1. Was Samurai Chef partly inspired by the TV show ‘Iron Chef?’

There is a little of the Iron Chef in our Samurai Chef show.  We’ve watched a lot of the Food Network and wanted to parody the cooking show theme in general with this story.

A few people have mentioned the character actually reminds them of Gordon Ramsay.  We’ve been told he has read the book too so we hope he sees the funny side of that comparison!

2. Samurai Chef was inspired by your love of food, can you tell us what your favourite foods are?

Between Lao and myself we have a bit of a sweet tooth so anything cake usually does well with us.

In the more healthier department though…we spent some time in Japan some years back and loved the food out there.

Okonomiyaki and chicken katsu curry where the best of a long list of dishes we sampled.  Did I mentioned cakes?

3. Will you be bringing your clothing and Manga to any conventions this year (other than London Anime Con)?

We don’t have our convention plans confirmed yet, but we’ve been at MCM Expo and Hyper Japan in previous years and it would be great to attend again.

We’d also like to bring our comics to new conventions like Thought Bubble in Leeds at the end of the year so watch this space for news on that.

4. One of your plans to grow is to create TV shows for your characters, can you tell us more such as how you would envision it?

We’ll continue putting out more comics so we’ve got books for all the current characters and shows.

Since animation is a much more involved process than comics we’d likely start doing some kind of animated shorts before trying something to produce full stories.

We see them as been available online and if people like the short we’d work on producing longer pieces and eventually adapting the comic stories as animations.

5. Will you be creating any more characters beyond the characters already established?

Absolutely!  We’ll spend the year working on the already established characters and shows: Samurai Chef, Hot Lunch and 11th Hour.

Later in the year we’ll likely introduce some new characters that we have in the works.

6. Which item of clothing is your biggest seller? Can you tell us about the inspiration behind that design?

People have always liked the Serious Sound design which was one of our original t-shirts.

More recently the Norio t-shirt / sweatshirt design has been a big hit with customers.  That design is based on one of our more popular characters Norio from the 11th Hour and was recently featured in British Vogue magazine.

7. Is there any particular artist or designer you would love to collaborate with?

That’s a really good question!  There’s another anime inspired brand in the US call Boomslank that do great detailed artwork.  It would be interesting to see how the two could fit into a design.

Aside from that I’ve always wanted to do an Adidas collaboration on the Superstar line of trainers.

We haven’t actually thought too much about collaborations but now you’ve got us thinking so we’ll be on the looking for interesting opportunities!

8. Why was Anime your main choice of inspiration for your clothing brand?

We grew up watching a lot of cartoons in general and loved anime in particular. That had a major effect on the direction we took for our own brand as we wanted to create something different from the typical mainstream, something people won’t have seen before.

Anime has a very distinct look and feel and is accepting of different ideas (characters, stories etc).  That variety and imagination is something we appreciated and wanted Mayamada to represent also.

For more information and to purchase the t-shirts you see here you can visit Mayamada