Author: nachonova

That’s All, Folks!

Posted on April 3, 2023 by nachonova

I made this comic to close out the Return of the Fleas comic book as a palate cleanser to leave the book on less of a down note than the last comic. Plus I had to bring Grumpton back. He’s got a bad cattitude that you simply can’t confine to a single comic strip!

I wanted to make the strip look different from the rest of the book, like there was a possibility someone else drew it. So I busted out my crow quill dip pen & India ink & got to business. I used to draw my old comic strip “You Guys Are My Friends” in the same style & size as this strip, so it was fun for me to get back to something familiar.

I’m entertaining the idea of doing a run of Gumption comics & it would be fun to do them in this style, but I want to try doing comics with Procreate too. We’ll see what happens. Who knows, maybe this will be the year for multiple new comics projects!!

It’s Okay

Posted on March 27, 2023 by nachonova

This one was not easy. My dad died in early 2022 & I pretty much threw myself into making a bunch of cat comics as an excuse to have a huge new project to occupy my time so I wouldn’t be bogged down in sadness. But I knew I had to address it somehow, this is a damn autobiographical comic series, kinda. How could I avoid it?

I don’t mean to paint the picture of my dad being a good dad. Some of what’s hard about his death is the amount of unresolved stuff, the distance between us. It all sounds very stereotypical for a man & his dad to have issues. It makes no sense to go into all the trauma here in a little blurb beneath a comic. But this was where I was emotionally when I wrote this comic. Trying to see the good in a human despite the direct harm they caused me due to abuse, neglect, & dishonesty. Clearly I’m still processing this. It takes time.

Anyhow, the death of a parent kind of makes a person fatalistic for a while. I never felt more mortal than I did in 2022. Maybe that time in 2021 when some guy passing me on the sidewalk said he was going to shoot me “in the fucking face” & motioned to pull out a gun & extended it to the spot right between my eyes. But I’m approaching middle age, & these cats are about to turn 10, so yeah I got a little mopey this year about the idea of them not being around.

But I try to remember that all we have is now. The present moment. It helps me to experience it.

Retail Therapy, with Cats

Posted on March 20, 2023 by nachonova

I think I meant sublimation instead of transference. It’s not a big deal, I think the intent of what I was trying to communicate is clear. It means I’m overcoming the negative emotions stemming from enduring child abuse by trying to provide a nice life for the cats. Looks like I’ll have to fix this for the second edition of the book, which means this first edition is that much more of a collector’s item! 🤑

Today’s comic is intended as an introduction to next week’s comic, which provides more of a window into my dysfunctional childhood. Don’t worry too much; although I’d like to say I turned out fine, I can’t say that because it’s not true. But I get some peace of mind knowing I’m still alive & strong enough to not have been consumed by that poverty & neglect.

Also, how cool is Chewy.com? If you’re a pet owner, you have my extreme recommendation to check out Chewy if you’re not familiar with it. They made the cat tree attainable for me.

Hey, today’s my birthday! Wow. I don’t know how other people feel turning 39, but I’ve never really been a big birthday guy so this isn’t a big deal to me. I know I’m middle aged now. Oh well. If you celebrate my birthday, please enjoy yourselves responsibly!

You can also celebrate by checking out my new Kickstarter for my new comic book, Human Stuff Vol. 3! I hope you like autobiographical comics, because that’s what this book is. The Kickstarter page & video give more of an idea of what it’s all about, but if you like Hey Cat you’ll probably like this book!

Return of the Fleas, Pt. 2

Posted on March 13, 2023 by nachonova

Finally some closure to the previous comic! Maybe I spend too much time around the cats & am a maladjusted person, but it’s a damn emotional rollercoaster for me when these cats are bummed out for whatever reason. Bologna always seems more betrayed than Noodle when I have to administer flea medication, so she sulks a little longer. All I can do is continue to be way too extreme about making sure the cats don’t run outside & risk getting fleas & hope the cats eventually understand the cause & effect of all this.

Return of the Fleas, Pt. 1

Posted on March 6, 2023 by nachonova

The titular comic for the latest Hey Cat comic book. Anytime I’m feeling like I’m scratching more than usual signals the beginning of a terrible cycle. Nobody is happy, except maybe the bugs IF they actually exist.

How far do I go to make sure the potential parasites are dead? Tune in next week for the conclusion!

Fait Accompli

Posted on February 27, 2023 by nachonova

I got Bologna in the summer of 2013 a little after Hey Cat #1: Be Here Meow went to print. I had a few comics for the second book at this point, but I realized this kitten would change the series. Was Hey Cat about to jump the shark??

Fortunately the two cats got along well & I was able to continue making the comics with the same damn formula I had put together by this point. Things didn’t really change too much until the next summer when Jessica & I moved to Austin. This is all documented on the Hey Cat website & in Hey Cat #2: Extremely Loud & Incredibly Annoying.

But what I hadn’t documented in the comics was picking Bologna up! Here is that comic documentation.

Scraps

Posted on February 20, 2023 by nachonova

What can I say? I’m a permissive cat guy. It goes against the nature of a cat to impose human bullshit on it. I like to feed the cats scraps! Not a ton, I don’t want them to get sick. But Baddie ever since Baddie spent time as a street cat, she’s been wild about trying to get our food when Jessica & I are eating.

Not too long ago we heard commotion in the kitchen & saw Baddie trotting into the room with a huge piece of steak in her mouth that we had left on the cutting board for a few minutes. She’s relentless. So sometimes when we’re eating & she’s not bugging us I’ll reward her good behavior with human food! I know, I’m part of the problem. But isn’t humans feeding domesticated cats part of their evolution? So there you go, I sound like part of the solution too.

The Call of the Wild

Posted on February 13, 2023 by nachonova

I had to do a comic about this because it happens so regularly it feels like a real life recurring comic strip bit. The cats want to go outside, & I get it! Lot of cool stuff out there. So clearly I’m the bad guy in this scenario.

But because of my long list of cool human reasons to keep them inside, I have to be the enforcer. It’s not my favorite position to be in, I like to let the cats do their thing as long as they’re not treating each other like assholes or destroying something. There are too many variables outside my control once the cats get out though, it sucks to have to hunt them down a few minutes after we notice one of them slips out unnoticed. Plus I don’t want to crawl around underneath the porch.

Heathcliff, the People’s Garfield

Posted on February 6, 2023 by nachonova

Garfield has a big presence in Hey, Cat. What can I do? Garfield is the big dog in cat comics. Garfield is ubiquitous, omnipresent. Garfield is us.

It was important to me to spend a little more time on Heathcliff, the underdog cat. I grew up reading Heathcliff comics in the paper just like I grew up reading Garfield. Hell, Heathcliff & Garfield both had a Saturday morning cartoon show when I was growing up. I like Heathcliff. But I stopped reading newspaper comics regularly like 20 years ago.

I got back into having awareness of Heathcliff a few years back because I’d started to see Heathcliff comic strips on Twitter. I think it was the run of panels about the Garbage Ape. I appreciated how the comic had turned into something different, but not in the way legacy strips usually do when another cartoonist takes over the strip after the original creator dies. I appreciate how 6/7 days of the week I can read Heathcliff & it’s something I never would have thought to write or draw.

A good way for me to justify all the “research” that went into making this comic was to create my own bootleg cat character, Grumpton! I based the design on an amalgam of several of the cat characters on the cat comic timeline in the first panel of today’s comic. It’s so much fun to do dumb stuff like this that I kind of want to spin Grumpton off into a standalone comic book.

Waste Chaser

Posted on January 30, 2023 by nachonova

Because of her famous cat curiosity, Bologna watches me scoop the litter boxes sometimes (Noodle does this now too, possibly a copycat move). Who knows what goes through a cat’s head when they see us sifting through their shit?

I may have mentioned it in an early Hey Cat comic, but my approach to the human-cat communication in this series is that I don’t really understand what the cats are saying. It’s basically me interpreting a meow. I’m pretty sure they understand some of what I say, but they choose not to give a damn about it. Like some of my human interactions!