One long noose

Feed your friends. Feed your loved ones. Feed the people who help you. Feed your neighbors. Feed your community.

completing a short comic is no small feat, and i think nitteh deserves every bit of praise for seeing this story through to the end. the artwork never disappointed, i absolutely loved the expressive faces and the textured backgrounds from beginning to end.

that said, i think most of my issues came down to the pacing, a handful of plot details that don't quite hold up under scrutiny, and some writing choices that didn't land for me.

in a mystery, the small details matter. things like the bodies being discovered in the junkyard despite the cannibal cats seemingly not living there, honey getting absolutely wrecked only for goose to immediately act as though she's completely unharmed, or goose somehow escaping an entire horde of enraged cats without explanation all raised questions that pulled me out of the story. they felt like visual or narrative shortcuts taken for the sake of moving the plot along, but they ultimately undermined the internal logic.

the relationships also felt rushed. dapple and honey's romance came across as fairly underdeveloped and mostly existed to fuel the emotional drama of the second half. i think the story would have benefited from spending less time on goose pining over the boy he wanted to ask out and more time fleshing out the central lesbian couple whose relationship drives so much of the plot.

honey herself ended up feeling surprisingly passive for someone who i think is supposed to be the protagonist. she spends much of the story reacting rather than driving events, and by the ending she's at her absolute lowest point, submitting after enduring horrific abuse. then goose suddenly appears, having somehow survived the horde, to instantly kill dapple. how he got there is never explained, and in doing so he unintentionally robs honey of what could have been her most meaningful moment of agency in the story.

Squirrelstar explaining recent events in the clans to Monkeystar

comic for a little seattle anthology i did. this is my cat db cooper :)