THOUGHT BUBBLE MONTH 2025! Thought Bubble regulars Sarah Graley and Stef Purenins have had a busy 2025. On top of another volume of their collected webcomic Our Super Adventure this year also saw the publication of the charming Pizza Witch from Image/Skybound. Ahead of all the comics fun in Harrogate this weekend we chatted with Sarah about the origins of Pizza Witch, rewarding reader interactions and the importance of following your dreams…
ANDY OLIVER: Let’s start by asking you to describe the premise of Pizza Witch, its cast of characters, and the kind of creatures readers will encounter in these pages?
SARAH GRALEY: Pizza Witch is a story all about Roxy, a trainee food witch who’s super passionate about all things pizza magic! Luckily, her best friend and black cat familiar George is also super passionate about pizza magic but not everyone else shares these feelings! Her parents don’t really care for it, neither does the food magic community in general, and even her boss, Pizza Warlock, doesn’t really seem to have his heart in what he does. Over the course of the first book, Roxy goes on a big quest to find a secret ingredient and prove everyone wrong, and maybe get a few smooches and go on a few dates along the way, all set in a world filled with skeletons and cats and crystal dragons!
AO: Can you give us some background on the wider themes of Pizza Witch, the importance of following your dreams, and the message you’re looking to impart through Roxy’s adventures?
GRALEY: I think it’s really important to follow your dreams! For other people to believe in you, I think you really have to believe in yourself first, and sometimes you just have to find the confidence to do the thing and see what happens! For me, I really wanted to make comics and so I started making comics! I’ve always wanted to tell stories in a creative way, and like Roxy, I sometimes found that people don’t always look at comics as something to take seriously. I knew that comics was something I felt really strongly about, though, and I had to try not to take those opinions on board.
I think I just want to show people that if you feel really strongly about something, you have to be your number one fan to start with. (And finding someone who can be your supportive cat familiar to give you words of encouragement doesn’t hurt, either!)
AO: How much of a challenge is it in juggling the needs of webcomic delivery with an eventual print collection when planning out a comic like Pizza Witch?
GRALEY: Luckily, our editor Alex Antone at Skybound was super supportive early on about us sharing Pizza Witch as a webcomic leading up to the book release, so we made sure to have that in mind throughout the whole process. From early on, we planned out the story in episodic chapters, making sure that we’d always be leaving readers on a nice cliffhanger or twist!
In terms of the artwork, we planned the art out as typical comic pages first, but then Stef would go into the final pages and adapt them into the more vertical comic format that websites like Webtoon and Tapas use as there’s been a big shift to this sort of reading format in recent years.
The nice thing about Pizza Witch as a webcomic was essentially getting to finish the comic pages way in advance of posting the comic episodes online! Sometimes with Our Super Adventure – our weekly diary comic – we play pretty fast and loose, sometimes only finishing a week’s comic the day before it goes online.
AO: How did Pizza Witch come to Skybound’s Comet imprint for younger audiences?
GRALEY: Back around the middle of 2021, our now-editor at Skybound, Alex, mentioned to our agent that he really liked my original Pizza Witch comic short story from back in 2015 and expressed interest in putting a new edition of it out. We heard about this and as we’d been thinking of revisiting the world of Pizza Witch, we pitched putting together a brand new full-length Pizza Witch story! The folks at Skybound were into that idea, and they suggested making it part of their new Skybound Comet imprint and we were excited to say yes!
AO: Your latest Our Super Adventure volume Treats was crowdfunded on Kickstarter this year. Autobiographical comics by definition have an element of vulnerability about them but also a degree of intimate connectivity with their audience. What have been some of the sweetest reactions from readers to Our Super Adventure over the years?
GRALEY: We’re really lucky that our comics have really resonated with people! I think one of the first times it really hit home was attending one of the MCM London shows shortly after some of the Our Super Adventure comics went viral back in 2016. We had so many people come to the table and tell us that they’d seen the comics online and really related to them! At the time, I was really just sharing weird little moments that happened with me and Stef and the cats, and to find out that other people were having similar weird little moments was really fun and it’s always so nice getting to talk about these weird connections with people!
Sometimes people will bring us little bits of art that they’ve made of our cats, and that’s always super amazing! At a recent comic con, a young fan had made their own t-shirt with our cat Wilson on it and the slogan “Wilson Time” and that was incredibly cute as well! We feel so grateful to have such lovely readers!
AO: Can you tell us about your creative process, the mediums you work in, and how the collaborative approach works between you?
GRALEY: A lot of the time, me and Stef will go for a walk together and one of us will have an idea that we excitedly tell the other person about and that’s how a lot of our creative projects start out!
With comics specifically, we’ll come up with ideas and write together, and then I’ll thumbnail the layouts and draw the pencils. Stef will then letter the comic and then I’ll do final inks. Stef then does the flat colours on the pages before I do a final colour pass with any extra finishing touches. We’ve been working like this for around 7 years now full time so we’ve become a little comic-making machine!
When we do more video-related stuff, like the Our Super Adventure voiceover comics that we post on YouTube and TikTok, Stef will put those together before wrangling me to do some voice recording and then he makes the nice music that we put on them as well!
AO: What’s next for Sarah and Stef? What can we expect to see from you in 2026?
GRALEY: We’re always working on secret things that we can’t talk about! That’s the best and the worst thing about working in comics sometimes, getting to work on really exciting projects…but being sworn to absolute secrecy! We’ll also be making more Our Super Adventure comics and we’re also growing our brand new print club over on Patreon, too!
Interview by Andy Oliver
Visit Sarah and Stef’s online store here
Sarah Graley and Stef Purenins are at Table A6-7 in the Bubbleboy Hall at Thought Bubble.
Thought Bubble 2025 runs from November 1oth-16th with the convention weekend taking place on the 15th-16th. More details on the Thought Bubble site here.
Read all our Thought Bubble 2025 coverage so far in one place here.
Poster by Ng Yin Shian
