Five questions for Jamie Smart, creator of the Bunny vs Monkey series

Bunny vs Monkey: Rise of the Maniacal Badger publishes this week. How would you describe it?

Bunny vs Monkey is the story of a Bunny and his animal friends, who try to defend their woods from Monkey and his invaders. In this book, a new foe enters the conflict. The Maniacal Badger is a scientific genius determined to claim the woods as his own, and now Bunny and Monkey have to team up to defeat him. It’s all very funny, silly, and everything comes to a huge, chaotic—and hopefully surprising—finale!

The Bunny vs Monkey series began as a comic strip in The Phoenix. What have you learned about comics from that experience?

Comics are such a limitless medium. They’re so easy to pick up and dive straight into, and they’re as fun to create as they are to read. A lot of the Bunny vs Monkey stories have sci-fi themes. For me, it’s fun to think, ‘How can I explore this huge, mind-blowing concept through cute animals biffing each other with frying pans?’ It seems to work so far, and it’s amazing to see how much they’re being enjoyed in book form too.

You also write Flember, a series of highly illustrated novels: is there a difference to how you approach longer-form fiction?

Yes and no. With comics you’re spelling everything out visually, but writing a novel is a much wider canvas with more space for the reader to interpret what you’re telling them, and it took me a long time to learn how to work with that. With Flember I’ve had the chance to tell a huge, epic fantasy tale. There’s still plenty of toilet humour and characters falling over, but on a much grander stage.

The market for illustrated books is growing. Why do you think comics and graphic novels are doing so well as part of this sector?

Through the 1990s and early 2000s, comics in this country became very limited. In the last few years, with The Phoenix going so strong and a real push from book publishers to commission comic artists, children are discovering what a joyous, boundless art form this is. In the UK we’re only recently losing the stigma of comics being somehow “lesser” than other books, and so readers of all ages and reading levels are really enjoying them.

Bunny vs Monkey features an eternal struggle between order and chaos, will there be a resolution?

Each Bunny vs Monkey book collects about a year’s worth of episodes from The Phoenix, so there’s a resolution to the story arc. But will it ever end? I doubt it. Creating Bunny vs Monkey is too much fun. I still have a million stories to tell, so hopefully we’ll get to make more books.