Cross-Continental Content Collaboration

It started as a half-serious joke between me and my wife. Then I reconnected with our wedding invite illustrator for a more serious proposal: “Why don't we do a webcomic about Falafel?”

Not the Middle Eastern doughball delicacy. Our cat Falafel.

The Design Development

There’s a reason why this site is called ‘Kurt Writes Things’: because Kurt would very much prefer not to draw things.

This is where Amy Slatem joins the picture. Amy is a Sydney-based freelance illustrator and designer; one whose simple yet chic illustrative style had the smart, minimalist charm to match the short snippets of humour I had in mind. But we needed more than just drawings of a cat - we needed a comic-book character to come alive.

As our title character, Falafel was workshopped extensively - and very remotely. With Amy and I being separated by thousands of kilometres of land and ocean we didn’t have the luxury of meeting in person at a local coffee shop to sketch out the details, or at a business lunch somewhere about town. We made it work online but we could have done without a few time zones in between London and Sydney.

So our collaboration was remote in more ways than one. Because it wasn’t even feasible to communicate in real-time, this “sketchy” phase of creation required precise phrasing, oodles of patience, and probably the toughest thing to give to a fellow designer: trust.

I trawled the personal Camera Roll for all manner of pet poses from over the years and marked his identifying features (dotted nose, discoloured left ear, assorted splodges and speckles) on preliminary pencil sketches of Amy’s; hoping each email would return something that I would, as the pet parent, instantly recognise but also not recognise.

I soon became acutely aware of my new responsibility as a paying client to be crystal-clear in communications with my creative consultant.

When someone’s relying solely on your written word as guidance for a commission; “vibe-describing” is the difference between wasted work and an enthusiastic digital thumbs-up; indefinite delays and moving forward.

I had branched out before into podcasting (audio) and had recently honed my focus in copywriting (short form writing). Yet in this early phase of design development for Life With Falafel almost everything was visual, and I felt really out of my depth. But to innovate oftentimes you have to collaborate.

Amy knew what was I was on about though. She’s a pet owner herself (of a cute little French Bulldog named Pippa) and speaks in illustrations; her digitised drawings being the basis of her branding and packaging services.

Before making the leap from pencil to stylus pen we had to get all the little details right so Amy could shape the comic version of Falafel to fit any scenario in the future. A tummy tuck here (he’s a lean boy), a more prominent collar there…

The Inspiration

Once Falafel had made the leap from the real world to comic world, we needed some stories to keep him there.

Real-life influence aside, my two biggest influences for this comic were:

Nathan W. Pyle’s ‘Strange Planet’ series

(or those “alien comics” which started popping up on your newsfeed in 2019—in case you don’t recall either the author or the title)

‘Strange Planet’ is a visually simple comic with an unassumingly brilliant premise: alien beings doing everyday human things, but commenting on these activities with an otherworldly turn-of-phrase that reveals the inherent ridiculousness—or poignancy—of the mundane.

The beings show a child-like curiosity about life around them and I recognised that in Falafel. It was the fictional ‘voice’ that my wife and I heard every time our cat inspected our cooking, pounced to catch a toy, or enthusiastically received a petting.

‘Garfield’ by Jim Davis

The original “grumpy” cat was an obvious choice from my and many others’ childhoods. Although Garfield is still the mainstream blueprint for comic-style kitties who narrate the story themselves, it is a far different character (lazy, cynical) from what I had in mind for Falafel (peppy, curious).

So we had ourselves a cat comic and me playing around with a cute yet unreliable narrator of an interior existence—a cartoonish camera angle on my experience as a first-time cat owner.

Although I initially envisioned a more narrative/origin-story approach, we decided to stick to a sitcom format after I first saw the agreed-upon comic counterpart of Falafel.

What might’ve seemed superfluous in a simple written description received an unexpected illustrative flourish from Amy, translating initial demo takes of "OMG the cute stuff he does” into visually interesting pieces, even if the jokes were still basic and feet-finding.

The Script and The Spreadsheet

Four panels seems enough to reach the pun-point, right? And if you arrange the four panels into another square you’re already more aligned for a popular mobile platform like Instagram - where webcomics like Strange Planet and Pusheen (another cat themed influence) thrive.

Thus the scene was set for Life With Falafel to be short and sweet; at most a couple of seconds each time around.

I whipped up a spreadsheet template and got to work distilling jokes into four squares, with four headings to be asked of each square:

1. Narration - Falafel’s inner thoughts and rolling monologue, shown in a band across the top and/or bottom of a panel.

2. Dialogue - spoken words from any character (including Falafel). But mostly they are from Hoomin voices (Man Hoomin, Lady Hoomin, other media sources). These words are connected to the speaker with a plain curved line (I thought speech bubbles would be an inefficient use of space and an obstruction to quick dialogue changes).

3. Direction - bullet-point recipe to making the words become the pictures. Ingredients usually include: look and placement of characters, descriptions of actions, facial reactions, other text or signage, and bespoke items in the scene. This is the main meal of every comic brief as dialogue and narration are often minimal (and in some comics, completely absent).

4. Reference Material - links to photos and other media to back up the brainstorms, including a (very simplistic) handsketched version of the comic by yours truly. Amy says this is often the biggest help, although I wonder what she gets out of something that probably looks like it was just found at the back of a cave a few millennia after its carving.

This process is much like writing a song: you walk around with melodies and lyric fragments in your head, you grab the most insistent of them, and then try shape these into the punchiest of plots. If you play a musical instrument you find the right chords to go over these, or you share them with someone who can.

Our collaboration was structured for me to be the writer and originator of ideas for the comic, and with Amy responding to these ideas:

• First step usually comes in the form of a sketch, still minimally detailed, as a risk assessment for aesthetics. Her illustrative insight warns us of what would work in practice and what should probably go back to the ‘drawing board’ (pun totally intended).

• Next step is we agree that she give the comic idea its final digital ‘inking’. It’s a bit of an anachronistic term; one used within the graphic design world for retracing the line work with a stylus onto a digital medium (i.e. a tablet or touch-sensitive screen). Here is where individual layers of detail can be separated out and editable text sections can be added, with the result being a fully digital yet still hand drawn piece of art.

• Lastly, I receive the Adobe Photoshop working files from Amy and personally add the Life With Falafel logo and our bylines (artist credits) to the full comic, and barring any last-minute dialogue or narration changes, we’re then ready to publish.

The Launch

Armed with a feline and a format I came up with a basic batch of seven comic ideas for Amy’s initial commission (which also included a logo design in square and rectangular versions).

Together we whittled these down to four completed 4-panels by the end of January 2020. And then I went on holiday to Portugal. And then the whole world turned upside down.

I didn’t have a launch date or much details in mind for going public with Life With Falafel by the time the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the planet.

Considering that from initial idea to completed concept had been a blistering three months (one of those being December) amidst a full-time office day job myself, I felt it was worth sitting with this new character and seeing what would emerge organically with this palette in mind. At the same time, our household was making sense of the rapidly-restructured routine: remote working.

It was a buzz phrase you kept hearing during the first few weeks of COVID-19 lockdown. “Remote working” seemed like an apt pun and a zeitgeist-capturing way of introducing a comic about an indoor cat.

We (the Hoomins) were stepping on Falafel’s daytime turf, and he needed assurances that we would behave appropriately. I contacted Amy again with just a single comic idea and a new proposal. We were going live.

“Remote Working” (the comic) was a turning point for me believing Life With Falafel could actually work as an ongoing commitment.

It was the first idea I came up with after having seen Falafel in illustrative form. It changes your thinking when you see a prototype in front of you. During a time of unprecedented global crisis and uncertainty the comic shrunk the reader’s concerns to just four panels inside of a one-bedroom apartment; to a narrator mostly oblivious to a world outside of that. It was a humorous salve. I had in mind where to apply it.

The Impact

Our debut comic came out of somewhere and I wanted to keep digging near there.

Choosing to put aside some of our finished comics from pre-launch, I was in favour of releasing fresh new material to an audience who is already primed to read it. There’s also that artistic sense of comfort with character look & development to consider which leaves many popular cartoons and comics with weird first episodes or seasons.

Amy and I looked at the process and the pipeline, agreeing to:

• a weekly public release on Facebook and Instagram (Friday mornings, i.e. mood-boost right before the weekend)

• four ideas commissioned at once to last for one month, with each idea being illustrated & completed by her in the week of release

• see where this takes us - creative continuity being the name of the game

Having this external accountability—not just to my creative partner, but to a regular audience—for the comic’s creative output, I looked to get an online presence mainly through social media without resorting to a standalone hosting platform (like this website).

So I gathered my initial audience through word-of-mouth, Instagram hashtags, and paid Facebook advertising, with hundreds of little ‘love’ and ‘laugh’ reactions helping build a steady set of fans over the following weeks and months of 2020.

It spurred me on to write sharper scripts that could each stand on their own in terms of quality and content; that could appeal to cat-crazy comic consumers and topical casuals alike. Life With Falafel would aim to be for all ages.

The Future

Like many sitcoms Life With Falafel lasted for a short time, but a good time.

The weekly release schedule worked during an otherworldly window of time when people started buying hot tubs and baking banana bread for fun. But it couldn’t last like that indefinitely. So after 34 published comics we put things on pause with a Christmas-themed comic and signed off for the year, and maybe for a long time.

Years later, life still carries on with Falafel. He’s happy wherever he happens to be.