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Catball and WHAT?!

Okay, you've seen the comic.  Now you're wondering what we're smoking, right?

Catball & Clown Girl is a mash of a few in jokes Joey and I share.  I'll try to explain them, how they came about and how they all eventually were thrown together into this strip. Likely, it'll ruin the whole experience for you.

Catball.  The Catball is based on our cat, Lundie. She's a cute little tortoiseshell cat we adopted from Shannon, and she's a sweetheart. Usually. Like any cat, she has the tendency to be a little unholy terror from time to time. Now Lundie has two traits that we haven't found in any other cat. First, she can't just lie down. She throws herself at the floor with room-shaking force, often knocking a maiow out of herself in the process. Second, she folds all her appendages underneath herself and sits in the centre of the room like a little egg. Many cats do this, but a) not half as often as Lundie and b) they never get as compact as she can. So at any given time, Joey or I could walk into the room and find ourselves feet to face with a surly looking ball of cat.

Lundie's expression never changes--her eyes never open completely, so it always looks like she has a look of utter contempt on her face, no matter what we do to her. Of course, her Catball form looks that much more surly. We supply a little cat voice to her that's kind of raspy and has a sort of pseudo-Spanish accent to it. That's the voice of the Catball.

Catball's holograms. Lundie used to like hiding under the bed. She'd spend hours under there. Joey and I eventually figured she must be creating holograms under there, and the space under the bed is actually a very high-tech laboratory. Why holograms? Because the Catball just seemed to appear places out of thin air. We would never hear anything walk through the room, but suddenly there's a Catball glaring at us. Obviously a projection of a very realistic hologram.  As for how the Catball plans world domination with holograms, that's anybody's guess.

Clown Girl. The Clown Girl is actually a little easier to explain. She's based on the polite-to-a-fault waitress who works at our favourite Chinese restaurant. We've been eating there for over a year, and only recently found out her real name. This woman thanks us for allowing her to remove our dirty dishes from the table. She's always happy and polite, and we figure that's just proof that she's killing people and stashing the bodies somewhere. Last October, when everybody had their Hallowe'en decorations out, we passed a fake person on someone's porch. Usually they're scarecrows, right? This one was dressed as a rather hideous clown. As we were talking about this waitress and her murderous tendencies, I commented that she probably hides the bodies by dressing them as clowns and propping them on people's porches. From then on, we called her the Clown Girl. By extention, Lundie refers to Joey as "Clown Girl", and most recently has started calling me "Clown Boy" or for short, "Boy". It's the Clown Girl's job to collect parts and ingredients for the Catball's many hologram projects.

The non-sequitur nature of the strips is due to the fact that when we're not talking about anything in particular, Joey and I will lapse into little Catball rants.  If something in particular amuses us, we'll write it down, or one of us will draw it on whatever's handy. You'll probably see a few Catball & Clown Girl strips drawn on anything from napkins to paper plates to envelopes (such as the logo graphic). We're gonna draw 'em once only, with no retouches save the lettering. We won't update regularly, either. Call it our pledge to you.