An homage to my cat Yellow: a comic book in a space sim

What do my departed calico cat, Yellow, the space sim Elite: Dangerous and comic books have in common? Well, I used the game to create a comic book style story in memory of Yellow.

When last December I had to help my lovely calico cat Yellow cross the Rainbow Bridge, I promised myself that I would keep her memory alive as much as I could. Writing about her is a way to do so, keeping her photos and videos around is another way to perpetuate her memory. Creating a comic book that tells a story mixing fact and fiction is also a viable option, and an experience I’ve worked on since December. The comic book is now ready to share, freely, with the world, and whoever may want to read about how my “copawlot” is memorialized, in some 20 pages.

Using Elite: Dangerous space simulation to tell a story about my cat Yellow

A ”copawlot” is the name used among Elite: Dangerous players to mention their pets, which became “co-pilots” in the space adventure, as they spend much time beside our desks while we play… or on our laps or all over the desk, sometimes pressing key combinations that can create havoc on what was to be a normal journey.

My first page designs were shared with Elite: Dangerous players on February 18th, when I felt I had enough material captured to start building the story. The final result is now being shared, after I ended it on April 18th, two months after the first WIP pages

When I embarked on an Elite: Dangerous expedition in memory of another cat, I started to create an eBook with pictures and texts of the journey, a project that I keep working on and about which I wrote before. But when Yellow died, I decided I wanted to create something about her, and how I picked a planet in Elite: Dangerous to be a beacon of her life, something I can look towards — even in real life, as Elite reproduces the Universe around us — , and immediately remember her. The comic book idea seemed just right.

I’ve created comics and even comic strips, decades ago, and had some of them published in newspapers and magazines, but this is something different, as I used assets from Elite: Dangerous to tell the story. It makes sense, as the action happens within that universe. The result is shareable freely, so people can read Yellow’s story and, through it, discover the potential of a space simulation/game to build narratives, which is something that interests me, as a journalist and photographer. Above all, though, the comic book A Dangerous Journey is a celebration of Yellow, another way to keep her memory alive.

The introduction in the comic book explains the whole story in detail, and then you’ve some 20 pages of pure comic book experience to go through. Feel free to download the eBook and tell your friends about it. Whether you’re a player of Elite: Dangerous or simply like cats, this is a story you can relate to.

The comic book is dedicated to Toby, Connor, Yellow and all the other “copawlots”

Follow the link to read online this FREE comic book, A Dangerous Journey, created using in-game graphics from Elite: Dangerous Odyssey.