“I moved to New York fifteen years ago. I didn’t really have much interest in drawing at that time — I was vaguely interested, but then I found Threadless, this whole community of artists on the internet who help each other and bounce ideas off each other, and it was even a way to make money,” says Nathan Pyle. 

In many of the episodes in Dan Harmon’s show Community, the character Abed Nadir (Danny Pudi) is actually wearing a graphic tee from Threadless, a Chicago-based design company who crowdsource unique graphic tee shirt ideas. At the time, the company paid about $2,500 for the beloved designs. 

“It took me a long time. I think I did a hundred design submissions, at least, before I got my first license. Before anyone purchased anything. But, in those hundred submissions, I was learning a lot, I was making friends. That was me creating, doing something at night, while I worked another job in the day.”

Over time, Pyle learned more and more about design. Eventually, this hobby helped pay about 20 percent of his income. Eventually, it completely took over, and in 2021, Pyle teamed up with Dan Harmon to create Strange Planet.

“I knew I wanted to write. I wanted to create. It was right at the beginning of the iPhone era and when I realized there were opportunities for people to see your creation immediately was impressive to me.”

This is perhaps a unique problem for writers. When you ask someone to read a script, or even a short story, you are demanding their attention, often for an unknown amount of time. For musicians, it only takes a minute to hear a song. For artists, it only takes a few seconds to view a piece of art. 

“There may be words in the art, so creating comics was a natural evolution as I drew more and more for the internet. I also love the idea of competing. On the internet, you’re competing with the entire globe to get some attention, especially when the scrolling era began. With that, you have especially a short amount of time for someone to stop and look at what you’re doing.”

“If someone is following the work I’m doing, I have little thoughts, and they start to form a more cohesive worldview and narrative. So getting them out in little doses was a crucial part of my career,” adds Pyle.

Finding Your Tribe

Using Threadless and then social media, feedback was also crucial in the process. “Feedback was the core to making the work,” says Pyle. “I stumbled into it and I didn’t know it was a ‘release early/ release often’ model. That’s a software phrase, but it works for me too.”

“I work in interactions and there are theories about that with artists. I don’t mind getting a very early version of what I’m making out into the world and seeing how people receive it. That feedback helps me understand what people do understand about it and what they don’t understand about it.”

The same could be said for joining a writers’ group. Creatives need other people to help determine if the idea in their mind is shaping up on the page, be they words, lines, symbols, or tiny blue aliens. This all started by posting comics in the New York City subreddit group. 

Nathan Pyle. Photo by Chris Loupos

“That became my first book, staying out of the way in New York, blending in, and creating a little guide for people like me. The Redditors did provide that feedback. They were helping me edit, by saying, ‘Yes that is so true.’” This filtering and feedback system is free for anyone willing (and thick-skinned enough) to use it.

For those people who are scared to share half-baked ideas early, Pyle responds, “I totally understand the apprehension, including that you don’t want your idea taken by somebody else. The thing that helped me was when I realized, our ideas may already have been taken by somebody else.”

Pyles explains that many ideas are essentially out in the ether, rather than a completely original idea. With so many creatives and so many people online, it’s nearly impossible to be truly original. Where the originality comes in is when you start to combine skillsets with a point of view. That said, you should also begin with a “receptive community” says the artist. 

Being “Discovered“

Nathan Pyle has the unique success story where it feels like he’s an overnight success, but actually, it’s a story more than ten years in the making. “Each step in my career built a little more confidence into my creativity. What I tried to do is never lose that base confidence when I first started capturing any audience at all.”

Then, the results start to come in and it’s time to double down on that commitment. “When Strange Planet did start to take off, I had to really commit to it. I decided to draw one comic every day for a whole year. In the middle of that year, I had already submitted a book and it was about to become a bestseller.”

Around this time, Pyle was invited to sit down with Dan Harmon and Steve Levy, known for Community, and of course, Rick and Morty. “I had some basic ideas of what it could look like as a TV show and they had some specific, tangible ideas. I knew it was the right partnership to take a webcomic and make it into a world.”

The natural bridge the two prolific creators pitched came from Pyle’s original perspective. “They understood that having the beings have conflict that arises from honesty was a really natural and succinct way to explain to other writers. The beings sit down at the beginning of the episode, square up with each other, and the conflict arises from there. That’s subversive because often in sitcoms, they’re honest at the end.”

“Dan’s belief in me was inspiring. When someone at that level believes in your creativity, you have a lot of wind in your sails. I don’t know what I’m doing, but I’m surrounded by really smart people,” he jokes. 

Further Together

There’s an expression made popular by the Marvel creators that says, “Faster Alone, Further Together.” The proverb is also true for Pyle, as he had to move from mostly working alone in his apartment to working in a writers’ room. 

“That can be hard and I’m sure you’ve had moments where you have an idea that is right on the edge. Do I say this? Do I not? You’re listening to other people with really smart ideas and wondering if you subject it to the discourse,” he jokes. 

What inspired Pyle the most about Harmon was that Harmon would say hundreds of ideas in a day, but none of the ideas were particularly precious. He was saying as many ideas as he could think of, and letting the room distill the best of the best. 

Partial cast of Strange Planet. Photo courtesy of Apple TV+

“Dan was okay with just coming up with ideas. Just a machine of thought. You don’t have to hold onto your ideas. If people like them, that’s great. If they don’t, that’s also fine. The process of just saying that idea is also progress. You let it out of your head, try to put words on it. Next time, you might have a better way of saying it, but there’s so much about getting that first one out.”

In this particular writers’ room, since it was animation, there was also some visual development because moving from a web comic to a cartoon has a variety of complications and adjustments. “You’re writing a script, but you’re also answering questions about what the world would look like. That was some heavy lifting, because you had to make choices.”

Aside from the visuals, Pyle’s original comic characters didn’t even have names. “There were a lot of big questions we had to answer. At times, you can fill yourself with second-guessing, especially when you’re first world building.” Thanks to all of this, the series was picked up and then they got to work on a 10-episode premiere season. 

Creating the North Star For Strange Planet

The general idea is that the show is about truth and honesty, but there’s so much more than went into it to create a North Star for the writers and creators to focus on. “It was world slightly better than ours,” begins Pyle. “They’re emotionally advanced beings.”

“Most sci-fi ideas or aliens have technologically advanced beings, which make sense, especially because they’re visiting our planet. But, in this case, they’re emotionally advanced, as if they all go to therapy and have ways of dealing with emotion that are better than ours.”

“We wanted them to be without gender, without names, and then, to be sincere in their interactions. For instance, as far as North Star, we would tell the voice actors, ‘You can’t be meaner than the meanest Muppet would be.’ Immediately, people think Sam the Eagle, or whatever cranky Muppet you can think of, that’s as mean as you can get.”

Another example was Bob’s Burgers, a show that is both tremendously funny and wholesome. Within this idea, somewhat lies Pyle’s perspective on the world, his creative work, and everything in between. 

As for his creative work, he considers the stoic idea of Memento Mori. “You don’t know how long you have to carry a creative vision through. I think about that quite a bit. I think about how I’ve been healthy and been privileged, but if I can carry through the next decade, I just want to carry through the next important little idea.”

This interview has been condensed. Listen to the full audio version here.