Meet Jordan Morris and Sarah Morgan, creators of Bubble!
What initially drew you to graphic novels?
Jordan: I love how adventurous they can be with storytelling. I think they have more license to play with genre in fun and interesting ways. The audience is probably very pop-culture savvy so you can mash up comedy/sci-fi/romance/whatever else you can think of. There’s a wonderful “anything goes” spirit that you don’t see in other mediums.
Sarah: First and foremost wanting to write about the Bubble universe and gang, in any format. But a story about a lovable gang of hipsters fighting monsters in a tech bubble on an alien landscape? Comics just makes so much sense. I re-read comic favorites like Sex Criminals, Wicked + Divine, and Tank Girl when it came to writing the script. So if you like those, you’ll like this!
What was the process like of turning the podcast story into a graphic novel?
Jordan: It was a dream come true! As a comics fan, they always seemed like something created by a magical wizard, not a mortal such as I.
Sarah: My background is BBC radio comedy, where you paint vivid pictures with sound and words. Graphic novels are simply the reverse – a picture paints a thousand words, or it does if it’s a Tony Cliff picture of a woman stabbing an alien monster while thinking about donuts.
What scene or panel sequence did you most enjoy seeing come to life as a graphic novel?
Jordan: All the action scenes! But there’s some smaller, quiet stuff that was equally exciting. The characters communicating with looks and changes to their posture.
Sarah: Getting to see our best friend gang become flesh and blood humans was very emotional. Also, the part where aliens attack a Farmers Market and some baby goats escape the petting zoo and adorable chaos reigns. BABY GOATS.
About the Book
Based on the smash-hit audio serial, Bubble is a hilarious high-energy graphic novel with a satirical take on the “gig economy.”
Built and maintained by corporate benevolence, the city of Fairhaven is a literal bubble of safety and order (and amazing coffee) in the midst of the Brush, a harsh alien wilderness ruled by monstrous Imps and rogue bands of humans. Humans like Morgan, who’s Brush-born and Bubble-raised and fully capable of fending off an Imp attack during her morning jog. She’s got a great routine going—she has a chill day job, she recreationally kills the occasional Imp, then she takes that Imp home for her roommate and BFF, Annie, to transform into drugs as a side hustle. But cracks appear in her tidy life when one of those Imps nearly murders a delivery guy in her apartment, accidentally transforming him into a Brush-powered mutant in the process. And when Morgan’s company launches Huntr, a gig economy app for Imp extermination, she finds herself press-ganged into kicking her stabby side job up to the next level as she battles a parade of monsters and monstrously Brush-turned citizens, from a living hipster beard to a book club hive mind.
