Cat Pics

This is "Cat."

We were in second grade when we met, and stayed good friends through high school. Just before adolescence -- that is to say, just before we lost our minds -- we viewed with some contempt the older girls' frantic rush to pile makeup on their young faces. We teased each other, drawing cartoons depicting each other in excesses of hopeless cosmetics.

I think the cartoons started when we were in sixth grade; I'm not sure anymore. We were already "Cat" and "Sand," though no one else seemed to be able to get that through their skulls.

Cat's portrait (kind of like a press release picture) shows a degree of sophistication in the artwork compared to the earliest "Cat Pics," but my signature still looks a little timid.

I drew cartoons of her and she drew cartoons of me. We drew them in class, at home, at recess; we drew them on drawing paper, math homework, the back of graded assignments. We thought those cartoons were hysterically funny.

Along with the catastrophic (get it? "Cat-astrophic?") makeup, a recurring theme was eyesight. Both of us wore glasses and were blind as bats without them. In this early masterpiece, Cat forgets her glasses and wanders out into the world.

There's a lot of line in this cartoon, and the shadow amazes me; My cartooning style now is very spare.

Word balloons were still developing; a lot of extraneous detail can be seen. A dog at a fire hydrant shows its teeth at Cat -- this signifies an unspoken insult that she was so ugly that even a dog didn't want to be around her.

Unwitting homeliness was part of Cat the character, too, though that is less of a factor in this cartoon.


"Z - O - O," spells Cat, and thinks it says "Hospital." In the early Cat cartoons, Cat was pretty dumb, too.

(The real Cat was not dumb at all; had she been interested in higher education she would have made a great mad scientist.)

The angle of Cat's neck was a veritable pinnacle of visual humor.

So Cat goes to see the ape and near-sightedly thinks the ape is her Aunt Clara. The message is that not only is Cat dumb and overly made-up and can't see for crap, but also that her relatives are probably ugly, too.

Note the numbering of each frame to help the reader follow along correctly.

Also the tin-shaded lighting -- we saw that every day.


The ape roars at Cat, but Cat sees nothing unusual about it. Is Cat that dumb, or is her Aunt Clara that unpleasant? The cartoonist allows the reader (the real Cat) to ponder the insults, any or all.

The final sight gag is that Cat's feet are pointed in the wrong direction.

I saved all the Cat Pics, treating them with far more care than I did the other drawings I made. When I was old enough to get an allowance, I bought a lockbox for the cartoons. Only one was lost: a classic about a beauty salon hairdryer that blasted Cat into orbit.

They're still precious to me, and I plan on scanning them all and getting them into a book through Lulu.com. Crude and obnoxious, the cartoons -- especially the early ones -- remind me of a little girl who wasn't afraid to draw outrageously and constantly. I could use her coaching now.