Tag: Felix The Cat

Pop Culture Squad > Felix The Cat
Kickstarters You Should Be Backing – November 2022 Edition

Kickstarters You Should Be Backing – November 2022 Edition

Posted on by Bob Harrison

This month we have a bunch of campaigns available to support on Kickstarter. As you are planning that Holiday Shopping list, there are definitely a few campaigns on this list that you will want to check out.

Kickstarter is a platform available at Kickstarter.com where creative individuals have the ability to design and run a crowdfunding campaign. The concept is that individuals pledge to support the project, and if the project reaches the planned goal of pledge money in the time that campaign is running, then the project will get made. There are usually many various tiers of backer pledges, and different pledge levels come with different backer reward items. It is a fantastic way for creators to fund the projects that they love and want to create while getting new interesting things into the world.

The campaigns we highlighted for this month are in various states of funding. Some are fully funded and into the state of trying to hit stretch goals that come with even more cool stuff for backers and some are still in need of backers to hit their goal and get their project made.

Some of these projects are being run by well established entities and others are entries by much smaller and newer creators. All the campaigns have been chosen because we want them to succeed, and because we see something special in the product. There are over 3000 live Kickstarter campaigns right now and over 260 comic based projects. Here are the 11 that we think you should check out!!!

The projects are listed below in chronological order of the end of the campaign. So, the ones that end soonest come first. Make sure you click on the Campaign Links for each campaign to get all the detailed info about the rewards and creators. We feel there is something for everyone on this list. Enjoy!

Slice of Life #1-3 – Queer WEBTOON with an Anime Twist
Gritty anime protagonist, Lady Vengeance, finally realizes her romantic feelings for the girl next door.

Campaign Link: http://kck.st/3N7vBNp

Ending: Tue, November 22 2022 10:00 PM EST

PCS Thoughts: This story from Kat Calamia and Phil Falco is one that we get very excited to see on Kickstarter. It is an excellent story and these folks do a great job with presentation and fulfillment. If you are mildly interested in the content of this book, you will be very happy as a backer of this project!!

From the Campaign:

When gritty anime protagonist, Lady Vengeance, is brought to the real world by a super fan, she’ll learn there’s more to life than darkness and revenge…and she’ll find love with the super fan’s twin sister – a kind-hearted cheerleader.

Slice of Life is a queer romance that deconstructs the “slice of life” genre, unpacking the importance of everyday narratives to tell a larger story about the meaning of life from the point of view of a fictional character.

In this next installment of Slice of Life, Yuriko starts to find her place in this new world and finally realizes her romantic feelings, all while Lucy goes through her own gay self discovery journey.

Slice of Life #3 will be collecting Chapters 12-18 from WEBTOON in a new sequential format. The 56-page comic book will also contain a 3-page EXCLUSIVE story (featuring Yuriko and Lucy as a couple) not available on WEBTOON/Tapas!

The story takes place in the future and sees Yuriko helping Lucy with a college English course.

Love and Capes: Home for the Holidays
We’re making a Love and Capes Christmas Special comic!

Campaign Link: http://kck.st/3z9Rd5W

Ending: Wed, November 23 2022 1:22 PM EST

PCS Thoughts: Love and Capes is one of my favorite comics because it takes the ultra serious and fairly ridiculous genre of superhero comics and flips it on its head into a rom-com / family sit-com. The evolution that Thom Zahler has developed over the last few years has really opened up the world of the Crusader. This project will be more than worth your while, and time is running out on this opportunity.

From the Campaign:

Let’s do a Christmas Special!

First published in 2006, Love and Capes is the Ringo and Harvey-nominated, heroically super situation comedy about Mark Spencer, the world’s greatest superhero, the Crusader, and his girlfriend (now wife), bookstore owner Abby. Together, they have navigated dating, marriage and parenthood. Now have two kids, James and Hayley, and are having brand-new new adventures.

Love and Capes: Home For the Holidays started as a Patreon-only webcomic continuation of the Love and Capes series. Picking up a year or so after the last collection, “In the Time of Covid”, it shows our heroes enjoying the week between Christmas and New Year’s.

What we’re making is the print collection. Fifty-plus awesome pages of Love and Capes heart and humor. A complete story. In a high-quality, square bound collection (similar to the issues of The Dark Knight or Captain America: Sentinel of Liberty. It’s what they used to call “prestige format”.)

Of course, as with any Kickstarter, it’s not just the comic. At different reward levels, you can get sketches, original art, and even appear at Charlotte’s New Year’s Party. And who would throw a better New Year’s Party than Charlotte?


Continue reading “Kickstarters You Should Be Backing – November 2022 Edition” →

Brainiac On Banjo: Hey, Kids! VIOLENCE!!!

Brainiac On Banjo: Hey, Kids! VIOLENCE!!!

Posted on by Mike Gold

I’m a mean mistweetah, A wabbit feastah, And I pwedict, A bwoody Eastaw, A scuwowing shadow, And dah shadow was dis wabbit, And dah night aiwah echoes, Kill dah wabbit! — Bob Rivers, Kill The Wabbit, 2009

Felix The Cat was our first animated hero, making his debut in Otto Messmer’s Feline Follies in 1919. The plot: A stereotypical old lady goes out for the evening, leaving her house in the hands of her kitty, Mister Tom (played by Felix – look, just go with that). Being a tom cat, once the coast is clear Felix splits to his girlfriend’s house for an off-screen tête-à-tête.

Of course, while the cat’s away the mice will play. In fact, they’ll rip the old lady’s house apart. By the time Felix returns, the house is decimated but he’s too blissed out to notice. Then the owner returns, freaks out at all the damage, beats the poo out of Felix and slings him out of the house.

The slightly indignant Felix doesn’t care. He goes back to his girlfriend’s house and is greeted with open paws. Then about a billion newborn kittens, each looking exactly like Felix, swarms all over their papa. Evidently, cartoon kitties have a remarkably short gestation period. Be this as it may, it is now Felix’s turn to freak. He runs away, straight to the nearby gas field where he attaches a hose to an in-ground spigot and commits suicide.

Was there general outrage over Feline Follies? Was there an upsurge of kids running to gas fields to off themselves? Did anybody ban the sale of brooms to cat-owners?

Hell, no. People didn’t take this stuff seriously. It was a cartoon, not a documentary.

Was Messmer advocating violence by mice, cats or old ladies? Was he advocating unprotected kitty sex? Was he suggesting suicide was the best way to handle trauma? Again, hell no. It was a cartoon.

Because my brain is wired differently than yours, I thought of Feline Follies when I heard of a comics writer/artist being accused of being a fascist for working on a best-selling heroic fantasy comic book. Said writer/artist was accused by another writer/artist, who was no stranger to the concept of cartoon violence. If you labor in the fields of heroic fantasy, evidently, you are wearing an invisible SS uniform. Well, as Lenny Bruce pointed out, “Gestapo? I’m the damn mailman!”

Violence has been the cornerstone of heroic fantasy going back to the Year Gimmel. The line was blurry when the major source of such stories was in the realm of the religions that are now regarded as mythology as well as the religions that various warring factions today regard as gospel. But once it is removed from these trappings of conviction, fictional violence is just a plot device. If Elmer Fudd inspires your kid to want to get a shotgun, your kid needs professional help.

But once parenting became perceived as a science – which it is not; it’s an art form – “cartoon violence” had to be… edited. ‘Doilies for the mind’, to quote Mason Williams. The Three Stooges have been entertaining people since 1922, but their oeuvre became scissor-fodder in the early 1960s. How many of you have great-great grandparents whose eyes were poked out? Bugs Bunny is a latecomer, having debuted (as developed) some 80 years ago. He, too, has suffered the fate of a thousand cuts.

Entire generations of humans have been raised since we became smotheringly overprotective. Are we now a less violent society? Maybe you’ve never read a “newspaper,” but if your knowledge intake is limited to even the most anti-social of social media you should be aware that real-world violence remains a VERY Big Deal. Maybe we should deal with the real, physical issues that lead to such behavior instead of emasculating Wile E. Coyote and Larry Fine.

I have been known to toss the fascist tag around myself. I understand the definition of the term because I know how to work a dictionary. I try to use it appropriately, even when I’m being purposely offensive. Simply working on a heroic fantasy story that involves such violence does not make you a fascist, it makes you a storyteller. Batman could be perceived as a colloquial fascist, yet many of his better stories have been created by the late card-carrying liberal Denny O’Neil as well as by his opposite number on the right, Chuck Dixon. This does not make either a fascist.

Owning a gun, let alone writing about owning a gun, does not make you a fascist. Believing Smith and Wesson, Ruger and Colt should be in charge of our foreign policy just might – but any student of 20th century history should know better.