Posted in: Comics | Tagged: cathair apocalypse, Comics, entertainment, scott gross, webcomic

Could Scott Gross' Cathair Be This Christmas' Most Popular Webcomic?

Published Sun, 21 Dec 2014 10:00:45 -0600

Last updated Sun, 21 Dec 2014 10:29:19 -0600

Scott Gross, writer and illustrator of Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? from DC Comics writes,

"You write something today, something from a personal point of view… and it will run tomorrow."

Johnston's email was terse but electrifying. It came in reply to my own polite thanks for an unsolicited (and unread) Christmas eCard. Why had he written me? Did we even know each other? Whatever the reasons, I couldn't ignore the request of a man whose blog had been nominated three years in a row for the Eagle Award's "Favourite Comics Related Website," at least according to Wikipedia.

[Rich adds – we won once! And then the Eagle Awards were cancelled]

It's true that the last nomination was back in 2012 and the world had changed a lot since then. Twilight came and went. So did Gaddafi. In fact three years was enough time for Western Civilization to witness a complete moral, spiritual, intellectual collapse and the rise of a cybernetic hegemony of drone warfare, android hotel maids and self-driving fleshlights. And it wasn't like Bleeding Cool was doing me any favors. My interview subject was both difficult to locate and terrifyingly dangerous.

He was known as the Cutemungus, the Lord Cutemungus, turnt-up tabby and star of Cathair Apocalypse, which was fast becoming the sort of emergent Internet meme whose name you nervously feign knowledge of among your hipster-mafia friends even if you haven't heard it yet. Until now he had been ignored by the mainstream comic press, although that didn't surprise me. By 2014 the two behemoths of American comics publishing had devolved into workfare programs for balding, ossified wildebeests, too untalented to write for television, who spent their days on Facebook opining on the latest Morrissey album while their circulation numbers cratered. This was not the Cutemungus crowd.

He had been born to a different world, a post-apocalyptic world whose former rulers had consumed themselves in a fireball of greed and lustful overconsumption. Interestingly, it wasn't the greenhouse gasses or nuclear warheads that sealed human fate, but the shedding from billions of stray cats which blanketed the Earth in a suffocating haze of cathair, choking out all light and life. Once the gleaming temples of the Before Time had been buried by the Calico Wind, what remained were the hair-scorched highways, dander dunes and poop glaciers of the Badcatlands. In this fiery crucible the Lord Cuteumungus was forged.

Cutemungus was a renegade, this much I knew. From out of the cathair desert he cobbled together a heavily-armed motorcycle gang of one-eyed mutants and Scottish Folds and led them to victory in battle, defeating or absorbing everything in his way. As his strength grew, so did his legend. An unabashed drug-runner and white slaver, he was rumored to keep a harem of three hundred underage Japanese Bobtails permanently stoned off catnip and Reddi-Whip. But who was I to judge?

Ruling his society were a few tyrannical fat cats who inherited the civilization of their ancestral masters. Once plentiful, the tuna upon which survival depends was now controlled by one shadowy corporation, the BumBee. Their power could be matched only by the Marquez Sisters who trafficked the world's milk supply. Petty warlords and evil sorcerers fed off the remaining scraps. At the top sat one family, the Danderhausen, whose aged king clutched tenuously to the throne. His nincompoop son and sole heir had reportedly been captured by the Cutemungus horde, shitfaced in a Peoria niphouse. His daughter, the beautiful but mercurial Baroness Luscratchia, had been promised to the Persian Sultan Stinky bin Meow Meow in a desperate attempt to fortify the kingdom through marriage. Whispers were, however, that Luscratchia secretly pined for the barbarian rogue with whose interview I was tasked.

In trying to find Cutemungus, I therefore decided to start with the Baroness, hoping she might lead me to him. That, though, is where our story ends. As of today the whereabouts of Luscratchia von Danderhausen are unknown. She has fled the castle without a trace, leaving the reins of power to her decrepit father and a mystical order of clerics known as the Clowder. To learn more I, like you, will have to check out cathairapocalypse.com and Lord Cutemungus on social media, at facebook.com/cathairapocalypse and instagram.com/lordcutemungus. The rest, as they say, is all whiskers and butt fur.

Rich adds… to Instagram!