Wakanda Forever

The Ninja twins declare they are going to skate from selections from the movie Black Panther. The Slinky One is dressed as T'Challa, The Fluffy One is dressed as Zuri, keeper of the heart-shaped herb. The Fluffy One admits to bringing catnip and while he wants to leap a lot at the halfway mark for maximum points, The Slinky One is getting cold and wants to go see the Black Panther movie.

A flashback to 2018 in honor of the king. This year is so cruel it now took Chadwick Boseman and I can’t deal with that. He’s younger than me, for one thing. My heart goes out to his family and all the kids who saw T’Challa and believed they could do anything. That part of him stays. He never yielded.

Surprise!

“A little privacy, please.”

Well, the comics will be a little late.

(I am following the advice of Alley Cat Allies and leaving them be, but…well, it’s going to be interesting for a few weeks.)

I haven’t even introduced you to this lady properly! Um, here she is!

What We Did On Our Summer Vacation, Part 3

Sketches of me and what I did on my summer vacation. 1. Finding my Mum on the floor and pointing out she fell. "Yeah," my Mum's feet say. "Called 911 on my mom," is the caption. 2. "Met more cats," is the caption over me lifting a window and seeing a pile of kittens with their mom, the fluffy calico. 3. "Talked on the phone," is the caption under me holding a phone and saying, "I'd like my mum back, please." 4. A badly drawn me holding a grilled cheese out to my Nan is captioned, "Made grilled cheese." "But I wanted a waffle," my Nan says. 5. "Learned to cook chicken," is the caption under me lifting something into a pot of boiling water and saying, "I'm sorry, meat!" The Puppy looks on and says, "Don't poison me." 6. I'm holding a phone and grinning, with the caption "Blacked out my userpics, fixed everything!" 7. "Busted Mum out of rehab," shows my Mum using a walker to get to my car, which is on the sidewalk outside a building as I run with her suitcases. 8. I present Nan with potato salad. "Yum!" Nan says. 9. I look up with binoculars as cats curl around my legs. "Looked for a comet," is the caption. 10. "Made so much potato salad," is the last caption, where only my eyes are visible behind a mountain of potato salad.

My summer has been busy, but here are some highlights. This comic took me weeks to make.

I am planning to make a lot of these drawings better. In fact, this is how all the comics start out. But for now, this is what we have, and if you’ve never checked out the alt text to the comics, now would be a good time.

Or do you prefer these kind of comics?

Yeah, I didn’t think so. (Also I don’t think blacking out my userpics for a few days fixed anything, but I think you know that, too.)

Anyway, the comic seems to be a Saturday comic now. How about that. For what I have planned, the next two weeks need to have two comics or else I HAVE FAILED.

I am opening voting on which bit of this comic you’d like to see more of, give me a direction to go in the future.

What We Did On Our Summer Vacation…preview or part 2?

A crudely drawn sketch of what The Fluffy One did on his summer vacation, with him stretched out in front of an air conditioner, getting nose kisses and finding love from Babycat, seeing the Three Mousketeers in the backyard and asking, "What the fish?" then loafing in the sun and missing his brother. The last sketch is of him having a smacky fight with The Kitten.

…what is this crap?

I know I was planning silly drawings, but this is ridiculous!

Universe, give me time to draw, and I will draw more detail.

Stay tuned.

What We Did On Our Summer Vacation, Part 1 of 7

The Slinky One and m'Man loaf on grass in the sun, looking at a tiny kitten on a blankie. Nearby another kitten plays in the grass. "Okay, how come these baby cats keep showing up here? I dunno what to do with a baby cat except cover it with a blankie and put it in the sun, that's what I like." m'Man, elbow over a box, says, "I'll go find him some m'lick. I like a nice cold bowl of m'lick." In the distance, Tookie climbs down a tree declaring, "Hang on, I'm the bestest babysitter!"

Cats know how to have a good time.

Hello, how have you all been? This is the comic you’ve waited over a month for, and I haven’t worked out the layout yet, but wait, did I just make a comic about kittens in the afterlife? That’s not funny.

STOP SPEEDING DOWN STREETS.

The rest of this month we’re going to catch up on what everyone else has been doing on their summer vacation, and look at it this way, we got the horrible part out of the way! Unless you count the art in the next six comics as the true horror. Think drawing really fast because that’s all I got time for right now. You’ve been warned.

No social media until I get some comics made!

A woman wearing a shirt that reads "Science!" waves. Text reads no social media until I get some comics made. A smile face and the initials LBN are underneath.

I mean, I have some made, I just have to finish them and maybe have them look better than this, but what do you want from me? I haven’t drawn in a month!

I cut everything else out, so checking if my friends and family are okay is next. Be okay, people! Wear masks and social distance so I don’t come and break your kneecaps! I mean unfollow you. Or avoid you. Wait, I’m already doing that. Don’t mind me. You do you.

Summer Is The Time To Relax!

The Slinky One, appearing as a butterfly, said, "Okay, it's summer. Time to relax!" Utter chaos is going on around him. I'm on two phones, saying, "...but if Legionella is in the water, how do you wash it away?" The Puppy is saying, "Oh hey, there's a cat," to which The Fluffy One responds, "Indeed, I am your cat!" but behind him is a peach-color cat, sitting in a plant and asking what's for dinner. In the window, Babycat announces she'd like to go out and roll in the grass. Her kitten, now the length of the window, says, "Mom! Mom! What about the fireworks? You said it's dangerous out there!" "Nothing is as dangerous as living with you, baby," his mother tells him.

There’s a lot going on here, and I do want to make comics about all of it, well, not all of it, but I want to make sure my Mum can see them and she’s in the hospital fighting off Legionella pneumonia right now so I just don’t really feel like going HAHA LET’S COLOR MY SHIRT or anything much right now. I did want to get my hello summer strip in here, and here it is.

The comic is taking July off, but it will be back in August because I had quite a few comics in the works when everything went very wrong. As of today it’s getting tiny bits better every day, and that’s all I can ask for. Well, I’d like my Mum home for my birthday, too, but we were in the hospital on the original one so way to celebrate, Mum!

While she’s away, I’ve taken over the things she usually does, so there will be comics about that when I think it’s funny again. Legionella isn’t funny, though. No idea where it came from, but if it’s in our showerhead or faucets or even that puddle under the sink I had fixed while my mother was on a ventilator, that’s a problem. All you need to know is staying home and not catching Covid-19 was cool, but the water got stagnant in a lot of places so keep that in mind and continue to be terrified of breathing along with me. Hello. Sorry.

The peach cat who now lives in my yard ran around my house and busted back out the door like a Looney Tune so I don’t know that he’ll be living with us any time soon, but he just squeezed under the fence and plopped down in the grass for the evening.

Did I ever mention I schedule these? Yeah, see, I’ve scheduled EVERY summer series, but I just don’t have anything ready this time because I manage my time well only in my head first thing when I wake up and then NOPE. The only schedules I can live by right now are breakfast for cats when my Fluffy son decides it is and dinner by 7 for humans and everything else is sort of around that.

There are a whole lot of comics to look back on, if you like. When I find a layout that displays images instead of text, that’ll be even more fun!

Good Question!

A squirrel leaps off one tree and shouts, "Where's our treeeee?" Another squirrel, clinging to the massacred stump of a tree, is yelling, "WHAT THE FUUUUU--"

This is how I cope with devastation, okay?

Apparently the neighbor and I had differing opinions on what “Cut to the fence line” means. No, it’s not really funny. But I’m trying to force myself to see it as a metaphor for how abuse of power kills the beauty in the world.

It’s Been A Long Time Coming….

A lot is going on in the world, and a lot is going on in my house, so I didn’t get to draw anything this week to show my support for Blackout Tuesday and the Black Lives Matter protests taking place following the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Amaud Aurbery. I didn’t really want to go, “Oh look, a cutesy rendering of the victims of systemic racial injustice!” because that felt very wrong to me.

But I remembered this comic I drew back in November of 2017, which at the time I debated posting because gosh, I didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings, but now I realize there are only seven readers of this comic and they need to know, in case there was any question, that I am 100% anti-racist and I’m here to keep listening and keep learning and hopefully see some real healing and much-needed lasting change coming.

I am taking a knee for America.

(And yeah, at the time the most outrageous thing I’d seen the President of the United States do was toss paper towels to the people of Puerto Rico devastated by Hurricane Maria. Now I realize he’s fine with tear gassing people and letting Covid-19 spread as long as it didn’t crash the stock market. He still fails to recognize why Colin Kaepernick was kneeling. I’m not fine with that. There’s so much I’m not fine with. And that’s why I draw.)

Back to silly pictures of squirrels on Wednesday. Go be the change you want to see in the world, kids. ✊🏿

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