Curie's Legacy Inspires A Heroic Tale

After watching a panel at San Diego Comic-Con about the representation in media of women in STEM — science, technology, engineering and mathematics — Heather Einhorn and Adam Staffaroni felt underwhelmed by what they had just heard.

The panelists, including both creative and science professionals, kicked around ideas for improving representation and suggested a character who was the head of a laboratory, like a female version of Q from the James Bond films. Another panelist suggested that an even better idea would be two women running a lab together.

Einhorn recalls thinking that one or two women heading a lab is a really low bar. “We can do so, so much better,” she says.

“The answer was to do all women in a lab,” says Staffaroni, Einhorn’s husband and creative partner. They took that core idea and built on it to make it fun, exciting and interesting, with a cool history around it, he explains.

The result is their co-creation “The Curie Society,” an action-adventure graphic novel from their entertainment creative house, Einhorn’s Epic Productions. The titular society is named for Marie Curie, the Polish physicist, chemist and two-time Nobel Prize winner. 

“The base premise is that in 1903 Marie Curie used some of her Nobel Prize winning purse to create a secret society for women scientists, since she had such a struggle getting recognition from the academy at the time,” Staffaroni says. “ … She wanted to make sure, for the good of mankind, that the most brilliant women scientists had a place to do their research and explore their thinking.”

The graphic novel written by Janet Harvey with art by Sonia Liao is set in the present day, where the society now has underground chapters at dozens of universities worldwide.

“We enter the story following Maya, Taj and Simone, the new class of first-year recruits at the fictional Edmonds University,” Staffaroni says. “So through their perspective we learn what the society is.”

After answering a mysterious invitation, the brilliant trio go through their introductory training and induction period. “They fly to a mammoth de-extinction lab in Canada, they meet other Curie Society members doing cool research, and then ultimately they have to face off against some rogue scientists looking to do some not-so-great things with their research, and they have to save the day in the end,” Staffaroni says.

The MIT Press published “The Curie Society” in April — the first time it’s published any fictional graphic novel — and just recently greenlit volumes two and three.

“They’ve never done anything that’s not totally academic before,” Einhorn says. “We consulted with amazing female scientists so all the science in the book is actually real, as opposed to what Adam and I usually do, which is just make it up.”

She says that they come from the world of comic books.

“Between our entire team we’ve worked with every major comic book company,” Einhorn says. “So we bring that energy to everything that we’re doing.”

She was a brand manager at Legendary Entertainment, and Staffaroni was an editor at Boom! Studios and Lion Forge Comics. Before those roles, they both worked at DC Comics, where she was in fan experience and he was in licensing. They first met while working together on a launch event for DC Comics apparel at Bloomingdale’s in 2009. “We had one of the DC artists live painting Chuck Taylor shoes with DC characters in the store, and that was how it all came together,” Staffaroni recalls.

If 2021 was a typical year, Einhorn and Staffaroni would be on the road for comic book conventions, book fairs, the American Library Association Conference & Exhibition, and signings to promote “The Curie Society,” but due to the pandemic, all of those events have either gone virtual or been canceled. Instead, Einhorn and Staffaroni have been living in Southampton full-time since leaving New York in 2020 and are running Einhorn’s Epic Productions from home. 

“We still have our office in Manhattan, which is currently a storage facility, but our entire team now is remote,” Einhorn says.

Thanks to the technology that’s emerged during the pandemic to make remote work more feasible, they have no plans to return to the city, even as restrictions are lifted. In fact, they are looking for a flexible work space on the East End.

“This is a new business that is going to be based out of Southampton for at least the foreseeable future,” Einhorn says. “We’ve had a great time living out here so I don’t think we’re going anywhere.”

Being in Southampton has made them feel more on point creatively and recharged, Staffaroni adds.

Among the projects that Einhorn and Staffaroni have been working on in Southampton, “The Curie Society” is just the tip of the iceberg. Though they have comic book origins, Einhorn’s Epic Productions is limitless in scope and creates intellectual property across all types of media.

“We do platform agnostic IP development,” Einhorn says. “So for us, it starts with the concept itself, and then from there, we decide on a platform to launch it with. So right now we’ve got podcasts, we’ve got graphic novels like ‘The Curie Society,’ we’ve got some TV shows in development, and we recently launched a virtual influencer. So we’re doing a little bit of everything.”

Their “virtual influencer” is Free Hexel, who’s featured in motion comics, web comics and computer-generated music videos, and she’s on social media.

“She’s the lead singer of a K-pop band, so that’s a super fun concept,” Einhorn says. “We’re just looking to do new and cool things with IP that haven’t been done before.”

Einhorn’s Epic Productions’ next foray is into nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, which use blockchain technology — the same tech that cryptocurrency such as bitcoin is based on — to certify that a digital asset is unique.

Einhorn says that while there are NFTs for high-end art there is also an emerging scene for the average collector, at the level of baseball trading cards. Their company’s first NFTs will be based on “The Curie Society,” allowing comic book collectors to, as she puts it, exercise that same collecting muscle, but digitally.

“No one knew that the first Spider-Man comic would be eventually worth a million dollars when it came out in the 1960s, so we think digital collectors are going to be a little more savvy about new stuff coming out in that space,” Staffaroni says.

In 2018, Einhorn’s Epic Productions and iHeartRadio launched “Lethal Lit: A Tig Torres Mystery,” a podcast in the style of a radio play that follows the adventures of a Latinx teen detective. It is the first-ever iHeart Radio scripted podcast and among the first scripted podcasts developed for a young adult audience.

“We have a slate with iHeartMedia and our focus is on female-forward and inclusive content for the younger audiences,” Einhorn says. She notes that iHeartMedia’s other deals for scripted content are with Will Ferrell and Shonda Rhimes — “so we’re in good company.”

Not only has Einhorn’s Epic Productions now partnered with Scholastic for author K. Ancrum to pen a “Lethal Lit” book series debuting this fall, a “Lethal Lit” television show is also in development.

Season two of the “Lethal Lit” podcast is in production now, and following 2020’s debut of “Daughters of DC,” a political thriller, they are working on the new series “See You in Your Nightmares,” a psychological thriller/horror centered on high school students.

They had plans to make their own soundproof recording space for podcast production before the pandemic, Einhorn says, but now recording has gone remote and she doesn’t see that changing. “I think the actors and the sound designers are very happy working remotely,” she says.

The voice actors have invested in soundproofing and microphones and are recording from their closets.

“We used to be limited to just the pool of actors that were in the location where our recording studio was,” but working remotely has opened up opportunities, Staffaroni points out. “If someone in New York is really right for one lead role and someone in LA is perfect for the other lead, we don’t have to choose one or the other. We could just get both of those actors working together virtually.”

Einhorn revealed that their future podcast plans include “Nikki Fix’s Time Mix: Volume I,” a “‘Back to the Future’-style time travel adventure extravaganza taking place in the ’90s” with a soundtrack from that decade, and “Black Lotus Delivery,” a supernatural story.

Also this year, Einhorn’s Epic Productions struck a deal with Little, Brown Books for Young Readers to develop a slate of graphic novels targeted at middle grades.

Einhorn says staffing up will be critical this year considering everything that they have in the works. “Full vision, going forward, is we are doing everything we’re doing just at a much bigger scale. We love creating IP, and so we’re really, really lucky to be in the space where we’re spending 90 percent of our time right now on our own originals, which we’re very fortunate to do. So we just want to do bigger and more.