PRIDE MONTH 2026! Bone Broth by Alex Taylor (aka azbt) was the winner of the esteemed First Graphic Novel Award in 2023 and, as a result, was published last year by SelfMadeHero. The coming-of-age queer thriller set in a ramen noodle restaurant in London follows transmasc central character Ash in a story where events go horribly awry after an unexpected death in the workplace.
When I reviewed it here at Broken Frontier recently I said of it: “Bone Broth takes a grimly comedic premise and fleshes (pun probably intended) it out with meaty, gristly imagery and an explicit line in visual metaphor. An impressive debut from an up-and-coming new voice who definitely deserves your attention.” As part of our Pride Month coverage I chat today with Alex about the genesis of the book, the importance of the First Graphic Novel Award, and his upcoming trans-focussed projects…
ANDY OLIVER: Let’s start with the obvious question by asking you about your wider creative background and your route into comics?
ALEX TAYLOR: I was working as a full-time chef in a restaurant in South London after dropping out of uni because of Covid, essentially really missing the creative process I experienced when making art in college, and was wanting to find a way back into making things. I had made a couple of illustrated zines for fun, and heard about the South London Comic and Zine Fair at Stanley Halls and decided to apply to table there on a whim. They let me have a go at it, and during my time tabling, I met a bunch of really incredible cartoonists, who kept bringing up the First Graphic Novel Award. I thought it was a longshot, but decided to apply anyway, pitching a trans story that had been floating around my head for a while. Fortunately, this led to Bone Broth getting a publishing deal, which opened so many doors for me, including the opportunity to go back to uni and get to work on my art a whole bunch more.
AO: How important was a competition like the FGNA in focussing your creative energies and pushing you into thinking about longer-form narrative structure?
TAYLOR: I think for me the FGNA was truly a pivotal moment in my practice, and redefined my relationship to my own work. Up until that point, the most ambitious I could allow myself to be with respect to my drawings was in justifying them as a hobby, and, all of a sudden, I was invited to share space with some exceptional creatives and cartoonists, and felt genuinely listened to. I have the utmost respect for the other shortlisted works and their respective creators, many of whom have gone on to publish their shortlisted comics since. I think I can say with some confidence, that without the structure and deadlines of the FGNA, Bone Broth wouldn’t exist as it does now. But beyond just the technical, practical, and editorial support I was offered through the FGNA in developing my comic for publication, the nurture I experienced as a cartoonist and creative from Corinne Pearlman, Emma Hayley, and James Spackman is something I am going to be grateful for forever.
AO: Can you give those yet to read the book what the premise of Bone Broth is and the themes you’re exploring in its pages? How would you describe its cross-genre nature?
TAYLOR: Bone Broth follows Ash, a new employee in a ramen bar in London, as he gets to grips with working in the restaurant, working in a team, and working under his new precocious boss. Until one night after a drunken staff party that goes astray, things take a deadly turn, and Ash is going to have to harness everything he’s learned in his time in the ramen bar or face dire consequences. Despite its soft colour palette and whimsical art style, the story is definitely not for those without a strong stomach. For me, at its heart, Bone Broth is a story about transgender rage and defiance, that was undoubtedly shaped by the increased political hostility trans people have been facing in this country over the last few years.
AO: What was the genesis of the book? How did your own experiences tie into the book’s setting and its protagonist’s journey?
TAYLOR: If you know me well enough, Bone Broth is remarkably uncreative, the skeleton of the comic taking shape in my mind while working graveyard shifts in a Japanese restaurant. With too much time on my hands staring into space while folding noodles, or cleaning the noodle boiler, this ridiculous extravagant story started to take form. Though there are quite a lot of fantastical elements to the story, many of those are imaginative interpretations of real experiences or emotions. But, just to be clear, I never harmed or wished any harm on my old boss, though he was quite the character himself.
AO: Your protagonist Ash is a young transmasc character. Something that really speaks to the reader in Bone Broth is how his personal journey is portrayed in a visceral and almost instinctively pure visual sense. How did you set about using the unique properties of comics to express those ideas of identity and self-discovery?
TAYLOR: One of the most exciting things about comics, and arguably one of the medium’s challenges, is so much of the creative process can be worked through alone. Though practice-dependent, there is a level of authorship and control in comics, that lends itself to creating very distinctive visual languages and voices, and expressing quite specific and niche experiences visually. I’m a big believer in the use of the horror genre to explore and articulate queer and transgender stories, as the marrying of camp and genuine psychological terror isn’t entirely remote from the lived queer or trans experience in contemporary Britain.
AO: Your pages are so involved, absolutely bursting with detail and energy. Tell us about your creative process and the mediums you work in?
TAYLOR: I think part of me relishes involved suffering and problem-solving, and at that point every spread presented itself to me as an opportunity to try something new. Comics are very repetitive labours of love, and to overcome my own short attention span, my brain had to find ways to generate momentum in my work, and for me that was looking at each page, each panel, as an opportunity to problem solve. Perhaps even on occasion to the detriment of storytelling, I think moving forward it will be a constant balancing act, between holding back to present a concise narrative and harnessing my energy to make a visual feast.
AO: Colour plays such a vital role in Bone Broth. Can you elaborate on how you use it to create not just mood and atmosphere but also a sense of time and space?
TAYLOR: One of the biggest obstacles I was facing when working on Bone Broth, is its dual timeline, a very ambitious and difficult structure to pull off. Using a dual colour scheme to denote the different timelines in the story felt like the most natural and seamless way to transition the readers brain between these parallel narratives. But the soft pastel colour palette was chosen to begin with, because I wanted to create quite a warm and comfortable atmosphere for the reader to brew in, before yanking them out and sticking them in the pot to boil as the comic takes a left turn into spooky territory.
Art directly above from short comic ‘comme ils disent’ – all other art except profile picture from ‘Bone Broth’
AO: And, finally, what’s upcoming for you in comics? What are you working on next?
TAYLOR: Currently, I’m slowly working on a couple more graphic novel-length projects, continuing to explore trans and queer themes in slightly unconventional ways.
I’ve also just started working on my thesis project. Over summer I’m going to be travelling to a few different spots in the south of England, to collect real location points from trans people, and stories tied to these locations, investigating these locations through drawing, and looking at what it means to belong in a country where trans belonging feels politically uncertain.
This will culminate in the Trans Atlas, an evolving atlas composed of drawings, sketches, atmospheric sound bites, and encounters. The idea is to create an alternative geography, in which locations are connected through belonging, estrangement, memory and emotion. The long-term ambition for the project would be to eventually turn it into a web-based resource, that can be explored as a non-linear archive, or as a webcomic, the structure of which will be inspired by the conversations, stories and experiences exchanged during the collection of the Trans Atlas this summer.
I’ve got a lot of trans eggs in different baskets right now.
Buy Bone Broth online from Gosh Comics here
Interview by Andy Oliver
