"What a Good Cat!"

Q:   Where do you get your ideas?  (At least, that's what I've heard cartoonists and writers are always asked first.)

A:   As people approach age 40, many take up new hobbies and activities.  I already played golf, so I took up cartooning.

   My natural inclination with a pencil and paper has always been to write words, not draw pictures.  Still, over the years I'd get ideas for cartoons, too, and early in 1996 I sent some of them to Jack Ohman, whose popular culture strip "Mixed Media" was in our local newspaper  He e-mailed me back with encouragement.

   Even though none of my gags made the funny papers (or more likely because they didn't), when I found out about Geocities a couple of months later, I decided to try doing them myself.  Pat drew some of the early gag strips for me, but this Web page is my responsibility, not hers.  For the site that eventually became 3goodcats.com, I took the original photos of the cats, wrote their stories, and learned HTML, and now -- even though I wasn't my first choice for the job -- I'm trying to draw effective cartoons.  It hasn't gotten much easier, but it helps to remember what Charles Schulz said about cartoonists, something like "If we could really draw well, we'd be artists, and if we could really write well, we'd be writers."

   With that in mind, here is the first gag strip Pat and I did.  It's still my favorite.

   Oh yes -- eventually, a familiar gag appeared in Mixed Media. . .

Q:  Why did you switch from those kind of cartoons to the cat stories?

A:   Probably just the path of least resistance.  Living with four cats, we've seen plenty of things to write about.  It's not hard to turn one into a story, and once it's written, a complementary cartoon illustration completes it.  That's not really an original idea; "What a Good Cat!" is a slightly larger form of the "Kitty Korner" panel in the Sunday strips of George Gately's "Heathcliff."

Q:  But what you're writing usually aren't really stories.

A:  That's not a question.

Q:  OK, Alex Trebek, why do you call them "stories" when they look more like blog posts?

A:  Well, you got me there.  Some of these writings (heck, maybe 3 or 4 of them) really do have a beginning, a middle and an end, but often they just make some observations without going anywhere in particular.  The way things are on the Web these days, you could call this an illustrated blog devoted to the cats.

I plead one part ignorance -- blogs hadn't been invented when "What a Good Cat!" began in 1998 (actually, June 1, 1996, if you count the Geocities days when it was a part of 3 Good Cats) -- and one part upbringing.  What you read at this site has its roots in the writers I read while growing up.  The humor columnists published daily in my hometown newspaper: John Keasler, Douglass Welch, Art Buchwald, Erma Bombeck.  Other influences, too -- a 1958 paperback printing of Jean Kerr's "Please Don't Eat the Daisies" with a fluorescent pink 10-cent price tag is a reminder of why I take the time to slog around garage and yard sales.  Jean Shepherd -- the first time I heard him reading his works on the radio, my eyes opened wide with fascination at the funny tales he told about (and despite) the grubby struggle of growing up in a steel town in the Midwest.  And, years later, many Saturday evenings passed with me sitting close to the radio listening hard to Garrison Keillor's "A Prairie Home Companion."  What they did is what I was trying to do, in the privacy of my own home.

Q:  Where did the title come from?

A:   When it was a gag strip, I called it "Moore To The Point," but after the feature evolved, that name didn't fit anymore. In an article written by Amy Shapiro for The House Rabbit Journal, she described the misbehavior of unneutered adolescent rabbits, and concluded that when the male house rabbit follows his instincts, nipping your ankles and mounting everything in sight, "...from his point of view, he's being a very good bunny."  It didn't take long to apply that idea to our cats.

Q:  You say you update the page every Friday morning.  I happened to check out "What a Good Cat!" one Thursday evening and saw the page was already updated.  How do you define "Friday morning"?

A:  Ah, that's one of the not-so-dirty little secrets of this site.  When we began in 1996, we hoped that people around the world would enjoy reading about our Good Cats.  The two arbitrary worldwide time lines I could think of were the International Date Line and the Prime Meridian, the home of Greenwich Mean Time.  Since midnight GMT is 7 p.m. where we live, it worked out well with our schedule, and so we went with it.  Naturally, that also means that if you're in Hawaii and check the page around lunchtime Thursday, you're probably going to find the page updated.  Just another advantage to living in Hawaii, I suppose.

Q:  It seems I've seen this week's story before...are you repeating yourself?

A:   In a word, yes.    When I began this, I planned to follow the model of network television, first building up a stockpile of episodes before eventually going into repeats.  The only question was when, and after 6 years of weekly updates, that question was answered in November 2004, when some things happened that convinced me to slow down. 

   Since then, I've been on what I'll call a sabbatical, reading and listening more and writing and talking less.  Besides, the cats are also getting older and have earned the right to be semi-retired, with their memories and the knowledge that it is possible to ask someone in Colorado, in Sweden, in the Netherlands or the Ukraine, "Have you heard of Kelly, Lizzie, Caitie-Belle and Nicky?"  And they can answer, "Yes, I have heard of them.  They are all Good Cats."

Q:  What's the difference between a good cat and a Good Cat?

A:   A good cat is well-behaved, quiet, and affectionate, and our cats are capable of that behavior.

   A Good Cat is just like any other cat, only more so.  A Good Cat is athletic -- and to prove it, leaps several feet from the cat castle onto the bed where we're sleeping; a Good Cat is a fierce hunter -- and tears a hole in the cat food bag to get to its crunchies; a Good Cat wants a warm place to nap -- so it steals your chair when you get up.

   Pat would watch the cats while I was at work, and she's a good observer.  When I got home, she would tell me if they had done something mischievous, funny, or interesting that day, and if a story made me think, "That sounds like a Good Cat to me," then I'd write it up, draw a cartoon, and post them.

   Sometimes we have good cats, and sometimes we have Good Cats.  When Kelly gets into trouble, I can just shrug and think, "If he didn't, then he wouldn't be a Good Cat."