Moving to a new city is always a scary thing. You may not know anyone, you may not know the area, you’ve probably got a new job. Now imagine moving to a city full of monsters from various mythologies and cultures and you’re opening up a new restaurant to compete against your fourteen brothers for your father’s legacy. Pretty intimidating, right? That’s the situation Brianna finds herself in in Sam Sykes and Selina Espiritu’s “Brave Chef Brianna”.
At ECCC, I was able to chat with Sam Sykes about “Brave Chef Brianna”. Read on as we chat about sibling rivalry, why the undead love junk food, dealing with anxiety, and much more.
“Brave Chef Brianna” is your new book from Boom!. What can you tell us about it?
Sam Sykes: “Brave Chef Brianna” is the story of a young girl who is the youngest child of 15 and the only girl, so she has 14 brothers. They’re all the children of a celebrity chef, named Sven. Sven has come down with an illness and he gathers his children together and says, “listen, I don’t have much longer left. I want you all to go out into the world and create your own restaurants. Whoever has the most successful restaurant by the time I’m gone will take over and inherit my legacy and all my stuff.” Her brothers are all aggressive go-getters, while Brianna is sweet and timid. Brianna also doesn’t have a lot of money, so the only place she can set up is Monster City, USA, which is in the Pacific Northwest. It’s a city where monsters from all over the globe and from all different mythologies and cultures have come together to live in harmony. So she sets up a restaurant there, but it turns out that some laws in Monster City mean that the monsters don’t eat flour, sugar, or cooked meat, which are kind of needed in a lot of things. She has to figure out how to cook for people that don’t typically eat her food. The struggles are all about overcoming self doubt and your problems, and also trying to feed monsters.
You mention that she has all these brothers and there’s an almost universal theme of sibling rivalry that drives the story.
SS: Right. It struck me that families that aren’t athletic probably have more sibling rivalry than most. Athletics or sports are very easy to measure. Steve can obviously be very good at football, Dave can be good at soccer, and they can both feel better about the whole thing. Whereas, I have two sisters and none of us are athletic. We were into arts and theater and stuff. That’s much harder to quantify. We were constantly competing to see who was the cleverest, who was the funniest, and all that’s subjective, so none of that was ever settled.
Brianna and her brothers are very competitive because none of them want to let down their dad, but they also want the money and the fame and they also want to prove to themselves and each other that they are the best chef. Brianna’s not exactly competitive, but she really wants her dad to be proud of her so she’s out there trying her best.
There’s certain dietary restrictions for the monsters. Why is that?
SS: The idea is, and we learn more of this as the series goes on, that monsters and humans haven’t always had great relationships. In ancient times, when there were more monsters, humans fought monsters. As time went on, they sort of stopped fighting each other, but there’s a lot of cultural differences still. The bylaw against sugar and flour was established way back in Monster City’s creation when they decided they didn’t want to become like humans, so they outlawed these very human things – flour, sugar, and cooked meat – because those weren’t the monsters’ ways. That’s the compromise because now monsters have very human things like office jobs, but they basically eat stuff that’s not at all like what we eat. One of Brianna’s advantages is that she cooks stuff they’ve never seen before so they’re very interested in that.
Continued belowWhy do skeletons like fries so much?
SS: We’re not sure! Today we think that the undead are shambling, moaning, slow monsters. In Brianna’s world…
He was very excitable.
SS: That’s the thing, the undead have no earthly limits anymore. They eat stuff, but that’s because they just like the taste. They don’t really need it. They don’t really need rest either. So they just do whatever they were doing when they were alive, but to 1000%. So they don’t have volume control because they don’t see the need to do that anymore. A guy who played video games in life and died and came back as a zombie in Monster City now plays video games 20 hours a day and is the best at it. They also scream a lot, like they punctuate a lot of their sentences with screaming. No one’s quite sure why, but I like to think that occasionally the overwhelming sense of dread from their existence just gets to them and they have to let it out. Honestly, fries are tasty. Skeletons like tasty stuff.
The monsters are sequestered from human society in Monster City. So how is Monster City different from a normal human city, other than its residents?
SS: It’s a wildly diverse town because Monster City has to accommodate a lot of different people. Like in issue 2, we’ll learn that they come down to four main types: the undead, which we’ve already talked about; goblins, which encompasses goblins, gnomes. pixies, and anyone small and industrious; giants, who are just massive creatures stalking the land; then you’ve got hybrids, who we met in issue 1. Brianna’s best friend Suzan is a harpy, so she’s half bird. Monster City has to accommodate all these different people and body types. We get this really great map in issue 1 where Monster City has Giant Town, where all the buildings are colossal and the sidewalks are huge since giants need a lot of place. Then we have Suzan’s apartment building which, I don’t know if you noticed, but all the balconies have gates because she flies. All the tenants just fly, so they don’t need to use the stairs. They just fly to their apartment and hop in. They probably have stairs inside, but most of the residents don’t use it. Then we’ve got the river that is both a beautiful scene, and also something that some of the monsters use for transport. We see a fishman with a briefcase and a suit walking out of the river with a cellphone as he heads to work.
You’ve already touched on dealing with self doubt. That manifests itself almost in a physical way throughout the book.
SS: Yeah, in our script it has an actual name – Anxiety. Brianna suffers intensely from anxiety and those feelings of worthlessness. Whenever she’s under stress, Anxiety appears as a black cloud over her should and whispers mean things to her and is awful to live with. The more stressed she gets, the bigger Anxiety gets and the more it starts to crowd around her. She can master it, but she can never really get rid of it. That’s what anxiety is. When you’ve got it, sometimes you can deal with it, sometimes you can’t deal with it, and sometimes you barely notice it, but it’s always there. You sort of learn how to manage it, and that’s what we see Brianna doing. The monsters of Monster City aren’t aggressive. They aren’t out for blood, they aren’t violent, so Brianna’s main problem is overcoming that anxiety. She feels like she’s letting down her dad, she feels like she’s not good enough, and she needs to figure out how to live with that. That’s one of the big pushes of “Brave Chef Brianna”.
She’s Brave Chef Brianna. Bravery is not necessarily looking cool. Bravery is doing something scary and doing it anyway. Like, living in a new city that’s scary. Going up against your fourteen brothers…
Emphasis on fourteen.
SS: Yeah, fourteen brothers – Brianna’s poor mother – who Brianna perceives to all be bigger, stronger and better than her. Which may not be true, since Brianna perceptions are colored by society a bit. She’s going up against a lot and it’s not an easy time for her.
Anything else you’d like to add?
SS: I’ve been selling and signing comics today and I’ve had tons of people come up and ask for this for their kids. I’ve had tons of people come up and ask for this for themselves. This is an all-ages book, and I think that’s sometimes co-opted to mean just for kids, but this is all ages and that means all ages. This a very cute book about someone moving to a colorful new city and having adventures, but it’s also about dealing with something that an awful lot of people deal with. This nagging sense that they’re not good enough or not doing enough or that whatever they thought was making them happy doesn’t count as true success. One of the themes of “Brave Chef Brianna” is learning the difference between being successful and being happy. If there’s one thing that people get from this comic, it’s figuring out what makes you happy and how to be okay with that, even if it’s not what other people think it should be.
