Designing Bipedal Cats

I'm contemplating doing some rather fundamental character redesigns on Cat-Tharsis, probably with a significant change in style. There are a few reasons for this. The first and foremost is that the current designs were developed at a time when I knew very little about drawing, and have therefore become something of a hobble. I've been able to evolve them to the point where they aren't quite a misery to draw (early Cujo was the absolute worst, because I was throwing in a level of detail that was positively baroque), but I can't really use an evolutionary approach for much more than the head/neck interface (Cujo's sole saving grace but dreadful on everyone else).

Things I want to change:

1) Characters are currently 5 heads tall, I want to shorten them to 4 so that they're not too lanky to fit in a panel.

2) Heads are currently 5 eyes wide. I want bigger eyes so that I don't lose the ability to show expression in shots that show the characters at any kind of a distance.

3) Ears are currently too small for the heads. Part of this may be because one of my early models, my cat Grendel (as opposed to my character Grendel) has unusually small ears given the size of his head. That's what I get for basing my designs on a misshapen cat.

4) My characters got proper hands on labor day. The next challenge is to give them proper feet.

The other thing is that from the reader's point of view, the design changes are going to just one day appear, BAM! without much transition. I can't give the strip a hiatus, because with an update schedule of once per week, the pace is too slow anyway. I'm still just laying the ground work for the first major arc, and haven't even got all the principals on stage yet. I suppose patience is a virtue, but if the new designs are significantly easier to draw than the old ones, I might be able to move to a Tuesday-Thursday schedule from just Tuesdays. That would help move the narrative along considerably.

The Environmental President

Here it is, the latter half of November in Minnesota. I can still count on the fingers of one hand the below-freezing days we've had. Our energy bill is, of course, lower than I would expect, even with rising natural gas prices.

And now the scale has been lifted from my eyes and I understand the Bush plan for reducing our dependence on fossil fuels. It's quite simple really -- as the clear-skies initiative allows continued release of greenhouse gases, global warming continues, reducing our home heating costs. Brilliant.

Our heating bills will be even lower after the flood.