Quadra Cats

When Earth cats Tux, Jazz, and Scatcat encounter a friendly, takeout-obsessed Alien Cat with entrepreneurial designs on their world, they are swept into his wild plans to make Earth the tourist destination spot of the feline galaxy. But there’s one hitch — he thinks they are in charge, and the Large Bipedal Primates are their pets! If the Quadra Cats can’t maintain their roles of impromptu ambassadors for their planet and all who live on it without involving the humans, it’s No More Tuna Pâté, Ever…

In 2014, a friend who works on a local neighbourhood newspaper did an interview about me for the paper, and asked if I would be willing to draw a comic for the paper, which comes out quarterly. I said yes, and the Quadra Cats were born. The first strips were all in pen and ink, and I eventually gathered them together, stitched together with some extra panels and whole pages, to form a continuous narrative which became Takeout Planet. There are now three books in print, a fourth in the works, and a webcomic. They also have their own Facebook page, and are starting to receive fan art!

In 2016, I continued the saga with a story intended from the beginning to be the next book, and changed the style a bit, continuing to draw them in ink, but using digital greyscale for the shading. In this book, the cats go for a ride in space with Alien Cat — kind-of-sort-of accidentally.

I had been waffling for a while over offering the stories as a webcomic, and in February 2017 I was in a fey mood and just decided to do it. The two books were done and ready to post, so why not? Weeeellllll… maybe because I already had another webcomic going? Obviously, cooler heads did not prevail here! It’s been an adventure trying to keep up with them both, but both stories are growing (UPDATE: Mermaid Music, the other webcomic, has been paused indefinitely). The next book is a direct sequel of Spaced Out, wherein the Cats encounter the joys of interstellar bureaucracy: The Feline Federation. The book was released in 2018.

I’m now at work on a much longer sequel (each of these was around 24-28 pages) which is probably going to be in excess of 200 pages, so for now it is just ongoing on the webcomic. When it’s done, I’ll start thinking of print books. It’s called The Kittens of Doom, and is the first book in which the Large Bipedal Primates (AKA humans, AKA The Pets) have a real role as characters, as together with the Quadra Cats and a horde of kittens, they discover interspecies linguistics, battle space pirates, and save Earth civilization, both from itself and for the good of the galaxy.

Here are the original strips from the newspaper, in case you’d like to compare them to the webcomic/books — there is one that was omitted from the book because I couldn’t fit it in the narrative, and a couple that I’ve done since then. My style of drawing the cats has evolved a lot since the first early strips — this is vintage Quadra Cats!