Bun & Tea: A Serial Comics Magazine

Do you ever want to take a minute and just be told a story? I do. All the time!

BUN&TEA was a project I put together on a whim after leading my editorial position at WWAC. After several months of downtime, my organisational creative mind was racing. I put out a tweet asking if anyone would be interested in contributing to a wild scheme—a six-issue magazine featuring story comics designed to be exactly that length, that structure. I wanted to work with people who wanted to tell a specific story, and keep the process manageable and fun by limiting the scope: six parts, up to eight pages. I ended up with twelve teams or solo cartoonists, and I edited their six-part outlines and scripted layouts before we began looking to fund or complete any chapters. I remain proud of this period of process.

To fund the final creation of the first chapters and first issue, we went to Kickstarter through a small publisher. I was and am very grateful to this publisher for giving my project their time. Unfortunately, I wasn’t ready to effectively navigate the ceding of project control—I wasn’t sure where I stood any more, and in 2019 found that I wasn’t able to ask—and our communication about the schedule of production became very poor. In the end, BUN&TEA only managed to see print for one issue. Some creators have chosen to complete their fully edited stories, such as Moloney and Kusiak’s now-finished LENS. Everyone involved is encouraged to do so—their stories were good.

I filled the rest of the issue with magazine pages, featuring letters, articles, features, a quiz, etc—all the things that I enjoyed in magazines as a child. The cover was designed (assembly by me; Raquel Kusiak drew the mascot Bunton over my design sketch) to echo the magazines in which I first encountered comics (GIRL TALK; Bunty) as a way of placing claim on the legitimacy of all aesthetics and all inroads to being a comics reader.

BUN&TEA's comics came from an array of creators in the United States, Australia, England, Ireland, Spain, Chile, and Wales-via-Finland. We were a trans-friendly publication, and contain several queer romances of varying tone.