The Unadoptables: A Webcomic

The process Brooks and I went through to adopt a cat inspired an idea for a webcomic we are currently working on.

Back when we were looking to adopt, Brooks and I had the hardest time finding our forever cat. We would grab a Zipcar last minute and drive anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour to try and meet a cat whose online profile caught our attention. But when we got there, the cat was either already adopted or a total douchebag.

The cat cafe a couple neighborhoods over from us wasn’t any better. It’s one part tiny cafe and two parts giant cat playground. We met a lot of awesome cats there, however, all the great ones were resident cats and not up for adoption. The only cats available were the unadoptables: cats that are old or sickly or gross or mean.

Eventually, we ended up with our unadoptable, Ripley, aka sexy-violent cat. When I first met Ripley, I watched her try to escape from the cat room at the shelter. She climbed up on the ceiling, from which she fell, hit her head on a shelf, flipped over and fell on another cat who was just minding his own business, beat up said cat, and then ran out the door as the volunteer came in to check on her.

I didn’t tell Brooks this when he arrived at the shelter because I really wanted the perfect cat with whom she was pair bonded. I convinced Brooks to get both and sadly, a couple months later, the perfect cat, Newt, died. At first I was worried that Ripley would get the same virus as Newt, but I quickly realized that Ripley is the kind of cat who will live forever, just to torment me. We now live in the typical irreconcilable paradox of having a cat-child. We love Ripley dearly, and at the same time she makes life a little harder.

Brooks came up with the idea for the comic, and now we are finally moving forward with it. It takes place in a cat cafe in a world where cats can legally hang out around people and their food. We have our core characters established, a bible written up, and the script for the first several pages are about ready. One character is based off of Ripley. Other characters include Jelly, who is a gross cat. He lays in his litter box, doesn’t bathe, drools, and sneezes in peoples’ drinks. Babalu is the sickly cat and is always wearing a cone. Whenever she naps people mistaken her for dead. And I will tell you more about other characters in the weeks to come.

We just met with our comic artist. She’s cool and talented and excited to work on The Unadoptables. And this coming June 2017, Brooks and I will be running a crowdfunding campaign to help us get the webcomic up and running. We’ll be releasing sketches, character descriptions, and finished panels in the coming weeks. So stay tuned! We are most excited about this project and can’t wait to show you everything!