Alex Taylor on Bone Broth

Bone Broth is out now in the UK! Winner of the 2023 First Graphic Novel Award, this is the debut title of artist and author Alex Taylor. To celebrate, we sat down with Alex (though not over a bowl of ramen, sadly) to talk about how Bone Broth came to be.

Alex Taylor is a queer visual artist based in London, working creatively through multiple mediums of expression including illustration, painting, digital art, comics, zines, and film. He was the winner of the First Graphic Novel Award in 2023.

SelfMadeHero: The story behind Bone Broth – in terms of what’s on the page and it having won the 2023 First Graphic Novel Award – is really one for the books! So, take our readers back to the start. How did this morbidly whimsical graphic novel first come to be?

Alex Taylor: Bone Broth came about as a result of too many quiet hours spent cheffing in a ramen bar in South London. With so much time to spend daydreaming over a three year period, it seems inevitable that the story came about as it did.  When I heard of the First Graphic Novel Award I realized it was the perfect opportunity to workshop these ideas that had been brewing, and see what feedback and advice I could get to make this story a little stronger. I had no idea at that point that this would be the start of a project that would take me to all sorts of wonderful new places with my work.

SMH: Seeing as you’ve lived in so many places, such as Paris and Hong Kong, what inspired you to create a story so specifically tied into the culinary identity of London?

Alex: Despite having been fortunate enough to have worked and lived internationally, my years working minimum wage kitchen jobs in London were some of my most educational. I learned about people from every corner of life, and relentless work at a hellish pace, and about the relationships and loyalties that form between otherwise completely unconnected people that are forced to work a line together for 40-60 hours a week.

Also, I’m a big believer in magical wondrous things being born in the middle of normal everyday environments. A good story doesn’t have to be born from a wild trip to the other side of the world to be worth reading or writing. There’s plenty of gold dust right here in the cracks of our boring day jobs.

SMH: This is your debut published graphic novel, but you’ve also created a number of self-published comics and zines. What was it like to move from one to the other?

Alex: Definitely daunting. I have quite a laid-back attitude towards my work, usually prioritizing the completion and creation of a project before agonizing over how perfect it is. But with a project the size of Bone Broth I really wanted to get it right, do the story justice and give people their money’s worth. I think this pressure I put on myself is what helped push me over the finish line, it’s what kept me challenging myself in my page spreads and what ultimately gave the story some of its manic energy. I was also hugely fortunate to have the team behind the First Graphic Novel Award and the team at SelfMadeHero to help me in this transition from self-published zines and comics to more traditional publishing.

SMH: One undoubtedly eye-catching part of Bone Broth’s design is its specific and vivid colour palette. How did you come to choose those colours? Was there ever a draft of Bone Broth in, say, varying shades of green?

Alex: Ooh, I could definitely see a world where I’m working on a scary comic tinged with an iconic green, like in the first Saw movie! But I think for Bone Broth the colour palette came pretty intuitively. It was a mix of what just felt and looked natural to me when designing the characters and environments for the first time, and (knowing this would be a spooky story) the desire to offset the horror, or rather contrast it, with some very soft pastel summer-sunset colours. There’s a very lighthearted nature to the story on a surface level, whilst it delves into more serious ideas and more gruesome visuals as the plot progresses, and I think the dreamy colours feed into that a bit.  At some point I also recognised the story would have a couple of timelines to follow, and I needed to make sure the colours were distinctive enough from one another for readers to be able to comfortably follow the story. So, it became pink and pretty ✧˖°⋆

SMH: As well as vivid, Bone Broth is both emotionally and physically visceral,  putting the “gore” in “gourmet” while also presenting a very personal narrative focused on bodily identity. How did you go about putting this theme to the page?

Alex: I mean, stories of Queerness and identity have always gone hand in hand with horror. I’m very interested in the horror genre, I think horrors and thrillers have always really resonated with queer people because of the reality of the world’s reaction to Queer people. A lot of the themes explored in horrors and thrillers are very relatable to marginalized Queers, and Queer and trans experiences have in turn come to influence horrors and thrillers in their own right. As a trans person I’ve definitely had moments in the past where I’ve looked at my body as something out of The Thing (1982), and was basically raised worshipping at the altar of Tim Curry’s Franknfurter. I’m also really inspired by the work of Mike Flanagan, who uses horror as a vehicle to tell stories about uncovering human pain and emotion, or Junji Ito who just clearly has so much fun on the page in telling his scary stories. Pacing in comics and in horror is also so important to delivering the story, and to building a sense of anxiousness or fear that is so vital to the telling of a good spooky tale. This can lead to really fun experiments on the page, trying to find a way to jumpscare your reader while they are exploring the story at their own pace can lead to some really dynamic pages, which are really good fun to draw. I feel that horror as a genre is just really good fun to work through, it feels limitless.

SMH: A very important question: are you a fan of bone broth in real life? How do you feel about the dish after having done so many detailed illustrations of just what goes into it?

Alex: I mean yeah, I had bone broth almost daily for a good few years as my staff lunch! And we’re massively fortunate, here in London at least, to have quite a few places that make a really delicious bowl. I think maybe because it’s getting to that time of year, when it’s a little colder and wet outside, and getting dark a bit earlier, everyone’s bundled in coats and scarfs and hats, and Halloween hangs in the air, but it’s like perfect weather for a warm bowl of tonkotsu.

SMH: Bone Broth is a coming-of-age thriller whose Queer perspective is made especially unique by its presentation as a graphic novel. We asked a similar question back in 2023, but what are you most looking forward to people experiencing with this book?

Alex: I just want people to be able to enjoy it, have fun with it, forget some of the real challenges we’re facing today as a community for like 10 minutes and lose themselves in a spooky story filled with friendship and ramen and magic and mayhem.

Thank you for reading! Bone Broth is out now in the UK, and out in North America on December 2nd. Bon appétit!

- The SelfMadeHero Team