Cat Person

Cat Person made their first appearance in Bad Art Friends, a comic I made for the New York Times Book Review. If you aren’t familiar with the phrase “Cat Person,” well, I suggest googling it to learn more.

A few months after that comic ran I got a strange DM on Instagram from a person with the handle “FartzLol” or something to that effect. They asked, very politely, about Cat Person. Who is Cat Person?, they asked. And: Will Cat Person come back?

I thought this was an intriguing question but it didn’t make sense—Cat Person couldn’t really be, well, my foil. For one thing, it was always supposed to be a one-and-done kind of deal. Then there’s the issue of the character. A cat with an attitude who stands on its hind legs whose thoughts I can read and with whom I can speak? Hadn’t someone else already done that?

Nevertheless, the question lodged in my brain as a kind of challenge I couldn’t quite shake. I started developing the character in relation to this one Annie Dillard quote that I also have never quite understood and has always bugged me a little. Here was my original stab at it. Things got weirder from there.

Now I like working on Cat Person every once in a while when I have extra time. Partly because it's fun to play around with different settings and non-humanoid characters, and partly because I have no idea where it's going. In any case, I hope you like reading it.