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Sunday, November 22, 2009. New Comics in 3 days

 

That Darn Cat and Girl: Dorothy Gambrell, Part 1 of 2

By Kristy Valenti

Thursday February 28, 2008 10:00:00 am

If Achewood is the cunning, mischief-making Bart Simpson of webcomics, then Dorothy Gambrell's Cat and Girl is the Lisa. Like Lisa, the characters in the strip are more intelligent than mature, keenly aware of what's cool—while being simultaneously attracted and repelled by it—and in turn judge, try to save, and are embittered by the world, while retaining a large capacity for innocence. Gambrell's indeterminately aged protagonist, Girl,[1] mostly embodies the former traits, while her foil, the anthropomorphic Cat, the latter. The cast is rounded out by Girl's haplessly hip counterpart, Grrl, the ineffectual Boy, and a vampire who, over time, has transformed from a scenester to cubicle-dweller. Cat and Girl's character designs and backgrounds are drawn cleanly and geometrically, with an even line-weight, grayscale and spotted blacks.






Gambrell began posting Cat and Girl as a series of fliers at the end of the last century in West Massachusetts, where she was attending Williams College as a studio art major. Its unusual layout — a horizontal grid that can contain as many as 12 panels —which Gabrell describes as "a strange middle ground between the three or four-panel gags of daily comic strips and the narrative demands of longer stories," betrays its 8"x11" pulp origins. (And the strip's examination of the postmodern condition retains the air of theory-steeped collegiate discussions.) In 1999, Gambrell's "friend Chris […] was really after me to put the comics up on my little student website, so after I had drawn eight (a decent archive, I thought), I built a website for them." With the exception of three months in 2000, and one odd week when she was working on the self-published Cat and Girl compilation[2], Gambrell has been faithfully hand-drawing, digitally cleaning up and uploading Cat and Girls ever since. Currently, the strip runs two to three times a week. When asked how she developed the discipline to keep up with this schedule, she corresponded, "Hard work is a virtue. I know that's not really true, but I believe it anyway."




Although Gambrell has stated in an interview with Ted Rall in Attitude 3 that none of her characters are a direct reflection of her, it is evident that they share her epistemological impulses, especially in the areas of history and literature. Gambrell is "interested in most everything. I'm interested in knowledge in itself and for how it allows you to connect disparate things. I am probably best at understanding things with words. So my main interest is in things described with words" (and indeed, like most comic strips, Cat and Girl features a fair number of talking heads).[3] For example, in "Girl Versus Belonging," both Karl Marx and Groucho Marx are playfully quoted when Girl questions her hipster scouts nomination. Each character deals head-on with the search for authenticity, questions of identity and the ethics of consumerism: additionally, the dangerous seductiveness of nostalgia is one of the strip's major themes. According to Gambrell, "America in the late 1970s-early 1980s was going through an obsession with America in the 1950s. Looking back on Happy Days or the Stray Cats we do still see their 1950s affectations, but we don't mix up the Stray Cats and Jerry Lee Lewis. We don't confuse Happy Days with Dobie Gillis. Like it or not, even the most ardent nostalgist carries their own time into their understanding of the past. There is no way to lose that."

Cat and Girl's theoretical bent, occasionally obscure pop culture references and deadpan humor are balanced by Gambrell's predilection for puns, as well as the strip's joi de vivre: the characters seem happiest when music is involved, such as in the strip "Cat and Girl's Music for Dancing," where Cat, Boy and Girl bust out their goofiest moves. Gambrell, who played guitar in the Vandervoorts, explained, "I like cartoons, and I draw cartoons. But I am a fan of music. I read about music, I collect information about music, I listen to a lot of music. I also have no musical ability. It is partly about that cultural capital — the high-school world where what music you listen to defines who you are. It is also that I just love music, and think about music. And that is reflected in the cartoon."






Other influences on the artist include "every cartoon that the newspaper carried [when she was a child], even Apartment 3-G. Cartoons I actually liked were drawn by people like Gary Larson, Matt Groening and Ted Rall. I was also reading anything that came my way (novels, almanacs, cereal boxes, the informational guide in the phone book), watching Rhoda a little too often, and listening to garage punk music. If that coheres into anything I would be surprised."


Previous article: Randy Chang and Bodega, part two
Next article: Dorothy Gambrell, part two

Kristy Valenti currently works for The Comics Journal and Fantagraphics Books, Inc.

Uncharted Territory is © Kristy Valenti, 2008

 

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