By Mitu Malhotra

Today I am excited to welcome Mika Song to Cynsations to talk about her upcoming graphic novel Night Chef (Penguin Random House, 2025), which releases on Oct. 28, 2025. The star of this book is an orphan raccoon who is also a spunky self-taught chef.

I first saw Mika’s illustrations in A Friend for Henry by Jenn Bailey (Chronicle Books, 2019) and was enamored by her emotive hand-drawn artwork. Creating sequential art for a graphic novel entails months and often years of consistent work on the same project, Mika has generously shared a detailed behind the scenes look with Cynsations about the gestational journey of Night Chef. You can pre-order Night Chef at this link from World’s Borough Bookshop.

In Night Chef, the protagonist is a delightful anthropomorphized raccoon yet there is a call back to her original habitat as well as the forest community of critters. As a reader, I thoroughly enjoyed the intrinsic humor that bridges the human and animal worlds in this heroine’s journey. What was your creative approach to crafting Night Chef?

I think it started when I learned that raccoons wash things. This image just set off a chain reaction in my mind. I imagined them to be the fussy gourmands of the animal world. In contrast with their reputation of also being “trash pandas.”

This contradiction is something I also observed in chefs. During the day, they agonize over micro greens and mousses and then go home at 3 AM and devour a Whopper. I had the character idea, but coming up with a plot took a few years. I had lots of different ideas (an animal cooking show, a lost chef searching for her cooking sensei).

In the end, the truest story turned out to be an orphaned racoon on a quest to use her cooking skills to help others. She turned out to be a more serious character than I was expecting. But she’ll still make you a tuna salad-corn muffin sandwich or a wormburger, if that’s what you want.

During our conversation, you mentioned that you studied animation and then worked for educational websites. Could you tell us about your prepublication apprenticeship and how you developed skills for changing careers and becoming a full-time author-illustrator?

I was a student at Pratt Institute in the 2000’s. I changed my major several times and settled on animation for practical reasons. Pratt didn’t have a comics major. I was lucky to take one class, a studio elective for comics with Floyd Hughes. It was a bright spot in some tedious years. Floyd really encouraged me to keep making comics.

After many part-time freelance jobs, I finally got a job animating for an educational children’s website. One winter, I took a continuing education class for comics with Matt Madden. In that short class, I learned everything I needed to make my own comics and most importantly how to use a brush to ink and color them.

I began making comics about living with my grandparents during high school and took those to local festivals. I sent them to a few independent publishers with no replies. I used to make my coworker read them during our lunch break and she suggested I try writing for children. I did and ideas seemed to come easily for stories.

Years later, when my first picture book, Tea with Oliver (HarperCollins, 2017), came out, I drew some comics with the characters from the book to promote it. The marketing team didn’t seem very impressed by this. In fact, during this time most of the big children’s book publishers did not believe there was a market for children’s graphic novels and trying to sell a graphic novel idea seemed impossible.

Those days, I lived in Chinatown. I used to go to the library to work on new picture book ideas. I noticed a young boy running up to the check out desk with a stack of pink books taller than his head. Most of the kids were checking out laptops to play games. I went to see what he was reading. It was the Babymouse series. This was another sign to me to keep believing in comics.

You mentioned that your debut Donut Feed the Squirrels (Random House Graphic, 2020) is your personal favorite amongst the books you have created. This first book in the Norma & Belly graphic novel series received a 2021 Eisner Honor for Early Reader Award. What was the journey of its creation and how did you develop it into a series?

A few years after Tea with Oliver published, my agent, Erica Rand Silverman, met a new publisher who was starting a comics imprint. She immediately told her that one of her clients had a graphic novel idea for kids and showed her the web comics I had made to promote Tea with Oliver on my website. The idea she pitched was actually a picture book idea we had shelved a few months earlier. This became my first graphic novel in the Norma and Belly series, Donut Feed the Squirrels.

Could you tell us about the editorial process of working on a graphic novel?

The process was simply Outline, Script, Thumbnails, Sketches, Inks, Watercolors. The crucial point for editorial feedback is after Sketches are delivered, when the words and pictures are on the page.

The Outline and Script took the longest time. After many versions and back and forth with Alex Lu, my editor, the outline was approved and I started writing the script. The script went through two drafts.

Once the script was approved, I started drawing thumbnails (stamp-sized rough sketches) for each page of the script. I usually thumbnail right on a print-out of the script. Each page of the script corresponds with a page of the printed book.

Drawing the thumbnails helped me get a better feel for the pacing. At that point, I moved panels around. And updated the script and outline to match the changes.

After the thumbnails were completed I started drawing with pencil. My pencils are tight sketches drawn on the watercolor paper that I will later ink and color over.

Once the sketches were done, I scanned them and sent them to the designer at Penguin Random House (Bob Bianchini). He laid out the sketches into a digital PDF and added the text (using a font created from my handwritten lettering). At Penguin Random House, they call this PDF an Early Reads (not to be confused with an Early Reader). The Early Reads are circulated internally to get other departments like sales interested in the book very early on. The PDF is also useful for editors because, at this point, you can see the words and drawings on the page together and it’s easy to tell what each page of the story is supposed to do. At this stage, important edits to the story usually happen.

Since you use traditional media and mix color by hand, in Night Chef, how did you maintain color consistency in the pages, panel after panel? What did the process of finishing the final art especially the lettering for this graphic novel entail?

Below is a picture of the letters I inked and scanned for the designer who used them to create the digital font used in Night Chef. The font allows us to make small changes to the words even in later stages of the process. I drew the sound effects though.

With the Norma and Belly series I painted the black outlines (Inks) after the watercolors for a really loose feel that goes with the story. For Night Chef, I used permanent ink and painted the black outlines before the watercolors.

To keep the colors consistent, I paint the pages in batches sorted by location. I will lay out about 10 pages and paint the light brown colors in first. And then adding the next layer of color and so on.

The clever juxtaposition of the last two panels on page 5—the human chef hugging his mother and the raccoon closing her eyes and hugging herself, a sign of what she is missing in her solitary life is full of heart. How and when do you refine the minutiae of the panels? Do you discover details as you develop thumbnails to guide the visual narrative?

The part when Night Chef hugs herself while watching the chef and his mother hug was one of those important edits added after the Early Reads was made. Alex Lu, my editor on Night Chef, came up with the brilliant idea of making the chef’s mother literally come in and hug the chef and give him his packed lunch. I loved it, and just to make it really clear that she is alone but learning from the chef’s world, I drew Night Chef hugging herself. Again, this change came after the Sketches were made into a readable pdf by Bob Bianchini.

I noticed that each chapter in Night Chef begins with a full-page opener—bold wash of setting which places the reader firmly in the landscape of the scene using color. Chapter 1 opens with pale green-grey wash and white tiles of a kitchen—story panels unfold in this interior; Chapter 2, burnished orange exterior wall with window and garbage bin lying in a fenced in concrete backyard—story panels unfold with hint of orange backwash; Chapter 3, tall green tree against a clear sky—story unfolds in a forest. These colors cues are great for a young reader. Was the process of using color as a grounding feature planned in advance given your experience in animation?

I think working with watercolors makes you think about the kinds of colors you are using and how they can change over a series of drawings. The medium’s ability to get darker or lighter or for the color-bias to change as you mix the paints just makes you think about how you can use that to show progress in the story.

Because Night Chef is nocturnal I started mixing a color to represent night. I was thinking about all the different colors for night. I wanted to make the blue get a little darker and redder over the course of the scene when it was dusk and brighter and greener when it was dawn.

In the beginning of the book the colors are very cold and things get fiery and murkier as the action escalates until things settle into warm orange in the end. I feel that the colder colors of the kitchen make it feel inhospitable and lonely. The indigo and deep greens, later as she heads out into the night world are fecund and mysterious colors. And then once she finds Mole’s Hole, I use a lot of the warm orange colors. It’s like a hearth for the story.

The ending of Night Chef is satisfying, full of hope and humor with the inclusion of a backstory, a coda and a snafu-filled epilogue. What is your story revision process and how do you deepen the narrative with both visual and textual elements in tandem?

I thought of the ending once I figured out the location of Mole’s Hole. I knew I needed a way to make Night Chef’s dream of becoming a chef come true, so I came up with a restaurant for animals, Mole’s Hole. But I was still figuring out where or what Mole’s Hole was going to be. I knew I wanted it to be a speakeasy and in a surprising place, but I wasn’t sure if I should put it in a junk yard or in a sewer or a tunnel.

Then one day I was on the metro north coming back to NYC from Albany. Looking out the window, I saw a wooden tub floating on the Hudson and I knew it would be Mole’s Hole.

It reminded me of Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones (Greenwillow, 1986), and I just pictured all these pieces of junk strapped to it and hidden doors. I realized that I could make it as grand as I needed to make it on the inside, the tub would just be the tip of the iceberg. Once I imagined Mole’s Hole, I knew I wanted to have a to-go window for diurnal animals like birds. So that scene came together really from day dreaming and picturing the details of the setting and how the characters could interact with them.

How do you sustain momentum while protecting your well-being? Do you have a self-care routine or any tips to share for creatives working long days bent over artwork?

When I first started working on picture books I knew I wanted to keep my book making process as analog as possible. I was working as an animator on the computer during the day, and at night, I wanted to create things on paper. Which seemed so rare because everything is on the computer so it is a bit impractical, but I knew there was still an admiration for that in children’s books.

Working on paper can become an addictive habit. Watching colors seep into paper and feeling your brush drag a black line across white. I like being able to take the drawing and tape it to the wall. Sometimes when you come into the room on your way to do something else and you see the drawing again it helps you see it more objectively.

I kept going back and forth with the analog way and getting frustrated by my skills and wanting the computer to fix things, but eventually, I kept drawing on paper and came up with a style that can accommodate imperfection. I’ve noticed for myself the more I keep things simple in my life the more it works out for me.

I don’t have any hobbies. Does reading count? That’s what I like to do when I have free time. I try to exercise regularly, which helps me sit for the rest of the day. In the summer, I try to be like Frederick the mouse and just soak in the slowness. The last time I did nothing much for a month I got an idea for a new series I am working on now. When school starts in the fall, it will be back to the grind!

What would you say to those questioning the importance of stories for young readers today?

The other day I was in line at the post office, and I heard someone reading aloud. A boy about eight was reading Tintin to his younger brother, probably five, behind their mother who was pushing a stroller. He read slowly but certain phrases like “Good heavens!” he read with flair.

I used to spend hours as a kid reading Adventures of Tintin over and over. I’m happy to be around during this time of wider acceptance and support for graphic novels for young readers and to have found a way to be part of it. Still, just last spring I went on a school visit, where the parent liaison admitted to me that she wished her sons would read actual prose books and fewer graphic novels. It made me realize that there is still so much to be done for graphic novels for young readers.

What inspired you and Jen de Oliveira to collaborate on your Sunday Haha series? Most of the shorts featured in that project echo the Kishōtenketsu four step story structure and are super fun. What was it like to work behind the scenes and build a community to maintain this kid’s comics collection?

Jen and I got together during the pandemic to find a way for us comics creators to get our work to young people while the schools and bookstores were closed. Everyone was online anyways. Jen and I sent out emails to everyone we knew who made comics for kids and asked them to contribute. Jen knew many of the cartoonists. I worked on the website. And the cartoonists kept sending us weekly comics.

Even though we stopped making new issues, we still have all the archives online. It is the most successful group project I’ve ever worked on. We sent out an issue every week for four years and many of the cartoonists like Meggie Ramm have gone on to traditionally publish. Stan Yan has a graphic novel coming out soon, The Many Misfortunes of Eugenia Wang (Simon & Schuster, 2025). And Kaeti Vandorn just made a Dr. Suess graphic novel: The Grinch Takes a Vacation (Penguin Random House, 2024).

What is your favorite part of creating books for children?

My favorite thing that writing for young people allows me to do is visit schools. It wasn’t until I had my first school visit for Donut Feed the Squirrels that I realized this. It was also the student’s first in-person author presentation because it was 2021 (everyone was wearing masks). The look on their faces when they started to realize I was the author was priceless.

One of the teachers apologized in advance for her students being behind in their reading and writing because of the pandemic and remote schooling, but I assured her we would just be making comics. The students had brilliant ideas. I got to run up and down the aisles with a mic. Students got to experience the powerful feeling of drawing on stage with a giant sharpie while everyone cheers you on. And in twenty minutes, we were able to make an original Norma and Belly comic together in the auditorium.

In closing, Night Chef is about having the courage to follow your passion wherever it takes you. Night Chef honed her skills and bided her time in the walls of the kitchen and when it was time to heed the call to adventure she answered it. It might seem impossible for her to ever find a way to follow her dream, but she followed her passions and lived by her code and eventually she found a way. In some ways, it is like my own story about finding a way to make graphic novels, and I hope it inspires young people to pursue their own passions.

Mika Song makes children’s books about sweetly funny outsiders. Henry, Like Always by Jenn Bailey and illustrated by Mika received the Schneider Family Award and a Geisel Honor from the American Library Association. Her graphic novel for early readers Donut Feed the Squirrels was nominated for an Eisner award. She co-founded the weekly free kids comics collection Sundayhaha.com with Jen de Oliveira. She lives in Queens, New York in walking distance to all her favorite places to eat.

Mitu Malhotra holds an MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. A finalist for the 2024 Lee & Low New Visions Award and the winner of the 2021 Katherine Paterson Prize for Literature for Young Adults and Children, Mitu has won scholarships from the Highlights Foundation, Tin House, and a writing residency at the Djerassi Program. Her short story “Toxins” is part of ELA curriculum. Her writing has appeared in Hunger Mountain, Thin Air Magazine and elsewhere. In previous avatars, Mitu was a textile and fashion designer, and has taught in India, the Middle East and the US. Mitu is an active member of CBIG: Children’s Book Illustrators Group, NYC and NJ SCBWI. More on www.mitumalhotra.com. Follow her on Instagram @mituart or Bluesky @mitumalhotra.