This post may include affiliate links.
Bored Panda reached out to the team of ‘War and Peas’, who kindly answered our questions regarding the comics.
Jonathan and Elizabeth are counting twelve years since the first comic they made. Therefore, we were curious to know about the evolution of their artistic style and storytelling. They shared: “Our artistic style, just like ourselves, has changed massively over time. In the beginning, our characters only had two dots for eyes and no other facial features. That gave us room for dialog-based humor, while we're also inclined to use visual humor today. Our figures now have mouths. Sometimes even pupils and we really enjoy dramatizing the facial expressions.”
We also asked how they maintain consistency in delivering fresh, engaging content every week, and whether they ever face creative blocks.
“We work ahead a bit and have a backlog of about a dozen ideas most of the time. That helps to overcome creative blocks. It's also quite helpful to be a duo: If one of us is down, blocked, or whatever, the other is there to pick you up and to be strong for you,” explained Jonathan and Elizabeth.
Inspiration for ‘War and Peas’ comics spans over various sources like literature and TV series. We asked the creative duo to share how these diverse influences shape the themes or narratives within the comics.
“That's very difficult to answer because we don't really know how brains work. Maybe we'd have to ask a neurologist for advice here. It's not as if you could add up these influences, and then there's War and Peas. It's more than the sum of its parts,” replied the team.
And lastly, Jonathan and Elizabeth shared what we could expect next year from them.
“We're happy to announce that there will be a rhyme-based story collection in 2024 named 'Once Upon a Workday'. It's illustrated poems we wrote about creativity, work-life balance, and the struggle of being a functioning adult in this world.
The story behind this book is that we once published a story called 'A Job is a Job'. Our fans loved it so much that they urged us to turn it into a book. So we added a couple of similar stories and presented the idea to our publisher Andrews McMeel. So yeah, that will be a thing, and we hope everybody will love it as much as we loved working on it!”
