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If you were to time travel and visit Crazy Go Nuts University during my student days, you’d find that the thing I was known for wasn’t programming or playing the accordion, but drawing comics.
The web came around at the very end of my long and colorful academic career, so my comics mostly appeared in student newspapers — primarily Golden Words, a satire newspaper in the same vein as the original print version of The Onion, as well as the main student newspaper, The Queen’s Journal.
I make the occasional comic every now and again these days, and when Dan Arias, a former coworker at Auth0, found out about it, he asked me to draw some comics as a way to “storyboard” some screens for an app for the 2023 Oktane conference.
The comics were supposed to showcase some features of Auth0’s customer identity management system, and if possible, do so in a humorous way. They also had to use some animal mascots that had been created for the project: a platypus, a rabbit, a capybara, and a boar.
I recently found the sketchbook with the comics I made for the app. They never went into the app — they were just storyboards for the app’s artist, Sofía Prósper Díaz-Mor, to use as guides, and the final versions that appeared in the app looked fantastic.
Still, there’s a rough charm to my doodles, so I thought I’d post them here. Perhaps it’s time for me to make more posts as comics…
Fine-grained authorization and the big red button
The app had a space theme, so all the comics featured our animal characters — once again, a platypus, a rabbit, a capybara, and a boar — as characters having science fiction adventures that also featured some aspect of digital identity.
This comic was about fine-grained authorization, which is a fancy way of saying “very specific control over who’s allowed to do what in a system”…
Authentication needs anomaly detection
This comic was the storyboard for a story about anomaly detection, which attempts to detect logins that have a suspicious quality to them. I did this by having an alien disguise themself as the ship’s commanding officer, Captain Platypus, and board the ship…
Single sign-on and the planet of a thousand apps
“The planet of a thousand apps” was the setting for this comic about single sign-on. The idea was every activity on the planet was controlled by its own app, which meant that you either had to log into a different app to do anything, or you could use single sign-on…
The power of the passkey
To illustrate the security advantages of passkeys, I came up with this comic. It shows that with a passkey, you don’t have to memorize a password, and even if a hacker manages to break into the server, all it has is the passkey’s public key, which (as its name implies) is known to everyone…
Decentralized identity: A new hope
“Make Star Wars without getting us into legal trouble,” they said, and this is the resulting comic. It features our rabbit character as “Bun Solo” and our capybara as “Capybacca.” In this rough sketch comic, they destroy the centralized identity database, the Data Star, freeing the citizens of the galaxy to use decentralized identities. In the second page, I show the uses for them…
More to come…
Watch this space — I think it’s time to do more comic-style blog posts here on Global Nerdy!