So what is FOOTNOTE? It’s not my job or my next career. It’s a side project I’ve wanted to make for a long time. A little therapy for the mind. I’m a visual person. I like dragging a complicated idea onto one page, where it has a chance of making sense. Not a thousand-slide PowerPoint. Not a memo nobody understands.
FOOTNOTE is a workplace comic and short-story series. It lives at the Standard Provision Company, a fictional hot dog plant where people are trying to get through the day, the machines have their own opinions, and a black cat supervises without being asked.
But before the first edition, a little explanation.
It's like the Johnny Cash song. I've been everywhere, man.
People tend to know me through communications and marketing. That's only the latest chapter. I started in radio. Then county and city government, state party politics, a children's nonprofit in Hawai'i. Brewery marketing. Motorcycle tires and biker rallies. Health authorities. Fintech. Military, first responder and law enforcement comms sprinkled throughout. I lived the dot-com boom, the mortgage crisis and the rise of the web and social. I'm a Gen Xer who's seen it all. Different places. Different pressures. A lot of people doing their best with the information they had.
Some people call me a fixer. I'm a utility player. I fix things. I go wherever the bosses want and need me to go. That's just who I am. Along the way, I get to know everybody. I've been fortunate to see things from a lot of perspectives and put pieces together. I've also had great mentors who taught me to look at things differently, especially when the obvious answer wasn't the useful one.
I'm not always the flashiest with words. Some people would say I'm loquacious. Fair enough. But I know how to tell a pretty good story.
It's the Texas boy in me. I always loved hearing a great one.
So why a comic?
I've never been especially good with jargon. My brain has to re-envision something before I really understand it. A story gives me a way to do that. Put a concept on a factory floor. Give it shoes. Let the cat watch what happens.
Each FOOTNOTE story takes one idea and looks at it from a different angle. Sometimes it's a phrase we all use. Sometimes it's a rule, a habit or an assumption nobody has checked lately. Sometimes it's the gap between what one person means and what another person hears.
The point isn't to make fun of workplace politics. It's to talk about things that matter to people, with enough humor to get us looking at the same thing.
Work goes better when we're on the same page. That doesn't mean we all have to think alike. It means we understand what we're trying to do together.
And yes, AI will come up. Technology is changing how we work, how we talk and how we decide what counts as useful work. There are stories in that, too.
Meet the cast.
These characters are personal to me. Each represents types of people I've come across and things I've noticed along the way. They aren't portraits of a former boss or a company I've worked for. This isn't an attack on either. The humor is aimed at the concepts, not the people.
At the center is Footnote, the alter ego of our very real black cat, Puppy B. Anyone who knows me and my wife knows we love black cats. Giving one the last word seemed reasonable.
Selden asks questions. Frank, the inflatable, says nothing and somehow manages to report the mood of the whole plant. Around them are people with different skills, different blind spots and their own reasons for doing things the way they do.
If you see a little of yourself in here, that's good.
It could also be a warning. The purpose of your life may be to serve as a warning to others.
(A lined borrowed from Despair.com)
We'll see what the cat thinks.
A side project, with room to play.
I'm not asking anybody to like it. This is something I've wanted to make, and I'm going to enjoy finding out what it can become.
There'll be little things tucked in as it grows: quizzes, the FOOTNOTE Academy and other ways to play with the ideas. Those come later. For now, a story and a different way to look at things are enough.
FOOTNOTE 1 begins with a yellow line on the floor that nobody remembers painting
What familiar idea would you like to see through a black cat's eyes‽