Bored Panda got in touch with Lark to find out more about her work. First, the artist shared with us her personal story that motivated her to create this fantastic comic series: “I’ve worked for years at a ‘cool’ startup company. I’ve got the full package: inspirational speeches full of incomprehensible corporate terms, narcissist bosses, crazy workloads, and that subtle energy in the workspace that brainwashed people into thinking we (employers and employees) were all on the same side."
"There were many factors that slowly made me realize how noxious that environment was. But I remember this one day, sitting in the conference room, during a team meeting and hearing my boss and coworkers blabbering about numbers and goals and acronyms and a bunch of nonsensical corporate subjects… Even after years working in that area, I couldn’t keep up with what they were saying.”
Lark continued and told us more about her inspiration: “Then, I heard outside a bird singing. It was just a simple melody, a few notes sung in a wild language, but I understood it more clearly than I could understand what all those people were saying with their complex vocabulary. ‘That bird’, I thought, ‘is so much wiser than us to never set foot in a place like this and chain itself to our stupid lifestyle…’
‘But, what if it wasn’t so wise? What could possibly make a bird, born wild and free, give up on its freedom and start working the way we do? What is it that really separates us?’”
This is how the author came up with the first comic strips: “That’s how I started writing about Robert, a rufous-bellied thrush that gets a job at a company where the boss is a hungry cat. Catch.co became a place where different birds would work together, build relationships and learn about life while they literally tried to survive in the job market.”
Lark shared that her first comics were just for her own amusement and she created them as a way to play with situations that actually happened to her while she was working for the corporation. She said: “As I kept sharing them on social media, more and more people started to comment about their own jobs, and how relatable all of that was. I saw there a chance to call out companies that mistreated and abused their employees, and to tell everyone going through it that they’re not alone, and they should never accept these things as normal.”
“Ever since I started sharing this story, I’ve been receiving a lot of messages from people saying how important it was for them to read it, and how it made them feel embraced. That’s what keeps me doing what I’m doing, and I hope to keep telling stories like this for a long time.”
