Every month, Dark Horse Comics gives readers a behind-the-scenes look at the making of a comic or book. These articles can include the inspiration behind a specific title, what it's like to work in the comics industry, or some other special feature on the highlighted title of the month! In this month's Horsepower, John Allison gives readers a look at how he came up with the idea for The Great British Bump-Off: Kill or Be Quilt:

One of the things I find most inspiring about Japanese manga is that they have a comic for everything. There’s a fundamental understanding in their marketplace that there is drama everywhere if you just go looking for it. Stakes are defined not by the size of the explosion, but the value that the parties involved place on the matter at hand. And it was with this in mind that, five or six years ago, I wrote “quilting sports manga” on a Post-it and stuck it on the shelf over my desk. Like all Post-its, it eventually fell off and ended up stuck to the bottom of my house slipper. But what you may think of as a failure of 3M’s patent glue, I prefer to frame as the tenacity of a good idea.

When Dark Horse published The Great British Bump-Off in 2023, it may not have been the first direct market comic book about baking competitions. I have to believe that the United States is simply too serious about desserts to let an Englishman steal in and take the pennant. Dell doubtless put out a book called Ricky Nelson’s Pie‘n Pudd’n Jamboree in 1960. It was a different time.

But I refuse to believe that Bump-Off’s sequel isn’t the only comic series ever published to be about American-style quilting. The marketplace is now mature enough to absorb such a title. In fact, I’ll go further: quilting and comics are two hobbies so similar that to be transported from our safe, womblike local comic shops to a quilting shop is almost to step into a parallel universe. But how could I possibly know this? How indeed!

For a decade I was in a relationship with a woman whose mother ran a quilting shop. From the earliest days of our courtship, when impressing parents is key to one’s evolution from “good prospect” to “potential keeper,” she and I bonded over the strange similarities between our jobs. The conventions, the customers, the commissions, the making, the community, the arson. So, when time came for artist Max Sarin and I to follow up Great British Bump-Off, I knew which craft was next. Besides, I’d used all my cake jokes up.

Kill or Be Quilt takes a different path to GBBO; Shauna Wickle is back to dismantle a new intrigue, but this time she has to hold her nerve during a “quilting war,” practicing spycraft and shadow diplomacy in a sleepy canal-side town. She also has to deal with a vacation-ruining boating disaster, mercurial romantic prospects, avuncular wrath, experimental poetry, and arson. Is it possible that I have woven together many disparate elements to create whole cloth? Almost like . . . a quilt? Of course not. That would be far too tidy.

But I have managed to reunite the best-in show team from GBBO–artist Max Sarin, colorist Sammy Borras, and letterer Jim Campbell–for another go-round. Whatever scraps I throw at them, they make them look beautiful. For my money, no other creative team is a patch on them.

—John Allison
The Great British Bump-Off: Kill or Be Quilt #1, written by John Allison, illustrated by Max Sarin, colored by Sammy Borras, and lettered by Jim Campbell, will be on sale on April 9!

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