and feels things so deeply. It was kind of great the way Lilah let her finally kind of have her say. CLARA: Yeah, I think, I'm really fascinated, but I had assumed that it was a choice that maybe you made even ahead of deciding it was going to be an adaptation, that it was going to be from Alice's point of view. And it's fascinating to me that it was something that came out of that initial collaboration. LEV: Yeah. I also worried a little bit, it sort of, it sits somewhere between sort of original material and a straight up adaptation. And I think that was another thing that I sort of didn't get. Like is it going to be new material or old material? But what it does is kind of turns the original story on its head. So you get, if you ever wanted to see some of those scenes visually, you get to see them, but it just completely reinvents the story at the same time. LILAH: Yeah, and that was really important to me because I've done one or two straight adaptations of things before and it wasn't really that fun. It was just kind of yeoman work and it didn't allow me to get as creative as I like to be, and I love The Magicians so much that I really wanted to, (a) really be excited about what I was doing and also (b) get a bunch of my own words in there. CLARA: Well, and I think that's a good time ... One of the things I noticed reading through it is that most of the dialogue is pretty close to what's in the original novel. But there are a few new scenes, things we wouldn't get from Quentin's point of view because he's not there and Alice doesn't tell him about them. And the narration, on the other hand, is like pretty much entirely original, with an exception that we will talk about later, so tell me about that. Was that just about you wanting to be able to have your own words in there, or was there something specific you were trying to convey with doing it that way, like dialogue versus narration? LILAH: Sure. I think early on I decided I wanted to have the narration because it just seemed like such a great opportunity to get inside her head. And once I started writing it, it all just kind of spilled out very naturally. It wasn't that difficult. It's very close to my own voice in a lot of ways. And I really related to Alice when I read the books, and I think that was another big part of why I wanted to tell the story from her point of view. It just felt like a very natural thing to do, and it all just came out feeling very natural. CLARA: Because the narration is mostly original, it's pretty notable when it does repeat something from the books. And like for me, my favorite thing, it's used to really great effect when Alice, Quentin, Eliot, Janet and Penny are making their way through Ember's tomb led by Dint and Fen. Cause there's the scene where Quentin and Alice are fighting. It's a scene that happens in the book. They traveled to Fillory on the heels of their indiscretions, and they're scared and they're hurt and they're angry. But they're also still very much in love with one another. And after that fight, sort of narrator Alice repeats a line that belongs to the narrator in the original books. "In a way, fighting is just like using magic. You say the words and they alter the universe." And it struck me because it's in the original as well, and almost nothing for the narration is. And in the original like all the narration, it's not strictly Quentin narrating, but it's sort of from his limited point of view. It felt like at that moment when they're feeling like the most distant from each other and the most disconnected, Quentin and Alice, they're thinking the same thing. Which was like weirdly profound for me. Was that intentional? LILAH: Well, I think that sentence is one of the keystone sentences of the whole story. And it's a thing that relates all of what this magic is about in this story as a metaphor to how the way that we behave and the things that we do to other people alters of the world, and can be done so with just the thoughts in our head. LILAH: And to me that's a huge metaphor that's almost, that's made explicit there in that sentence, but sort of permeates the book. And so it was really important to me to get that sentence in there somewhere. CLARA: Lev, do you think about it the same way? Is it a linchpin for you? LEV: Yeah, of course, of course. Magic is, it's a real gift to a novelist because it's this way in which things that are inside people kind of get out and change the world. It's a sort of things ... your interior life kind of leaks into the real world in this interesting way. It's very nice the way that those sentences kind of transmigrate from one to the other, one character to the other. It is very ... it is quite moving, now that you call it out, the way that they're so far apart at that moment, but they're still feeling the same thing. DANI: Yeah. I had a couple of questions of my own. I was wondering for one, why are there a couple of characters that are in the book that are just completely missing? Richard, Anaïs. Was it just to like, break it down so it's closer to just Alice's point of view? Like did she just not care that they were there? LILAH: There's two reasons. One is that graphic novels take up a lot of space, and so I had to condense the story quite a bit in order to make it set. The other is that when these folks are doing all their preparations to go to Fillory and all the things they do in Fillory, that's a lot of characters for the artists to draw, and it becomes cluttered. The panels start to become cluttered when you have that many people in a panel at one time, so we needed to just kind of pair them down a bit. DANI: That makes sense. LEV: It's very elegantly done. It's hard to cut characters from someone's novel and have it not be kind of nails on a blackboard, but it's really quite elegantly done the way Lilah does it. And there are a lot of people walking around. I think when the Chinese translation was done of The Magicians, the translator pointed out that I lost track at some point about how many people are wandering around in Fillory. And I'm sort of like, "oh, there's seven of them" when there really are eight or something like that. Even I struggled with keeping track of them-- CLARA: I will say I miss Anaïs the sociopath just a little bit. DANI: Yeah, plus I like Richard a Little bit, because he's the one I went back to save him. LILAH: Yeah, good old Richard. LEV: [inaudible 00:11:37] the end, and then he gets cut from the graphic novel. There's no justice. CLARA: Dani, did you have another question before we ... ? DANI: Yeah, my other question was just, I was wondering if you guys asked what the characters would look like, or if you made your own interpretations together since I feel like some of the characters just generally seem to appear very different than most of those like- CLARA: I want to add to that. When I posted pictures of the graphic novel on Instagram, Arjun sent me a message and he said, "Why is Penny white?" DANI: I mean he was. CLARA: He was exactly how I imagined him, and don't worry, we talked, he's not offended. LEV: There was a lot of back back and forth actually over the character design before things got underway Pius did sketches of all the characters and sort of sent them through, and they kind of, they definitely evolved. There was some in writing that happened in order, I guess to bring them in line with sort of how they were in my head. I remember quite a bit of back and forth about all the different characters. DANI: I thought immediately when I saw Dean Fogg, I was like, he looks like Wilson Fisk, but with hair. LEV: Another character crudely whitewashed by the graphic novel. CLARA: This is separate from all of that, but I ... when I read the books I think because like Dean Fogg always comes across as so pompous, like trying to inflate himself in weird ways, I expected him to be shorter. DANI: I saw him as like goofy but also like pompous, so I totally thought of ... there's this play with Darren Criss, the Very Potter Musical, and I thought of Dumbledore in that play as the ... CLARA: I buy that. DANI: It's completely off there. LILAH: It's funny for a ... for a comic book writer, I have a fairly limited visual imagination. And so when I saw the character designs I thought, "okay, sure, why not?" CLARA: That probably comes in handy, right? Because you'd have to accept them regardless, because that's what you're working with. It probably comes in handy that you have, what did you say? It was a ... yeah, whatever you said, that comes in handy. LEV: I never asked him, but I slightly suspect that like Lilah, Pius has never watched the TV show, because he seems utterly uninfluenced by it. DANI: Wow, you've never seen the TV show? LILAH: I've never seen a single episode of it. And there's a reason, which is not because I don't want to watch the TV show, because I've heard really good things about it. It's that when I was trying to experience Game of Thrones, having read all the books and watched the show, I started to get really unclear about what had canonically happened, and it created this really unpleasant dissonance in my brain, and didn't want that to happen with The Magicians because I was literally writing a book. I think that it might have really thrown me, and I think maybe also the speech patterns that the actors might have worked their way into the writing in some ways. I'm waiting until I'm certain that there are no more Magicians books for me to write before I watch the show. CLARA: In addition to some of the stuff we talked about with original narration, there are a couple of scenes that are new, and then there's one other scene at least that's retold from Alice's perspective, like a scene that happens in the book with Quentin. CLARA: And I sort of imagined in the graphic novel that they both have had this experience at just sort of different times, so at the very end — skip ahead listeners, if you don't want spoilers — niffin Alice confronts Jane in Fillory the way that Quentin sort of does in the original novel. And Jane tells her that she orchestrated the whole thing, that there had been all of these different times that they've fought Martin and the clock was rolled back, and niffin Alice tells her, Hey, like real Alice wants you to go back and do it again, so she doesn't have to die. CLARA: But whereas in the original book, Q is not very accepting of Jane saying like, this is the best possible outcome, and Jane has to actually break the watch that allows her to wind back time to make it happen, Alice does kind of accept that answer and move on, or niffin Alice does. Why do you think that is? And this is really just a question for you as somebody who is like a reader and also, like as both readers and writers. So Lilah, why do you think it is? Why do you think Alice is more inclined to accept this answer? LILAH: One of the things that I've wanted to show is that Alice's act of sacrifice in the climax of the book is not just a way to save the man she loves, but also letting go of this incredible burden that she's been carrying her whole life, where she feels that it's her responsibility to care for others and make sure they're okay. And sort of the way Alice's niffinization is portrayed in the graphic novel is her allowing herself to be free of all that. And so that's why as she progresses as a niffin, she becomes less and less concerned with the things of humanity until eventually she stops being Alice at all and just vanishes into oblivion. CLARA: I think that's really interesting in part because of what happens in the originals as well. Right? Like we're still seeing it from Quentin's point of view, but again, book spoilers, skip ahead if you don't want to hear this. When Alice comes back in the third book, she's a different version of Alice, and one who I think has sort of ... even, she's coming back to her humanity and it comes slowly. But that thing that you're talking about, about this burden of caring for others forever is a thing that ... and putting their needs over hers is a thing that she kind of loses permanently. And that's not to say that she doesn't care for other people. Right? She absolutely does. But it's that burden, that belief that like it has to be me always. It's my responsibility. I don't know. I don't know how to ask that as a question, but I'm interested in how both of you see that and Lev, maybe we'll start with you. LEV: That's a hard question. It gets at the complexity of what happens to Alice when she becomes a niffin because it is a sacrifice and yet she also gets something as well. It's one of my favorite things in the comic, the way Lilah let's us see Alice, pre-niffin Alice, she doesn't go all at once. She sort of fades out, sort of like the Cheshire Cat, and it's a wonderful kind of writing magic trick that she does. You sort of see the fading ember of Alice's old personality, and then the reverse happens. CLARA: Right, the little blue in her eyes. LEV: It's a reversal that happens when Alice comes back, when she has to transition back to her. Yeah, she has to transition back to being a human and once you've been niffin-- CLARA: Once you go blue you never go back. LEV: You've never [inaudible 00:19:42] probably stop being completely [inaudible 00:19:45]. There's a version of that that rhymes, I don't know what it is, but yeah. DANI: Okay, when looking at the finished product, at this adaptation of a book you wrote and published a decade ago, what was that like? Do you have favorite parts and are they the same as the parts that you liked writing, or do you come at it more as a reader than a creator? LEV: It's incredible when any creative project even remotely resembles what the thing that you had intended to do when you started out with it. I've been thinking about this comic for a long time. It was a significant legal battle to actually free up the rights to do this. They first had to be grappled away from Viking and then they had to be grappled away from Syfy, and it took years of pushing literally to make this happen. LEV: It was incredibly gratifying when the finished product looked so much like what I'd hoped it would look like, and part of that was seeing things that I had always longed to see. For example, Alice's coming through the woods and finding Brakebills. In the book, we don't get it in the show, obviously, in the book we get it, narrated fairly briskly by Alice herself. But here we see it properly, we see it visually, we see it from Alice's point of view, and it's kind of glorious. It's just one of these wonderful moments. It's kind of unforgettable. It's a favorite in the fan art I notice, which is interesting for something that doesn't really happen in the books, but now we can see it in all its glory. DANI: I love the inclusion of a Jane Chatwin in Allison's story and I like ... as soon as we meet her as the cab driver, I was like, that's Jane. I just knew. CLARA: I think a lot of really ... well, it's also just, I mean it is really beautiful. I'm flipping through it right now and looking at Julia doing the Ugarte's Prismatic Spray, right? It's gorgeous. It's spectacular. It's also like a version of Julia that you would never get in the show because she's genuinely gaunt and suffering in a way that I don't think Stella Maeve could possibly be made to be. CLARA: And I don't know, there's all these little bits. There is one thing I noticed. We don't ... speaking of characters who get kind of put off to the side, we see Humbledrum but we don't get to talk to him. LILAH: I had to cut all the Humbledrum stuff. It was the worst thing that ever happened to me because I love that there's so much and the only reason he's there at all is because I made a mistake in my revision and left him in. And actually he was actually intended to be cut entirely because I just, I ran out of space and I was really struggling to find ... because I passed the upper limit for pages by a lot. And next thing you know it's gonna be a little longer than we thought. And they kept saying, "Okay, but not too much longer though," and I was like, "No, not too much longer." And then there would be two scenes more. CLARA: I mean I empathize with you. I would have trouble cutting anything from that book too. LILAH: That's true. But the interacting with with Quentin and the bear is some of my favorite bits. CLARA: It's so good, it's so good. Well, David Reed will at least be happy to know that you had trouble. LEV: The tree turned out really well, though. CLARA: Why do you think that is. Lev? Why do you think people are so obsessed with this talking bear that has like two lines? LEV: *I'm* obsessed with the talking bear. I'm so proud of the talking bear. I don't know. He's very appealing. I mean you would never ever want to actually talk to him. LEV: I feel like I grasped some truth of bearishness that had previously not made it to the page. I don't know, I don't know. I am very proud. Although I do want to say that he did the tree in ... the talking tree, and the talking tree came out really well. He's really weird looking in the comic in a way that I feel like he's not sort a wise old ent, gnarled with decades of wisdom. CLARA: No, though, I really appreciate Josh's ent joke as a, uh, aficionado. LEV: I have to stress, I did not think of that joke. That joke was was given to me, slash stolen by me, from my friend Matt, who's a producer on The Simpsons, a professional comedy writer in reality. I am not as funny as that. DANI: That's great. CLARA: Well, Lilah, what was the most satisfying part of this process for you? What are your favorite parts? LILAH: There's a couple of parts that I really like. I enjoy the way some of the things that I came up with that aren't in the novel came out. And what really made me happy was knowing that Lev enjoyed them and felt like they belonged. That felt really good to me. LILAH: There's a couple of scenes with Alice and Penny where you sort of see Penny's sort of growing infatuation with Alice and the difficulty having dealing with that because she wants to care for Penny, but she can't have these feelings for him. LILAH: And the scene, I think one of my favorite bits is the scene where Alice and Penny actually have sex because it's so sad and painful and it just came out exactly the way I wanted it to. DANI: I never thought I would feel sorry for Penny. But after reading the graphic novel I do. CLARA: Oh, I totally didn't, I actually had the opposite reaction, like that scene of the two of them on the dock where he is doing like ... it's like the worst dude behavior where he is in love with her and- DANI: I mean it is. CLARA: ... and he feels so entitled to her attention and affection and he's basically doing the like friend zone bullshit where he is upset that she doesn't love him back and views that as her crime. DANI: I didn't feel bad for him then, but I did feel bad for him later. CLARA: I think I didn't feel bad for him later because of that, because like ... I mean I do a little, it's not, I'm not entirely heartless, but I think that he refused to see her as a real person, right? Like through the whole thing. CLARA: And she says that at some point, I can't remember exactly where, but he is not, he's seeing her as a prize to be won. And so I don't know how much sympathy I have for him being sad that he thinks he won the prize and then realizing that that's not real, that like she had a different set of motives and intentions, and she had some complex thoughts in her head that weren't just the things he projected onto her. I don't know. Does that make me a jerk? DANI: No. CLARA: Long pause. LILAH: There's another bit I like and it passes by in a little flash, and it's when Penny is explaining how he got the button, he's giving all this detail that nobody cares about. And then someone says, "Well, how did you get the money? Did you rob a bank?" And Penny says, "Oh yeah." And it [inaudible 00:27:46] that robbing a bank is like the coolest thing that he's ever done. LEV: He buried the lede. CLARA: He did. But it also kind of reminds me of how in the book when he's in the library, he is always sort of, it's not exactly name dropping, but it has the same flavor. Like he's acting nonchalant about things that he's totally not nonchalant about, that he's using specifically as a way to like gain status and recognition. The robbing a bank thing was like that for me. DANI: That was good. I always liked the way that he shows up and just acts like they've all been friends this entire time. CLARA: Oh yeah, yeah. And like he immediately jumps into that. Going back to the Alice thing, he immediately jumps back into that casual intimacy with Alice when his last interaction with her was telling her that they couldn't be friends. He's just like, "Yeah, whatever. That never happened. We're still in love even though you never were." DANI: Can we look forward to more graphic novel adaptations in the future? Maybe Julia's story or Eliot's? LEV: Lilah, I'm going to throw to you. LILAH: You're going to throw to me, huh? Well, it was announced, kind of to my surprise at a panel that we did in San Diego Comic Con, that there are indeed more Magicians comics coming from the team of me and Pius Bak, with of course Lev's loving supervision. And that's all they said. And so I assume that's all I'm allowed to say. But rest assured that there is more to come. CLARA: Excellent. DANI: I just need Eliot's tale of his Muntjac adventures. CLARA: Oh yeah, Eliot's Muntjac adventures would be great. Just put that pitch in there. LILAH: There's so many things that I would love to tell. I would love to tell all of Janet's crazy stories about the stuff that she does when she's sitting in Fillory, because it's all related by her and then you don't actually see any of it. And there's a lot. LILAH: And also one of the things that I felt bad about in the graphic novel is that I had to make a choice to kind of ... you don't get as much Eliot as you do in the books. And so Eliot's queerness doesn't come across as strongly as it does in the book. And that's something that I felt not great about in the finished product, but there was just no space to really explore it in the way that it needed, so it just kind of goes unspoken. When you see the three of them in bed together, you can make some assumptions about who did what to whom. But that's really kind of it. DANI: Yeah, and then there's one line drop about being called a faggot, yeah. LILAH: Not being called a faggot, yeah. CLARA: Well I hope we get all of those things and more. I hope we get to see the same ... I mean, I really loved just the blend. It's everything that you were talking about, right? Like the blend of original material and new material in here. CLARA: Somebody ... I think I was talking to our friend Theo, and they were saying it filled in all the gaps that they felt in the original novel and never really knew that they were missing. LILAH: Oh! CLARA: And I mean I have to admit, I felt, you know, I felt really similarly. I love the novels unambiguously, but it was so nice to get Alice's take on things, and I think the way that it came together is just fantastic, so highly recommend everyone buy the books. CLARA: Since we do have time, I think at this point I will wrap up the interview, unless there's ... Is there anything else either of you want to say about the graphic novel before we move on to the prizes? LILAH: No. LEV: No, I thought it was great. DANI: Can I just say that the artwork was so beautiful. CLARA: Oh yeah. I'm really sad we couldn't get Pius on this as well. But as it turns out, Lithuania, New York, Texas and California are just, it's too many different time zones, didn't work out. We'll try to have him on separately. LEV: Pius is sort of slightly imaginary, but as soon as I saw his portfolio, I sort of knew he was the one, and that doesn't always lead to him actually being the one. But in this case we ended up hiring the guy who I just immediately thought, yeah, yep, yep, yep. CLARA: Okay. On that note, I think we'll wrap up the interview and announce The Magicians Reach Out raffle winners. Remember there's two prizes. The first name we're going to announce is the winner of the two copies of The Magicians: Alice's Story signed by Lev, Lilah and Olivia Taylor Dudley who plays Alice on the Syfy show. And that person is, can I get a little drum roll? Nic M. LILAH: Hey, it's Lilah. One of the things I like to do on Twitter is give away pizza to trans people. So if you are trans and you like pizza, follow me @lilah_sturges on Twitter and learn how you can be the recipient of a delicious pizza pie all your own. CLARA: Next we are going to have the winner of the grand prize. They get two signed copies of The Magicians: Alice's Story, one in each of the covers, a set of Hedge Witch Star temporary tattoos, a set of Hedge Witch Star lapel pins, a Brakebills U patch and pin, and a Peaches and Plums pin from Hiking Fen, a proof of concept bag and sticker from Stupid Lullabies. And I will say it, when I got that one in, it is so great. I'm ordering one for myself. CLARA: A Peaches and Plum enameled pin sticker, set of stickers and postcard from @tazdaunicorn, a coloring book from @echolaliamoon, Trevor Project Quentin poster that that I bought, but Dani worked with @NotCoolCo and Basic Stuff Magazine on the design. Three magicians themed ... they're basically friendship bracelets, they're really cool, from @SummerOfString. A signed limited edition map of Quentin Coldwater's worlds from the third book by Roland Chambers. And the Big Kahuna, the Big Kahuna, all seven of the actual prop keys from the season three finale, authenticated by one of the shows producers, Laurie Lieser. So yeah, big drum roll please. Everyone join in this time. CLARA: The winner of the #MagiciansReachOut, grand prize package is Jasmin E. Congrats, Jasmin. Yay! LILAH: Yay Jasmin! DANI: I'm very jealous. LEV: I am too. CLARA: I am three! Thanks to everyone who participated and helped us raise so much money for the Trevor Project. Sorry in advance if I butcher your name: Heather Honeycutt, Ronen Kohn, Adrianna Stamps, Maria L, Anastasija Zado, Julie Schwartz, Eric Lopez, Tessa Dacunto, Main Trueba de Buen, Portia Anthony, Elliott Waugh, Brittany Stapleton, David Bonner, Melissa Gunnels, Sabrina Lee, Tyler Breasem, Margarita Javier, Nora Bombay, Luc Gendrot, Rebecca Berger, Quentyn Henson, Natalya Zmudzin, Rach H., Savannah Scott, Cee, Walter Springer, Cheryl Williams, Melissa Rose, Marissa Gagnier, Ana Maya, Anna Knierim, Torie Jochims, Matthew Barber, Dustin Jackson, Joanna Clark, Magdalene Miranda-Ordonez, Stephen Jones, Cai Kagawa, Lev Grossman, Mariah Roman, Hannah Antolin, Kyle Ratliff, Jaden Salinas, Sarah Bennett, Jacob Freeland, Elizabeth Tolleson, Harrison Worster, Kendra Skoglund, Elizabeth Gross, Channing Brown, Stephanie Albright (on behalf of Catherine Gilbert), Jennifer Beyer, Dina Passno (in memory of Elizabeth Woodward and Emma Calabrese), Jaime Vaughn, Lorraine Haverman, Gigi Wilson, Kennedy Rhodes, Calorie Pangilinan, Cathy Willey, Adam LaFever, Chase Weaver, Denise Reid, Kristin Brikmanis, Paiglyne Marceaux, Michael DeWitt, Holly Denny, Jasmin Ernest, Julia Schmid, Melissa Neeriemer, Nicole Kelly, Matt Adelman, Joanna Oyzon, Rhonda Torreson, Sarah Enyeart, Leah Clark, Sallie Gucwa, Steven Cain, and Sam Scala. CLARA: I also personally just want to give a special thanks to Raven and Larissa who started the ThankQ campaign to raise money for the Trevor Project after the finale, and who graciously let us ride their coattails to make it a success. CLARA: Whew! Anything you want to say to all the lovely people who donated? LEV: I just want to say, hey, it's so great that you contributed to this. It's such an important cause. And for this, if for nothing else, I'm happy I wrote the books just so you know, people could do good. LILAH: Yeah. Thank you so much to everyone who did that, it's really fantastic. And so much money raised. Wow, you guys are great! CLARA: Yeah, I am still kind of shocked at how well it worked, so I just repeat that. Thanks everyone. Dani, you want to say anything? DANI: I just want to thank everyone for coming together to support the cause. I mean, we've had a lot of, I don't want to say negativity, but- CLARA: Just division. DANI: ... upset-ness in the fandom, so it ... I feel like it was just like a nice thing for everyone to come together on, not just for this but also for the shirt we designed- CLARA: Yeah, yeah. DANI: With NotCoolCo too. CLARA: All right. LEV: It's nice to be reminded of how much we have in common. CLARA: Yeah. I think on that note, that's pretty much it for the episode, so Lev, Lilah, thank you for joining us. LILAH: Thanks for having me. LEV: Thank you for doing this. CLARA: And listeners, thank you as always for joining us for this special hiatus episode. For updates throughout hiatus and into season five, follow us on Twitter or Facebook @physicalkidspod, and please go out and buy that graphic novel. It's amazing! CLARA: I honestly, like I didn't know what to expect. I knew it would have to be good to get Lev's stamp of approval, and I've seen some of Lilah's work before, and it's fantastic, but this is ... it's really great and it really compliments the original books quite well, so highly recommended. 10 of 10. LILAH: Thanks! CLARA: And that's it! Bye!