It's less than a week until Thought Bubble Comic Con 2013 so I wanted to celebrate the upcoming event with an interview with Jade Sarson, creator of Cafe Suada and nominee for this year's British Comic Awards.
You're known
for your comic Cafe Suada (which is completely lovely), a story about rival tea
and coffee shops with a dash of romance. What inspired you to come up with the
idea?
(Thank you
so much.) Cafe Suada started out as a 7 page black and white comic called Battle of the Beverages; it was my back
up entry to the 2010 Manga Jiman competition. The theme was something to do
with the Sun I think, so I had a wacky idea for a short battle between “Sunbeam
Teahouse” and “Eclipse Coffeehouse” and thought it would be a fun one off
short. I had thought my other entry was more interesting and had more clever
character designs and concepts – but how wrong I was! Both entries were
published in the 2010 Jiman comic collection Leek and Sushi 2: Manga Cupcakes
by ITCH Publishing and the reader
response was amazing. Everyone demanded more comics about the unnamed
tea
waitress and coffee waiter! I was in my second year of university at the
time,
studying for my illustration degree – so I decided then that whenever I
wasn’t working
on my degree illustrations, I would develop Battle of the Beverages into
something I could really sink my teeth into. I read lots of shoujo
comics at
the time, and those really inspired how I began to write the story (with
dashes of shounen when the battle element reared it's head!), and
visually I was studying lots of illustration so that helped inspire the
unique visuals.
It was another year until BotB had been completely reimagined as Cafe
Suada and
made its web debut.
How far in
advance do you plan Cafe Suada? Do you know what's going to happen in future
volumes or do you see how it goes?
I spent a
good deal of my final year of university planning out Cafe Suada’s plot, so the
answer to this is yes and no. I know that there are key plot points and scenes
I need to cover during the story, but how or when each of those points is
reached is unknown. There are around about 16 key stages to the story I would
say, and 4 of those have been covered in the 3 books I’ve released so far. In
between each of the key stages anything can happen! I leave writing each
chapters script until the latest chapter is nearly over online, you see, so
that I can come up with new ideas to flesh out character development and
general story and gag ideas that I might not have had years ago. This way I
feel that the storytelling can improve and flow more naturally than if I stick
to a dated script I wrote at the very beginning. What I will say is that I have
always had a very clear ending in mind, and I fully intend to reach it
eventually.
Your work is
inspired by a blend of manga and more western illustration. What are your
inspirations for your artwork?
Oh boy, here
we go, it’s always hard to answer this question as I am being influenced all
the time and my art and storytelling styles are always changing and improving
as I draw more comics. I’ll start with artists. Yoshiyuki Sadamoto, Eiichiro
Oda, CLAMP, Hiromu Arakawa, Yuu Watase, Maki Murakami, Hisaya Nakajo, Tessa
Stone, Yukipon, Glen Keane, Tony Fucile, Jamie Hewlett, are all names that
spring to mind as big influences. Their works range from delicate shoujo to inventive
character design and emotive animation. Other artistic influences have been
from old British girls comics annuals, which I collect whenever I can as the
artwork is surprisingly gorgeous (despite the stories usually consisting of “Suzie
can’t get a boyfriend and her dress isn’t ready for the party!”). These old
comics were also what gave me the idea to use teastained pages – all the old
comics I own have aged terribly and the paper has gone brown, which struck me
as an interesting contrast to the bright and colourful glossy comics of today.
Now, onto
writers, as that is also incredibly important to making Cafe Suada great. I
love J.K. Rowling and Terry Pratchett; I think the sarcastic, witty, quintessential
Britishness of their books has been a huge influence on how I write Cafe Suada’s
dialogue. Graham Linehan’s clever sarcastic sitcoms have also inspired a lot of
the comedy moments. I am also hugely influenced by the works of Richard Curtis
(Geraldine is named after one of his best characters) – a lot of people find
his overly optimistic worldview irritating, but I find it refreshing, and it’s
an optimism that I try to bring into Cafe Suada whenever I can. Comics, after all,
are a form of escapism – and while it’s great to escape into the gritty
darkness of Batman sometimes, I feel it’s with Cafe Suada that you can escape
to a beautiful teahouse where you feel at home with your (albeit strange)
friends!
You're clearly
an incredibly talented artist with a fantastic style. When did you first become
interested in illustration?
I went
through my entire childhood and school days adamant in the belief that I would
be an illustrator – I had a moment when I was very young, reading a pile of
books as I always did, when I realised “someone’s job is to draw these book
covers!” and that was that. Quentin Blake became my hero. It was only in my
early teens that I discovered comics and completely fell in love with telling a
story entirely with art, instead of simply illustrating a cover or a few key
scenes.
Aside from
Cafe Suada, you've worked on a plethora of projects. Which has been your
favourite to date?
Oh gosh,
tough question. I really love working on short comics because I always try to
break out of my comfort zone and try something new with each one – there’s one
I did for the Observer competition this year called Mabel and her Labels which I’m very happy with because I really
feel like my grasp of colour theory has gotten better with colouring it. Siddown! is also a personal favourite
with all the historical aspects in the illustrations, but it is also a
frustrating project too that I need to hurry up and get out there, it’s been
too long on the backburner! If I’m perfectly honest, I love all my projects to
bits, no matter how old they are – a lot of artists seem to hate looking at old
work but I’m always proud because I know that each project is the best that I
could do at the time I did it, and it’s cool to see that I’m always improving.
There’s a whole lot of new projects I’m working on that are hush-hush that I’m
really excited to tell people about eventually too!
You've
released a six-page pilot for your graphic novel Siddown! Can you tell us a
little bit more about that?
Siddown! is a comic about the hilarious, daft, exciting and
at times heartwarming story of one passenger called Sid Downey in his search to
find an empty seat on a British time travelling train. He ends up unwittingly
involved in the journeys and relationships of his fellow passengers, and in
doing so learns more about himself than he planned to. It’s a really fun comic
to work on as it’s full of characters from all eras of British history, so I
get to draw lots of different bodies and outfits and cultural clashes. Sid is
great fun to write, he’s your typical irritable Englishman with an uptight
sense of propriety and etiquette who learns to open up and be more honest with
himself – with help from the rest of the cast who were an interesting challenge
to design. With a train full of passengers from lots of time periods, it’s a
challenge to make the main characters stand out amongst it all – I hope I’ve
pulled it off. I guess we’ll see when I get around to actually bloody finishing
it! I will, honestly.
How does it
feel having been nominated for the British Comic Awards at Thought Bubble this
year?
Incredible.
I was at London MCM Comic Con this past weekend and the amount of people that
congratulated me really made me happy. It’s only the second year that the awards
have been going, so it’s even more unbelievable that I was nominated. I’m still
in shock really, I mean there are so many talented creators based here in the
UK who I admire, and comparing my work to theirs is impossible, so I don’t envy
the judges that task! Sometimes as a comic artist it’s very hard to keep your
chin up and keep motivated, being shut away from the world, losing your grip on
whether or not people are even enjoying your work anymore. So to have been nominated
for Best Emerging Talent was a brilliant boost to my confidence, and made me
feel like everything I’ve been working on has been worth something. It’s like
someone stepped out of the unrecognisable mass that is the rest of the country
and said “You can do it. Keep making comics. Because we think they’re pretty
darn good.” So it’s been wonderful to have proof that they think my comics are
good enough, and I think I’ll have buckets of motivation left for ages!
And finally,
where can we find you at Thought Bubble Comic Con this year?
I shall be in the Royal Armouries hall, sharing a table with
my lovely con buddy Amanda Elanor Tribble, on table 38! We’re pretty close to
the entrance, so we should be easy to find. There’s a floor plan for all of the
halls here: http://thoughtbubblefestival.
Check out Jade's site http://teahermit.co.uk/
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