I had a kind of weird week this week (I mean, I know we ALL did, but mine was Twilight Zoney on a personal level as well, which was so not fun) but got a lot of things done on MEMO (the comic strip).
While, perhaps, a dubious accomplishment, the biggest thing I achieved was coming up with a ‘cartoon’ look for the in-strip TV show, Kitty Coroner.
A little background - around the time that we first met, in 2016, my now husband and I attended a cocktail n games party thrown by an artist friend of mine and, well, there *may* have been a joint that got passed around and we *may* have indulged and that *may* have led to an unleashing of our creativity that somehow led to the creation of Kitty Corner, a game where we mock interviewed people on the spot to a non-existent TV camera. We semi-secretly decided that anytime someone said the word “Annals” we’d all take a drink. It showed up shockingly often. Anyway, I was thrilled when a couple people got in to the goofy spirit of it and played along and we all ended up laughing until we were hoarse.
Along the way, Kitty Corner became Kitty Coroner and the details of the fictional show unfurled in the way that these things do when in the social situation we were in. For example, we decided that Kitty Coroner’s theme song was the sound that a truck makes when it backs up. To this day, when we hear that ‘beep beep beep’ we turn to each other and laugh! :)
So when I started MEMO (the comic strip) online, I thought it would be fun to weave Kitty Coroner into the fabric of the narrative as a kind of odd running joke.
Full disclosure: I have a really hard time drawing cats and dogs. I don’t know why that is but I work on that occasionally. But, early on, rather than spend all my time trying to draw a cat for a throwaway gag, I decided to simply meld a photo of a cat and a photo of a guy in a lab coat in Photoshop. I kind of liked the idea of using ‘real’ things on occasion although it’s been pooh poohed by a couple artist acquaintances of mine. <shrug>
But as I didn’t own either image, I always felt a little “squiggly” about the whole thing.
I had a kind of idea in my head what each season of the show would be like and weaved a few mentions here and there - early on, I ran this ad at the bottom of a strip:
And then, later, I created a mock Close Up (a staple of TV Guide magazine, for those who are too young to know about such things) detailing some of the plot of that season that signaled a change in direction. I reasoned that the concept would be dragging and the producer would have to come up with a new angle, so Kitty became an astronaut and went to work at the International Space Station. Mainly this happened because I thought the idea of Kitty in a spacesuit would be funny. :)
Detail:
As a side note, at the time, there was a story I was working on that involved Kitty and I wanted readers to become familiar with the characters and actors. That never came to pass but the story is something that I’d really love to write for MEMO (the comic strip) someday.
Finally, the show did make a brief appearance in a 2022 strip, where it appears on a TV monitor in the background:
I don’t know who the Nurse character is, but she just sort of showed up one day in my sketchpad and I love her… I don’t know how, but she will show up again someday. :)
Detail:
Anyway, during this time of refreshing everything about the strip, I decided to hunker down and finally come up with a cartoon Kitty. I had spent time working on “We Can Mew It” for the run up to the election last autumn so I used that as a start:
The Husband (rightly) thought it looked too “Josie and the Pussycats” and I can see it, I suppose.
So I made some revisions and came up with this:
I’m about 95% sold on this as the final look of Kitty but will probably continue to refine somewhat once I get to the point where Kitty makes an ‘official’ re-appearance in the strip.
As a side note, Kitty has had a few logos over the years that I’ve just thrown out there and this is the first one that I actually spent time on - I like the contrast of a cartoon cat and a logo that feels very dark in tone. :)
Hope you’ve enjoyed seeing a bit of the process I’ve gone through over the years on one of the odder concepts in MEMO (the comic strip). :)