Out of Hours: Letters To Die For

You’ll not find this nursery book in Toys ‘R’ Us, but then its authors, illustrator Chris Walker and AKQA associate creative director Matt Longstaff, are more about raising grim giggles than teaching ABCs. Carol Cooper meets a couple of sunny guys with darkly droll minds

It’s a sunny spring morning in a quiet corner of London’s fashionable Farringdon – I meet Matt Longstaff and Chris Walker, two well-mannered, softly-spoken gents, outside the AKQA London HQ, which happens to sit above the offices of Save the Children. Everything seems so wholesome. Until we go and sit in a dark pub and discuss two kids slaughtering each other. These would be Rosé and Fred, who find 26 gruesome ways to kill in Longstaff and Walkers’ wickedly funny ABC book of cartoons.

In the vein of Edward Gorey’s Gashlycrumb Tinies – another abecedarium, or alphabetical list, of darkly comic deaths – Let’s Play: MURDER is, in its creators’ words, ‘old fashioned non-PC fun, cunningly disguised as a children’s nursery book’. The concept dates from Longstaff’s art school days in 2004. “I was going to do a scary mural outlining a different way to die for every letter of the alphabet. I didn’t do it, but kept it in mind as something that would be funny.” In 2006, on graduating in graphics and advertising, he got an internship at AKQA that led to a copywriting position. Now associate creative director at AKQA London, his time with the agency has seen him help open the new Berlin office and work on such imaginative campaigns as MTV’s Under The Thumb app and the Nissan IDx project in which virtual reality headsets gave users the chance to design their own cars. AKQA was also where he met Walker, who had spent nine years at the agency until last year when he quit his role as senior designer – having worked on such high-profile digital projects as the Nike and MINI websites. Now successfully freelancing, his bold career move has afforded him more time to develop Let’s Play: MURDER.

Longstaff first mentioned the idea to Walker around two years ago and they started refining the concept and researching comedy deaths. “Our Google histories looked terrible for a while,” says Walker. “It wasn’t even going to be kids at first,” says Longstaff, “but then kids seemed more funny. If it was just two dudes beating the shit out of each other it would have been too dark. Then we thought, it should all be real, there shouldn’t be anything over-fantastical, no D is for dragons, or G is for gun.” Walker elaborates: “It has to be death by anything that is readily available around the house, anything that could happen if you left these kids alone for long enough. I think the appeal is that we have had to be really creative with each one, like S is for skewering. We could have just done that with a spear, but we used a swingball set. G ended up being for gas, helium gas, which Fred inflates Rosé with until she explodes.”

The duo say they are not fans of horror, it’s more about having a laugh, “even if it’s a shocked or nervous laugh, it’s always a laugh. We don’t see it as death, the kids are alive on the next page,” says Walker. The book also celebrates the macabre side of childhood imagination. “In my house we weren’t allowed toy guns,” Longstaff recalls, “so we just found sticks that looked to us a bit like guns or space lasers and off we went.” Walker joins in: “Yeah, and you would play until someone got hurt, then a parent would step in. We’ve just removed the parents, to see what happens.”

The characters were originally developed to spoof the 90s UK kids’ show Rosie and Jim. “We thought it might be funny to do a corrupted version of them but then we found nothing rhymed with Jim. And Fred rhymes with dead,” says Walker. “We wanted a chavvy name like Chardonnay. So we came up with Rosé.” After refining the concept they started bouncing the idea off various people, one of whom was Chris Baker of independent publishers Dead Canary Comics. “They kicked us into action to finish it and they will represent the book when it’s done. It’ll be their first book, which is exciting,” says Longstaff. DCC will be able to utilise their connections with Waterstones and Firebox, online purveyors of irreverent titles such as Crap Taxidermy and Images You Should Not Masturbate To. “And we’ve been talking to people at Magma Books and Urban Outfitters,” says Longstaff. So, although they admit it’s not exactly WH Smith material, there is definitely a market for this brand of gruesome fun, something that their outstandingly successful Kickstarter campaign has borne out. At the time of going to press the campaign had closed with more than 400 backers. “I thought it would tail off when we ran out of mates, “ says Walker. Longstaff  enthusiastically outlines their progress: “We unlocked Brazil over the weekend,” he beams. “So now we have 20 countries who want to get involved in this. Which is just hilarious. We thought that we needed £4,000 to get it to print and we’re up to £9,000 now.” At the time of going to press, £13,250 had been pledged and they book will be shipped to 29 countries. The extra funding enabled them to up the quality of the product to hardback, with a dust jacket, too.

It’s ironic that a Kickstarter page set up by two digitally-focused professionals proudly boasts the sensual, old-fashioned delights of textured paper and I suggest to them that this yearning for physical cultural artefacts is a response to the digital age, much like the resurgence of vinyl records. “That’s true actually, we’ve come to slightly fetishise it. Since we started talking about GSM [paper weight] it’s like a whole new world has opened up. We have MP3s and Kindles and so on but we really wanted to make something ‘real’. Maybe because that doesn’t happen so much any more,” muses Longstaff. “I’ve been a digital designer and illustrator for 15 years and this is my first ever printed piece,” Walker adds.

The project is not only a labour of love, it’s also fed back into their professional lives. Longstaff admits he used to avoid social media briefs but the experience of setting up a Facebook page and engaging with users has also improved his skills. “I’ve always been into making a point, cleanly and crisply and getting out. But in social, if you do that you can come across as rude and abrupt. For example, I don’t ask questions in my advertising but in social it’s all ‘what’s your favourite blah blah?’. But I’m learning to adapt what I do, even if it’s not about asking questions, it’s about getting people to share or like or be involved. The next time a social media brief comes my way I’ll pick it up as I feel I’ve more legitimacy now.” For Walker, the social media element has boosted his professional profile. “I’ve had more reaction to my work and actually got commissions off the back of it. Just from my name being on Kickstarter and Twitter.” The sales of his original Let’s Play: MURDER artwork has also garnered him new fans, selling fast to buyers around the world. Not bad for something that started out as a bit of a laugh. I ask them if they have further plans for Rosé and Fred. “We’ve been thinking about an interactive e-book, so on a touch screen you’d kind of ‘swipe right to behead’. The users would be kind of complicit and that would add to the black humour,” Longstaff chuckles. Walker agrees, “or maybe the next step should be a pop-up book. That would be nice.”

Hmm. Not sure if ‘nice’ is the word. I leave them to ponder their dark arts and reemerge into the spring sunshine. Heading for the bus stop, I make a failed dash for the No. 73 – as it pulls away, I notice the particularly malevolent grin of a child staring at me from the back seat.

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