Side Titles - I'm thinking of it as a sort of expansion pack

One thing that I would like to do is to break out a few of the comic strips as a separately printed issue -- such as Space Cat with his adventures.  And the mad scientist cats sitting in their morphing box.  It would be more than just the mini comics, these would be the same size as the issues but thinner.

I've been looking at marketing ideas and what others have come up with.  This whole 'self publishing' ability we all have now is so wide range that anything can be done, up to and including micro mini comics 2" x 2" in size or smaller. 

Terrarium Tanks And Cats - Just Another Kind Of Box

Yes, I admit it's been slim pickings on the updates. I've hit a downtime, both with ideas and because it's prime sewing season, I have been working on making merchandise for two Renaissance Festivals, sewing from six to ten hours a day for two weeks.  At lesat the end is in sight again.  My fingers need the rest.

Last night, though, I did three strips on Marcus finding and 'inhabiting' the new terrarium in the home.  He evicted the tiny, stunted dinosaur that lived there (the chameleon hopped out in a flash and is causing a ruckus in the other room with the smaller cats).  

For a few hours he's basked in the fact he can recline in the lost wilderness -- at least till the owner comes home.  We hear her wondering why all the cats are up on the kitchen table staring at the light fixture and realizes that her chameleon is out of the tank and running free.  At this point Marcus makes a discreet (and fast) exit from the lost land.

Well, OK, Here's Another Plant-Based Cartoon Idea

I was on a roll for a while doing some comic strips with plants and Marcus, so what the hey, here's one more.

Driving around the other day I was looking at all the spring flowers coming up, and remembering a discussion with someone a few days back about which low-light plants to use around the base of trees for landscaping.   Hostas are good for that and need very little care.  And while just driving for some reason my brain was just going over the word 'hostas' when it weirdly clicked on the 'hosta la vista, baby' line from the Terminator movies.

Ok.......I'll run with it.  

So I have a strip ftsem now where a green plant is on the table being stared at by Marcus who says 'ANOTHER plant?"  The owner warns him to leave it alone and warns him that it's for the front yard, she's just going to get a shovel to plant it in a few minutes.  He spends some time staring at it, in deep thought.  Then an evil smile and he says "Hosta la Vista, Baby' and the owner yells up 'I told you to leave it ALONE!'  

Does he destroy it?  Does he only threaten?  Is it being done only to raise the owners' blood pressure?  It's up to the reader to find out.

Coming Up With NO Ideas.....

Wow, this has been almost a full month where I've had complete writers block in regards to getting a new comic strip down on paper.  I haven't had such a dry spell for a long time.  

NOTHING is working.  Not my list of interesting key words, not trying to rethink how the next 'adventure' would go if the fleas turned up again, not anything.  No inspiration!  

ARGH!!!!!!!!!!!!! (scream)

Glitterati Cat Strikes Again!

Marcus never has luck with plants.  After having him get in trouble (undeserved) with the last plant his owner had sitting on the table ready to be given as a gift, I had to do something nice for him.

So the latest/current strip I have him doing his Walter Mitty manifestation as a  "Glitterati Cat", sitting at the highest point of the area (top of the book case) and thinking fondly of all the stuff he deserves, before turning around to to take a swipe at the haning fern almost in reach.

Though his owner does catch sight of what he's doing and tries to foil his effort at yanking it down.

Combining Stargate & CDs

I was watching repeat episodes of Stargate Atlantis the other night.  It was the episode with the exploding tumors (yeah, I know) where their Scottish doctor gets killed on Atlantis.  Explosions were going off around the base and for some reason I had an old memory of one of our cats tipping over a stack of CDs at the old apartment.

Merlin was hell on wheels till he calmed down around age 4. We came to expect things knocked over, moved, pulled apart, scattered, etc.  Well he was sitting next to a large stack of CDs on the desk when I walked in. He was grooming and accidentaly bumped the stack with a shoulder, and the entire stack started to cascade downward like a Slinky going down a stairs----smoothly and with a whole lot of noise.  He watched the entire thing, with a WTF look on his face. Then looked up at me and yelled that he had nothing to do with that.  Loudly.  (He was 1/2 Siamese).  Since I saw how it happened, I agreed with him. 

Anyway -- that got me a comic strip when I merged the two ideas.  

PANEL 1

Marcus sitting in front of a large stack of CD cases.

"Explosive Ordinance Cat evaluates the situation he finds himself in. It is not pretty.  The room has been evacuated in anticipation."

PANEL 2 

Marcus has his paws on the stack.

Owner:   "Marcus, get off the table.  Leave those CDs alone."

Marcus:  "The bomb has previously been primed and ready.  This may be beyond even his skill level."

PANEL 3 

Marcus's tail exiting to the left, 7 CDs flying in the air.

Owner:  "Oh my god....."

Marcus:  "BOOM"

..............as always, if anyone wants to email me I can be reached at falconme@sbcglobal.net...... Thnx!

Plants Are Evil

Marcus never has luck with plants. The orchid beat him up, the others, well, things just don't go well for him.

I did up 4 strips last night with a new plant in the home.  Cats HATE when a door that's normally open is closed (and vice versa, they get immensely interested in a closed door that suddenly is open).  I had the owner close off a room for the express reason of keeping the cats away from a houseplant that was going to be taken in to work on 'Monday'.  Of course that brought up all sorts of speculation about what it was and such.

This series of strips was a riff on the Little Shop of Horrors story. The cats can hear the plant calling to them from the other room and it gets creepier the longer it calls.  They all decide that maybe not opening the door is the best thing under the circumstances. 

......I'm not poisonous......believe me......

Um..... no.

Space Cat Part 2

Apparently Space Cat wasn't through with his adventures in the box. I did up another 3 strips where he goes into his next adventure - delivering a cargo hold full of Nip-Ohnium.  Unfortunately sapce raiders target him and steal his payload but he comes out of the mixup just fine thanks to a containment leak.  

Um... yeah.  It does make sense. 

Thank You Star Trek

TV has been running multiple reruns of every Star Trek show produced for the past few weeks now.  Last night while watching some episode or other of Voyager I got an idea for another ‘cat in the box’ adventure.  Usually I use the two ‘mad scientist’ characters for this but there’ve been a few times in the past where it was only one cat to the box and I’d give them different markings.  Such as when Marcus got stuck inside one and was Origami Cat till the box was tipped over and he got loose.  Or the big, fairly fatal pretend Kayak Adventure one of them took.  Or the Dr. Who aficionado in his ‘too small’ box.

This idea covered 4 strips before I was done, all sketched in during the one hour episode I was casually watching.  I fudged ‘official’ comic strip writing rules where it’s sort of an unwritten law that the text need to be  less than 25 words per panel, and just filled each panel in with as much as I could fit. 

One cat was in the box, the other was making comments from the side as the first focused on doing his space adventure.  I used ALL the tropes/clichés known to Science Fiction.  Well, as many of them that I could fit in that is.  Even with 4 strips that’s 16 panels chock full. 

The cat outside being more of a non-sf fan pointing out all the problems as the first cat has himself a space adventure, ending in a warp core breach where you eject the core.  Turns out the core was a roll of toilet paper. 

Don’t get me wrong, I love SF, but after some 40+ years of Star Trek, All the Star Wars, All the other sf movies ever made that I saw in the theater and as TV movies, you HAVE to admit that much of it is formula now and it’s very, very difficult to come up with something truly original anymore.

Which was half the fun of MAKING FUN OF IT with two little cats in a comic strip. J

Cooking Shows Slightly Warped

It’s been a dry spell lately for new ideas but today while switching TV channels up and down the range I did briefly settle on one of the PBS cooking shows just as the person was waxing philosophical about a Turducken!  Yes, people do actually go to those lengths it appears.

Which got me to thinking what would a cat try if they had a chance to do something inside something, inside something else.  After running my cats through several variations of mice/rats/squirrel/grackle/
hamster/etc. the final choice after 2 strips/8 panels was a rat inside a wren (it was a small rat) inside a sparrow – producing a Ra-wre-rrow, the name of which didn’t sit well with the third cat since it was too solidly close to “Scooby Doo”.