About a week ago, I suggested to Eleanor that I was going to create a comic strip based on our two cats for the Jejune Echo. She said that I should do it and I should start with an event that happens 3-4 times a week and makes us chuckle each and every time. Challenge accepted, I suppose. For the heck of it, I'll give a little background. First and foremost, who are the stars of this little strip? We adopted Eigeman as a kitten from the Ross County Humane Society (Chillicothe, Ohio) in February of 2011. He tricked us into believing he was a lap cat that day. It now seems more likely that he was scared out of his mind (as he spent much of his time the next few years) and was merely gritting his teeth, waiting for the whole ordeal to end. Regardless of his temperament, he is a very good pet. His name is the last name of my favorite actor (Chris Eigeman). The addition of Scruffy to our household was somewhat unplanned. Living on Wheeling Island in Wheeling, West Virginia, one encountered a fair number of stray cats. One such animal captured Eleanor's attention... and sympathy... and started to receive food on a regular basis. During his outdoor time, I witnessed him fight with other cats and suffer through two major infections involving swelling around his face. He truly was a "scruffy" looking little guy. As we were moving away from Wheeling, we had a bout with our consciences on whether we could leave this animal behind (at the beginning of winter) after becoming somewhat attached to it. We could not. Our "brain damaged kitty" (not actually) is a source of great amusement for us, and (luckily) he and Eigeman are buddies. Now, why a comic strip? I love to create things. Anything. Consider Stü Art and this website. It's all about building things from scratch, whether the end result is "good" or not. A few years ago while working with an after school Latchkey program, I had an idea to have the kids create their own comic strips. Unfortunately, the idea never materialized, but it stuck with me as an accessible art project. Then, a couple years ago, a friend and I basically developed an iPhone game. It was never added to the App Store, but it was a lot of fun along the way. It was my friend's idea to make it a "content driven" app, which meant we had to create a lot of characters, items, and artwork. I did a lot of character and scene drawings for the project. Along the way, I developed a process of hand drawing the content and then coloring it with the GIMP software on my Mac. The results were humorous to me and had a cartoon-y nature to them. Between the mundane exploits of the cats and my crummy drawings, a comic strip seems like a no brainer...