Tag: grumpton

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!!

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.