Poorly Drawn Lines Creator Brings Webcomic to Life With FXX's Cake

The anchor show for the latest season of Cake, FXX's animated anthology series, is an adaptation of the beloved webcomic Poorly Drawn Lines. Created by cartoonist Reza Farazmand while he was still in college, the absurdist webcomic is known for telling short stories in a simple visual style with an eclectic group of characters and a surreal sense of humor. The animated version of the webcomic adds depth to the things that made Poorly Drawn Lines great and is a compelling focal point for Cake's fifth season on FXX.

Reza Farazmand spoke with CBR about turning his webcomic into an animated series and bringing his surrealist humor to life. He discussed what it takes to turn a small, stand-alone webcomic into longer-form animation and how he matched the character voices in his head with real-life vocal talent. Farazmand also shared some of his comic influences and how his approach to Poorly Drawn Lines has changed over the years.

CBR: What is the origin of the name of Poorly Drawn Lines?

Reza Farazmand: When I started drawing, my art style was very rough. I really didn't start drawing until I was probably late in high school, so I didn't grow up as a kid developing art skills or being super interested in art classes or anything like that. I kind of started drawing as a way to basically illustrate the jokes that I liked to write -- I was initially a writer. So yeah, it was pretty much just because my art was really poorly drawn initially. I think it's gotten a lot cleaner over time and I'm pretty happy with where it is now.

What changes did you have to make to take Poorly Drawn Lines from a webcomic to an animated show?

Probably the biggest change is exploring specific characters further. For a lot of Poorly Drawn Lines, it's just been standalone gag strips. When I realized that I wanted to do longer-form stuff with it, I started to incorporate more regular characters and started to build out personalities for them, and do a little bit of world-building. That's probably the biggest change from going from single standalone comics to animation -- incorporating story and characters. Also, a 20-page script is a lot longer than a three-line comic script that I typically write so there was definitely some learning involved.

So as a self-described writer first and foremost, what are the difficulties in expanding your couple-frame jokes into 20-page scripts?

I had to basically learn what drives a story forward and not just a joke. I tried to make it feel like Poorly Drawn Lines by sticking to a lot of little jokes that kind of string together into a bigger story basically, or that work their way into a conversation between two characters that drive a story forward. Whereas the joke would be the entire focus of a single comic, now it's just a moment in a 12-minute episode. It has to kind of lead to something else.

Were you involved at all in any of the voice casting for the series?

I got to be very closely involved -- listened to auditions, made lists of people who I thought would fit the character as well. I actually got to do one very brief cameo in the second episode as an angry butterfly. There were three angry butterflies and one of them is me, but my voice is pitched up to sound like Alvin and the Chipmunks basically, so you can't completely tell that it's me. So I got to be really closely involved in the casting process, and that was a lot of fun trying to match the voices to what I was hearing in my head.

How did it turn out? Do you think they matched up all right?

Yeah, I'm really happy with it. I also went into the casting process with an open mind because while I've been writing these characters for many years, I can't say that I have a fully formed voice in my head. So I was a little bit open-minded as to what other comedy actors could bring to the characters. Most of the actors have a background in improv and stand-up comedy and so they bring their own sense of timing and humor to the characters and add a lot of personality.

I heard that you started writing Poorly Drawn Lines your first year of college -- how has your approach changed in the years since then?

It's changed a lot. I think early on I was doing college-specific stuff, like grievances that college students have -- things like textbook prices, and getting up early for classes and stuff. Then at some point, I started doing more surreal, absurd humor, not so much grounded in real life. That's become a more interesting style for me to work in.

Does that surreal nature have a broader appeal?

I think probably, and I think it goes along with general broad trends in humor, as well. Humor has trended toward absurd and surreal over the past -- I don't know, I'm not a comedy historian. That's my perception of it, that humor has gotten weirder and a little bit more esoteric, but also more interesting.

So have your influences then changed from when you started to now?

Yeah, definitely. I can specifically say like, very early on, I really loved Matt Groening's Life in Hell comics. Matt Groening, obviously creator of The Simpsons, did a weekly comic, and this alt-weekly, I think it was LA Weekly. His style was very... Social commentary or satire, so I was trying to do that. I don't know what my specific influences are now, maybe just the broader shift in comedy towards surrealism. A lot of my influences, though, throughout my career have definitely been other webcomic artists and web humor in general.

Any specifically you want to list?

Early on I really liked The Perry Bible Fellowship, which is obviously a classic now. Hark! A Vagrant was a big influence early on. What else? There was this comic called White Ninja for many years that I think is now defunct but it was an early webcomic, niche comic that I really liked. There's a ton of others. There's a lot of contemporary artists that I really like now, too -- False Knees, Sarah Andersen. There's Webcomic Name by Alex Norris. There's a whole bunch of great comics to be inspired by these days.

Poorly Drawn Lines airs as part of the anthology show Cake -- how did your show end up with Cake?

I decided I wanted to pitch it as an animated series. So I went on the pitch circuit, basically, and took it out to all these networks and pitched it as a full half-hour comedy with two 15-minute episodes mashed together -- like an old Adult Swim show or something. FX was interested and then we started developing it and they, at some point, decided to make it the anchor show for this season of Cake. I think it fits really well there. There's a lot of other great animated stuff and I really like the whole vibe of the show. It's probably one of the most unique pieces of television out right now, I think.

Poorly Drawn Lines is broken down into three segments throughout each episode of Cake. How important is that tripartite division to how you're telling your stories?

I actually don't -- when I'm writing them, I'm not thinking about it in three acts. But the Cake editors find those breakpoints, they just did that basically. It totally works, I think. They'll pause it on a dramatic moment or a joke or something, so I think it's kind of fun. Then in-between, you get all these other shorts, which are cool and kind of break up the humor a little bit. I didn't really consciously think about those three parts while I was writing them.

This isn't the first time that Poorly Drawn Lines has been adapted for TV -- it was also adapted as part of TripTank early on, is that right?

TripTank was more hands-off for me. Basically, the animation studio producing that show approached me and asked to buy a handful of my comics to adapt. So I basically just got sent a check and then they adapted them. Or actually, now I'm thinking about it -- it was a long time ago so I'm forgetting -- but I did have to actually turn them into script form. So that was probably my first attempt at script writing was just adapting my messy, Microsoft Word script into an actual, properly-formatted script for the animators to build off of.

Is it easier to take a Poorly Drawn Lines comic that already exists and try to transform that into a 20-page script for a completely different medium, or to start from square one and develop a new Poorly Drawn Lines story?

So I did a combination of both for this season of Poorly Drawn Lines. In a few cases, I just took a joke and then expanded it. The second episode has one of my characters digging a hole and finding this possessed skull, and that was actually a series of four or five short comics that I did for the webcomic. I took that gag and adapted it into this whole thing where Kevin, the character, is interacting with this possessed skull throughout the entire episode and it causes problems for his friends. So I think it can be easier sometimes to have a little seed of an idea to build off of.

A lot of times when I'm writing these comics, I'm thinking in my head how I could probably make it 20 pages long if I wanted to, but I've got to keep it to four panels to put it on the internet. It basically gives me an opportunity to expand some of these comic strips to places where I feel like they could go. But then it's also really fun to just completely come up with something new -- which I actually did for the majority of the episodes, most of them are not derived from existing comics.

What are you working on right now outside of Poorly Drawn Lines?

I'm working on the webcomic version of Poorly Drawn Lines and continuing that, and that's pretty much it. The webcomic is my full-time job. I'm hoping to do more TV, possibly more animation. I'm not quite sure what form that's going to take yet, but that's my hope for the future.

Poorly Drawn Lines airs as part of Cake on FXX Thursdays at 10:00 pm ET.

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