An Exclusive Guest Post from Jordan Morris and Sarah Morgan, Authors of Bubble

Satire and Sci-fi: how our monster-slaying graphic novel is a love letter to hipsters and the gig economy 
By Jordan Morris and Sarah Morgan
Jordan Morris: The idea for Bubble came to me when I was visiting a friend who lived in Brooklyn. This Brooklyn was less Scorsese-y and more HBO’s Girls-y, full of artists and brunch places and DJs and DJs who only played at brunch places. But access to hot yoga and vegan eggs Benedict comes at a price. This friend lived in a loft apartment with five other people and slept in a walk-in closet. She had a real job too! With a desk and ID badge! The kicker about the apartment was that it was above a nightclub that specialized in Brazilian house music, so it was thumping until four a.m. I asked her if it was like that every night and she replied, “Oh no, just Wednesday through Sunday.”
My friend insisted that sleeping in a thumping disco closet was worth it because of all the neighborhood had to offer. I got an image of her going on her morning run and fighting monsters and zombies but doing it with a smile because COFFEE! IMPROV CLASSES! SECRET VAMPIRE WEEKEND CONCERTS! The world of Bubble started to fill itself in. I imagined this stiff-upper-lipped monster fighter living under a protective dome (METAPHOR ALERT!) and tethered to a life-or-death gig economy. I realized I had a sci-fi (or “speculative fiction,” if you’re fancy) story on my hands.
Sarah Morgan: When my chum Jordan first told me about Bubble I could not have related harder—my life from 1996 to 2003 was spent in a series of perilous London house shares, living in if not Dickensian then certainly character-building poverty, chasing that same hipster utopia.
In one squat we all got carbon-monoxide poisoning and no one noticed. (On the plus side, one of my housemates worked at Burger King and would bring home actual garbage bags full of cold fries. We were grateful.) I worked multiple side hustles like bartending, focus-grouping, flyering, burrito-wrapping; I spent a summer as a promo girl for Kellogg’s Golden Grahams, handing out cereal samples at EDM festivals while wearing gold polyester hot pants. (You haven’t truly lived until you’ve seen sunburned people on Ecstasy fisting dry handfuls of toasted wheat into their mouths.) All of this to pay the rent so I could keep interning for free at my dream job—on a lifestyle magazine. (For younger readers, a “magazine” was curated content, printed onto thin slices of dead macerated tree. The ’90s were so weird!
So a podcast sitcom—as Bubble was then—about daft yet lovable twentysomething pals doing terrible gig-economy jobs to chase their dreams felt like a show I wanted to write on. And when Jordan said, “And the side hustle is killing gross alien monsters for an dystopian Uber-like app,” I was like, “Yes. Of course it is.”
Jordan: We wanted to send all this stuff up, but not tear it down. A gentle noogie, not a kick in the face. Sometimes that capital-S Satire can be rather dick-ish. Sarah and I both live in cities that are more than a little Fairhaven-y, and while we agree that the opinionated dude-bros and crystal-loving wellness gurus that fill our gastropubs and hot-yoga studios can be a little much, we love a good round of bar trivia and farm-to-table fusion cuisine as much as the next hipster.
Sarah: We share a mutual love of comedy sci-fi: Mystery Science Theater 3000, Futurama, and, of course, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. For me, sci-fi takes the mundane sting out of social commentary, blowing up our torments to their ridiculous yet relatable conclusions. Mars Attacks! is a warning about the deadly pomposity of the patriarchy (I think?). Fry in Futurama feels awkward and lonely because he’s a thousand years out of whack. Marvin the Paranoid Android is my sexy mental-health pinup boy.
As someone who’s seen Spaceballs way more times than Star Wars, I knew that when it came to adapting the podcast to graphic novel form, we’d make room to stuff it with gags. In comics, no one cares if you bend genre, and the medium loves a metaphor.
A typical Fairhaven monster is the Beard, a slavering rat king of terrible opinions made from feeding alien-blood-corrupted microbrew to a bro-y podcasting pub-quiz team. We’re not exactly Ursula K. Le Guin over here.
Jordan: We’ve also got Book Club, a crew of “Live Laugh Love” wine-moms who become a hive mind with an unquenchable need for more members. Hopefully our monsters feel as familiar as our main characters. There’s Morgan, a person of incredible ability who has voluntarily shackled herself to a mundane job. Annie’s a heat-seeking missile for any kind of stimulus, whether it be drugs, alcohol, or “other.” And Mitch, a not-so-secretly basic man, just wants to eat at chain restaurants. You might not be one of these people but you’ve probably dated at least one.
So hopefully we’ve simmered a stew that goes down easy. A little world-building, a little satire, a dollop of penis jokes. And if we offended you, we’ll gladly take you out for a cup of coffee. There’s this great little place that does a fair-trade organic oat-milk latte that simply slaps. No, you’re thinking about that other place. You probably haven’t heard of the one I’m talking about
 
Check out this blog post from our friends over at The Adventure Zone!