Geek Syndicate
INTERVIEW - Sugar Glider Creators, Daniel Clifford & Gary Bainbridge
be rather handy in the superhero world, gliding, climbing, vicious fighting style etc. so at a Paper Jam Comic Collective meeting in Newcastle one evening, I started drawing a superhero character with goggles, claw-like gloves, a gliding cape and a black and white costume. I’d just finished working with Daniel on our first collaboration for a PJCC book. He talks about it here and I talk about it here. He came over and looked at the sketch and persuaded me to take this character further. So we spent a little while expanding on the character of Susie Sullivan, aka Sugar Glider and the world in which she lives. DC: Gary drew a fantastic sketch of a female superhero and I leapt at the idea. I was putting together an anthology of all-ages adventure stories at the time so I asked Gary to submit a strip about this character. I helped him develop the general concept of the story and became really excited by it. Seeing an opportunity to finally make a full-length comic book, I asked Gary if he’d collaborate with me on a short series. We both went away and developed the characters and stories for a year before releasing the first issue. GS: I really liked the idea that you created an entire universe with Sugar Glider Stories. Can you tell us what it was like to step out of the writing and artist chairs for some of the stories and step into the editing world? DC: I love creating structures for other people to work in. I’ve always been involved in coordinating art projects – from a film group to youth work and then in comics. So it wasn’t a big deal for me. And my love of huge franchise superheroes means that I have a bit of a belief that having other creators write and draw your characters legitimizes them. It’s a daft idea, but it’s the one I’ve grown up with. At the same time, every strip in Sugar Glider Stories issue 1 was written by us. In issue 2, even the strips that were written by others were based on ideas and character profiles that we provided. I set out who the character was and where we needed them to get to, but the guest creator added their own personality and came up with stories that I never could have – and that’s what the project was all about. GB: The Sugar Glider Stories was the single solution to two problems. The first was that we had inadvertently created a boatload of characters with backstories and relationships and personalities, and no space to show them off. The second being that we wanted to fill the gap between releases of the main title, to keep the SG name fresh in people’s minds. I think SGS are not without their faults, maybe they came out too soon, maybe they were too much work , maybe they didn’t have enough of Susie and Sugar Glider in them. For me, they were a great oppor-
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