Finding Out What Can Be More Fun Than A Funeral Home, As Fellhound and Michele Abounader Launch Their New Collab

Comic Yeti Contributor Doug Wood sits outside the Yeti Cave with Fellhound and Michele Abounader to discuss their upcoming Kickstarter campaign FUNeral Home.

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CBY: Thank you for providing an advanced look at your comic. I have been a fan of Fellhound’s comic work for a long time. She has primarily done books solo outside of short stories, so how did this collaboration come about? Can each of you go into what you each contributed to the process?

FELLHOUND: Thank you Doug! The feelings are mutual.

Michele and I have been friends for a while and have often shared ideas and stories over a good game of Golf (With Your Friends, available now on Steam). One fine evening while out on the (Bouncy Castle expansion) golf course, we got to talking and realized we wanted to make the same thing - a dumb, fun, anime-shenanigans book - to escape the impending horrors of life.

Working with Michele was a joy because I think we had a lot of similar ideas creatively and it wasn’t really a typical “here's my idea, please draw this” situation. We both came up with the story together and had input on various stages of script and art - together. It really felt like a collaboration from the ground up and that’s so important!

CBY: Oh playing multiplayer games with good buddies sounds so good right now! So got story ready to go, was crowdfunding always the path? How do you quick pitch the story to someone hearing about it for the first time?

MICHELE ABOUNADER: Kickstarter was always the plan, yeah. We decided to set our goal to fund the print run and some other needed things…variant covers, lettering, the logo. We put our creator pay into some stretch goals.

Our best quick pitch is our campaign tagline… “A story about chosen family, processing grief, and sapphic assassins. It's not burying your gays if your gays are burying everyone.”

CBY: Fell, having read your work in the past, grief and action seem to be the reoccurring themes of your comics. Could you speak on some of the comics influences you’ve had that touch on those topics?

FH: One of my favourite comics of all time is Strangers in Paradise - I think that opera of a series really encapsulates the entirety of human emotion in 2000 pages. And because of that I never forgot about it. So that’s what I like to create in my stories - feelings you don’t forget about. Another comic that inspired me on the emotional front is 12 Days by June Kim. It’s about getting over your dead ex girlfriend by drinking her ashes for 12 days. Such a strange premise and yet, told so poignantly. Sometimes feelings are hard to describe and you can only ever figure them out through a good book.

For the action front I’m mostly inspired by the works of JH Williams on Batwoman Elegy. To be honest I don’t read many typical action comics but I’m moreso enamoured by the way people creatively draw movement. Another example would be Elena Casagrande’s work on Black Widow - it was so cool to see her make use of the de luca effect in the spreads!

MA: Ugh 12 days……….. (Fell gifted me a copy of 12 days and I will truly never recover from it)

CBY: Michele, I believe this is your longest work to date. If so, can you talk about how it feels to have that extra space to breathe in telling a narrative? Some writers struggle to tell concise stories. Do you find writing shorts or one-shots difficult at all?

MA: This is the longest script I’ve written that will be out in the world, yeah. And developing the story with Fell was so much fun (heh) and organic? It didn’t feel like I had extra space as much as it felt like the right amount of space. We sort of planned the story and the length of it from the start.

I like short stories because you have the opportunity to be really punchy and get creative with other storytelling elements… lettering, colors, panel structure, etc. it’s not easier or more difficult, it’s just a different way to create.

CBY: One base advise for creators is write what you know, so I have to ask, do either of you have experience in work at funeral homes?

MA: neither of us has worked in a funeral home or been an assassin. Official answer.

FH: (Funeral Homes not to be confused for Alison Bechdels Fun Home, now a tony award winning musical)

MA: Neither of us has won a Tony award or been in a Broadway show either.

CBY: Ok so that confirms my suspicion about one or more of you being magical girls. I’ll take my answer after the interview. Last question, what reward tier are you most excited about? What are you recommending to people the most?

MA: We cannot confirm or deny if we are magical girls.

We do have a couple of cool variant covers, and we have a tier to offer all 3 of them together at a bit of a price break in case anyone has trouble deciding.

CBY: Let the folks know your social medias.

FH: @fellhound.bsky.social‬ MA: @cerealpancake.bsky.social‬

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