While you were gone: n8n writes the holiday handover and draws a comic about it

Try it first: While you were gone. Pick a person, the length and a comic style, and a few seconds later the handover sits in Nextcloud and the comic on the page.

What you get

• A handover note: as Markdown in the Outbox folder of a demo Nextcloud: who covers what, which deadlines fall into the absence window, what to do if which risk strikes.
• A Deck card: with the summary, so it shows up on the board the team looks at anyway.
• A Talk message: short, with the essentials.
• An out-of-office reply: with the cover and the return date, ready to copy.
• A five-panel comic: leaving, the mail piles up, something catches fire, the cover saves the day, coming back. Four styles, from detective noir to picture book.

The workflow

• Webhook: takes the person, the length (3, 7 or 14 days) and the style from three lists. That is all the page sends.
• Fix the demo space: a Code node decides where the workflow may read and write: one calendar, one Deck board, one folder, one Talk room. Every URL is checked against it and the run stops otherwise.
• Six reads in parallel: CalDAV REPORT with expand for the events in the absence window, the Deck API for the cards, WebDAV GET for the inbox summary and three project notes, PROPFIND for the Outbox folder and the Talk API for the chat.
• Analyse the absence: a Code node does the maths deterministically: what falls into the window, what is overdue, who covers it, which risks exist. In the sample run that was 5 meetings, 10 open mails and 6 handovers.
• AI: gpt-oss-120b at IONOS only phrases things: the summary, the out-of-office reply and the five comic panels, in the visitor's language and the chosen style. If a field is missing or the model does not answer, the workflow fills in a template built from the same facts.
• Write: WebDAV PUT for the note, the Deck API for the card, the Talk API for the message. Then the workflow cleans up its own older entries.

Why the AI does not do the maths

Who covers whom is not up to a language model. The Code node works it out from calendar, cards and mail, traceably and without hallucinations. The AI only gets the result and may tell it nicely.

The comic and the technique

The comic is drawn in the browser: one description made of simple shapes that is output once as SVG and once straight onto a canvas. That is why the same comic can be downloaded as SVG and as PNG, and the share preview is made from the same drawing. The fonts (Bangers and Comic Neue, both SIL OFL) are hosted on my server.

Honest limits

• Everything runs on demo data of the invented Brightside Studio. A file stands in for the IMAP node here so nobody sees real mail.
• The cover rules are simple: one fixed buddy per person, finance topics go to Sam. The workflow knows nothing about leave planning, shift models or time zones.
• The AI writes the comic in the language of the page. It can be wrong, which is why all facts are shown separately next to it.
• The out-of-office reply is only displayed. In real use you would set it with occ dav:absence:set or in the settings; the workflow deliberately does not.

Privacy

Nothing from you is sent to Nextcloud. The result stays on the server for 14 days so that the link works, and the page is set to noindex. For the hourly limit there is a salted hash of your IP address for one hour at most.

Build it yourself

The workflow is available as JSON, as a template only: you have to enter your Nextcloud address, an app password, your Deck board, calendar and Talk room, and swap the inbox file for your IMAP node. More workflows to click are on the n8n overview, for example the office morning.

Now it is your turn: which cover rule is missing in your team? Tell us in the comments.

Originally published at daniele-michelin.com. More guides, free checks (SPF, TLS, headers) and an error-message lexicon: daniele-michelin.com/en/.