Ryan, the creator of Buni, focuses on universal and easy-to-understand topics. Since his comics don’t use words, he sticks to ideas like food, being tired, phones, and holidays. “Simple themes and topics would include food, being hungry, being tired, Mondays, jealousy, disappointment, allergies, phones, animals, and holidays,” he explained. He also mentioned that comics about love used to be a big part of Buni, but he’s moved away from that, saying, “the hopeless crush on a girl who doesn’t like you back isn’t as funny as it was years ago.”
Coming up with ideas is the hardest part of making Buni comics. Ryan says he just sits down with a pencil and sketches for an hour, hoping that one idea will be good enough. “If I’m lucky, out of four or five ideas, maybe one is good enough to draw for real.” The rest of the process—drawing, inking, coloring—is easier for him and something he can do while listening to audiobooks. His main advice? “Write a little bit every day.”
A big part of Buni’s charm comes from how Ryan mixes adorable characters with surprising or dark endings. He says the trick is “to have cute objects like a cupcake or an ice cream cone have a dark ending, or vice versa.” This balance helps make the comics funny and unexpected. One example he shared was a comic where moldy cheese in a hospital bed gets "the plug pulled" because it’s too far gone—sad if it were a human, but funny because it’s cheese.
Even though Buni is full of weird situations, many of the ideas come from everyday life. Ryan shared a recent comic where a hard-boiled egg and an avocado notice their bellies look the same, and in the last panel, they’re pushing baby strollers. He explained, “It’s hard to explain a joke without killing the joke… but the twist is that they both had baby bumps.” His ability to take small, relatable ideas and turn them into surreal humor is what makes Buni so unique.
