How Asian-American couple’s Tubby Nugget went from silly doodle to viral sensation
The husband-and-wife creators of Tubby Nugget reflect on their character’s incredible success as they release their first graphic novel
What happens when two artists fall in love? Here is an unlikely answer: a nugget is born, and a tubby one at that.
The Adventures of Tubby Nugget: Escape from Nuggetville, a newly released graphic novel, is the result of a collaboration between illustrator Joshua Jackson and author Jenine Pastores.
The pair met in 2015 when the then filmmakers were assigned to work on a short film called Heartsick. Today, they are still creating things together – only now, their canvas has shifted from screen to page, and their latest protagonist is a round, brown, squishy little character.
“A year into dating, Jenine would always call me a nugget,” Jackson recalls with a laugh. “So what I would do is draw little nuggets on my phone and send them to her whenever she needed to be picked up, or she was having a bad day.”
The real catalyst for shifting their focus solely onto Tubby Nugget was a health crisis back in 2018, when Pastores found herself in and out of the hospital with increasing frequency. At first, the doctors were not sure what they were dealing with.