It is an honor to get this one. It’s my first Art oriented award. It comes from Cybernettix which has lots of cool stuff there including animated gifs, 100 top 3d text, jokes and more.

I love the concept of Clan of the Cats. Any situation that involves adults in adult situations always strikes me as a breath of fresh air in a comic strip. When adults DO pop up in mainstream comics, they're usually parents, and the focus of the humor is usually on the lil' darlings.

You even have a great high-concept description...For Better or Worse meets Tales From the Crypt! I could also point out some positive comparisons between your strip and the excellent comic book series, Strangers in Paradise, which is also a good chronicle of adult women in a relatively real world. Your strip shares one great aspect of that, in that the world is a real, unimaginary, and unglamorous thing, but that it's the people who inhabit it that make it strange, awful, and sometimes wonderful.

Your realistic style is perfectly suited, and makes the odd emotional behavior that much more funny...I see a running joke already evolving about Thai food, and her facial expression makes me feel her gastronomic discomfort, even though I've never had Thai food myself!

So far, I like your Sunday strips the best, and that's probably because your characters have a little more room to live and breath. A few of your dailies suffer a little from that shortness and abruptness that the newspaper format restricts, although several of them overcome that quite well!

That need to depict adult situations in a small space is why you're right to keep For Better or For Worse firmly in mind, since it is arguably the only real adult comic strip in mainstream syndication. Notice that Johnston has to pack a LOT of information in one panel to carry that off, though!

Just visited your site from the webring........beautiful work! I did not find, however, your name. Perhaps that is intentional. Your cast of Characters is wonderful, and I'll look forward to reading about them. Just wanted to say hello, and that your site and your strip are both excellent. Are you published in any papers? Good luck, now I'll go back to your site and read some more comics!

Respectfully yours

Wow. The writing's a little uneven-- you're looking for a mix between gag-a-day, continuing story and gothic horror and haven't really found it yet, but it'll come. Looks like you're abandoning the traditional gag structure and that might be a mistake, but that's how the medium advances.

The art's impressive, sort of "Strangers in Paradise" meets "The Crow," and while I wish the art in the strip were as fully realized as it is on your opening page, I think you're really onto something.

One tip: Use lighter screens. Anything darker than about 30% reads as spot black and, with all the spot black you use anyway, the screens you're using look kinda muddy and unclear. Look at some old "Steve Canyon" and you'll see how these elements can be balanced to dazzling effect.

I'm gonna bookmark this one; it's the best new online strip I've seen this year! Any noise from the syndicates yet?

-----------------------------------

--Bob Kennedy

Alexandria, VA

Well, on the June 30 edition, you misspelled "know." God bless white out.

On the whole, however, I find it rather intriguing...an engaging treatment of a rather nontraditional concept. My problem surrounds the "soap opera" feel of the strip. You're teetering between gags and drama.

BUT...definitely a strip I will keep reading.

[Note: My wife is Pagan, on the path to be a witch. She will be reading with even more interest.]

sj

It was an interesting read. I agree with some of the previous comments in that it appears you are still trying to find your rhythm. You appear to be trying to figure out if you want to be funny or if you want to tell a story. To be honest, I'd probably be more interested in an eerie story than a mixture of the soap opera/gag-a-day variety. The gags tend to take the bite off of what you're trying to accomplish. I realize that Lynn Johnston has accomplished this, but she is an extreme rarity in this business.

Also, the drawings appear to have a bit too much of a mechanical feel to them. I don't know if you're drawing these on the computer or if you're using a computer a bit too much to fill in. The syndicates really frown upon mechanical-looking cartoons.

Overall, a nice job and a good read. I think that you have a good opportunity here to be spooky. Perhaps that's where you should concentrate your efforts. The gags seemed to work against spooky aspect of the cartoon.