A Vancouver-based children’s comic creator, illustrator, and teaching artist, Janice Liu’s whimsical artwork blends fantasy and Chinese history — and her graphic novel Chicken Soup & Goji Berries explores Chinese Canadian identity. 

Cold Tea Collective talked with Liu about her journey as a comics artist, her aesthetic, and the role of teaching in her life. 

Choosing to Pursue Comics

With a longstanding love of art, Liu decided in high school that she was going to be an artist. 

“I [couldn’t] imagine myself doing anything else — this [was] my career,” Liu said. “My parents were very supportive of that.” 

Liu thought that she would write and illustrate picture books because of her art style until she took a course on storytelling for children. She quickly realized that picture books weren’t as interesting to her as comic books were. 

“So much of my development as an artist was in middle school,” Liu said. “I have really strong memories of reading comics as a preteen and being really in love with that, whereas I felt like I couldn’t connect strongly to picture books in the same sense.” 

Behind Chicken Soup and Goji Berries

Chicken Soup and Goji Berries was the project that firmly rooted Liu’s interest in comics and ultimately changed the direction of her career. During her time in Toronto, Liu came across a program called the Col.lab Incubator through the artist collective Project 40 that brought Asian artists together to collaborate in exchange for funding and mentorship. 

From there, Liu called on her friend Naomi Cui for a collaboration. Both women were interested in the Asian Canadian immigrant experience and offered different skill sets; Naomi came from the world of design and coding with a background in linguistics while Janice was rooted in illustration. 

Together they brainstormed a comic about the relationship that Chinese Canadians have with the English and Chinese languages. What resulted was a series of short stories about a Chinese Canadian family and their understanding of each other despite their language barriers. 

The slice of life comic follows a mother and father, their three kids who’ve grown up in Canada to varying extents, and their grandmother who recently immigrated to Canada. The characters have varying proficiencies in English and Chinese.

As first generation immigrants, the parents are fluent in Chinese and can communicate in English, while their children are all different; the eldest child speaks Chinese fluently while the youngest can’t speak at all. 

Similar to the characters, the comic itself is also bilingual in order to be relatable and accessible. For example, a parent might say something in Chinese and the child would respond in English.

Both versions of the book preserve the bilingual nature of dialogue. The physical copy of the book allows readers to pick between reading both languages or with translations. Likewise, the web comic version shows translations when hovering over Chinese dialogue. 

The authors also thought the comic could be used as a language learning tool to help improve Chinese language proficiency, especially for Chinese Canadians wanting to improve on their heritage language.

“You can be consuming this media [and have] English to help you along and maybe you can pick up some Chinese along the way,” Liu said.

The Flutterdoodle Aesthetic: Fantasy and East Asian History

When she first set out to do children’s books, Liu wanted a whimsical, catchy name and figured she could be a little more silly in the picture book space. She picked ‘Flutterdoodle’ because it was dreamy while still being about art. 

Liu’s artwork is whimsical, lighthearted, and fun — featuring colourful watercolours and approachable characters that draw upon her heritage. Her work evokes the aesthetic of Chinese brush paintings, a style of art she finds very beautiful as it conveys a sense of freedom or movement.

Her work also has meaningful nods to the culture and philosophies that form brush art. Chinese brush art and the Confucian values are inextricably tied together as both try to capture the essence of the object rather than just what is seen.

“I want [my figures] to always look like they’re floating or dreaming or in a space that’s not quite reality,” Liu said.

As for the narrative interests, Liu likes to mix fantasy and Asian history, and enjoys putting her stories in a setting to create a certain type of fantasy.

Liu’s forthcoming graphic novel will continue to mix the two. She didn’t divulge any titles or dates, but shared that it will feature the same three characters from a previous comic titled In Between Home: a bird girl named Jingwei, the Moon goddess Chang E, and the moon rabbit. 

“These are three characters from Chinese mythology that I’ve been playing around with and fixated on for a bit, but this is the first time that I’ve pulled in real mythology from Chinese history.”

According to myth, Jingwei is a girl who was playing by the sea when she drowned, then was reincarnated as a bird. She comes back to earth fueled with a determination to prevent anyone from meeting the same fate and throws sticks and stones everyday into the sea in hopes that one day she could fill it up entirely. 

“There’s something about the metamorphosis that’s interesting,” Liu said about Jingwei. “In my design, I made her half-bird, half-girl to give it a more human aspect.” 

Finding balance through teaching 

Besides comics, Liu is the owner of Young Artist’s Place, a studio in Burnaby, B.C., where she teaches kids how to draw. She noticed that most art classes were focused on more traditional art, so she started the studio with the intention to create a space for kids and teens to learn comics, manga, and “all the nerdy art.”  

Now in its third year and hitting its stride, the studio is receiving more interest than ever before. What started out of necessity when she moved to Vancouver has become a calling for Liu, who finds satisfaction and balance in her new path.

“It’s the perfect balance because it’s still related to art but gives me a break from using the creative part of my brain all the time,” Liu said. 

Find Liu’s work on social media under the name Flutterdoodle or on her portfolio. Also, get a copy of Chicken Soup & Goji Berries here.