I’ve been doing a webcomic for several years now called “The Quadra Cats“, about some Earth Cats that meet up with an Alien Cat and accidentally find themselves as impromptu ambassadors for Planet Earth (which Alien Cat assumes, of course, is run by cats). I’ve printed 3 issues of the story so far, filled with cultural misunderstandings, geeky jokes, and the developing friendship of the four cats.
The continuation of the story takes up when the cats arrive back from an unsuccessful attempt to join the Feline Federation (because they haven’t read the rules). I won’t be printing this current story for a while, because it’s going to be much longer than the previous stories (which are really all continuous anyway). Eventually, I’d like to print them all in one volume, but that’s going to take a while.
I’ve decided to make some changes in the way I’ve been drawing the comic, which is not unprecedented. The first volume was all in pen-and-ink, and pretty roughly (though charmingly, I hope) drawn; the second and third were drawn with ink outlines but shaded digitally in Photoshop, and evolved a bit as I refined my techniques. Lately (as you may have seen from my last two posts) I’ve been playing around with an app called Procreate, and after doing quite a bit of experimentation, I decided to draw and letter the comic entirely digitally, except for the initial rough sketches.
I’ll go into my processes a bit more in future posts, but for now, I’m going to offer up the beginning of the story. You can follow it on on the webcomic site (where you can also read the previous books) and on the Quadra Cats Facebook page, where I’m posting each update in a photo album.
Here begins — ta da dum de dum! — The Kittens of Doom!
That brings us up to date with the story so far — I hope you’ve enjoyed this preview of the story! If you follow on the Quadra Cats website, you also get excerpts from Alien Cat’s journal, MOLLY’s to-do list, and occasional commentary from me.
More soon about how I write, draw, and letter the comic.
Karen Gillmore Art 
Amazingly stunning 😍, but I have a question why cats ? Not any other animal ? Or even humans !
LikeLike
An excellent question! Other than the fact that I love cats, and love drawing them, there was another reason.
When I started doing this comic, it was for a local newspaper, that wanted commentary on the neighbourhood from an unusual point of view. I thought, how about aliens? But that seemed too trite to me; lots of sci-fi stories are about that perspective. I had a wonderful cat named Mak at that time, whom Tux is modelled on, and I always wondered what he thought of the weird things humans do. But lots of people do stories from the cats point of view. So then I thought, hey, what about an alien cat? Who not only finds humans a bit puzzling, but also the local cat culture? And so the Quadra Cats were born.
I did cats instead of dogs, because dogs are not allowed to roam free (cats are not either, technically, but they do). It had to be a domestic animal, something that would normally associate closely with humans and could comment on city life. In this story that’s just begun, there will be a lot more humans, too. The first of them will make their debut a few pages from now.
Quadra Village is the neighbourhood I live in, thus the name. If I had known I was going to keep it going after the newspaper, I probably would have named them something else, because there is an island locally named that as well, and every time I go out of town to show the books, I have to explain about the neighbourhood!
LikeLiked by 1 person
I see know, since you want something unusual believe me you won’t find any uncommon or even abnormal than alien cats 😂 good choice 👍🏼 .. also with the village name I think it fits perfectly
LikeLike