Tuesday, February 15. 2005
Kit 'n Kay Boodle
In early 2005, after months of work repressing his gag reflex, former CYD regular contributor The New Meat took a long look into the deep abyss of Kit 'n Kay Boodle, a comic which could almost be parody if the author wasn't completely serious.
“Kit ‘n’ Kay Boodle”
by The New Meat
Richard Katellis’s “Kit ‘n’ Kay Boodle” isn’t a comic that started out good and then slowly deteriorated over time as the artist ran out of inspiration. No, “Kit ‘n’ Kay Boodle” has been a humor atrocity right from the very first strip. It doesn’t concern itself with humor or drama or plot or anything sort of story-telling elements that you might usually associate with comics. It’s a straight smut comic, which would be fine except that it pretty much fails on that level as well. There’s probably never been a less sexy couple – Kit and Kay look like second-string San Rio characters with penis and breasts, respectively, pasted on. It gives the comic the weirdly unerotic look of a Tijuana bible. But more than anything, it looks like the sort of comic a pederast might use to seduce his new prey into vices few even know exist.
To summarize, “Kit ‘n’ Kay Boodle” is about a pair of foxes, the cute little cartoony sort often seen frolicking with lost princesses in Disney movies, except they’re anatomically correct. Kit and Kay live in the town of Yiffburg. Which, roughly translated from Goddamn Furry Retard Speak, means “Sexburg” or possibly “To Have Sexburg.” “Burg” being German for town or possibly mountain. But I’m pretty sure it’s town. Residents of Yiffburg have constant, relentless sex in every public space imaginable. In Yiffburg, there’s no worse crime than to be repressed and nothing screams repression more than a refusal to have constant, relentless, public sex. Sex isn’t a private expression of love and affection between two people nor is it a fun, naughty romp. In Yiffburg, the magical, mystical experience that is sex has been reduced to a civic duty.
For a strip as mind-numbingly obsessed with sex, “Kit ‘n’ Kay Boodle’s focus on vanilla, monogamous, heterosexual sex strikes the readers as, well, weird. This is, after all, a furry strip, so where’re all the macro hermaphrodite taurs!? The rich tapestry of human sexuality is NOT on display here. For most of the strip’s run, most residents are monogamous, heterosexual couples dating within their own species, giving the series a weirdly incongruous puritanical flavor. Possibly mindful of this criticism, Katellis has included more “interracial” couples in recent strips. Also, I think a few gay and lesbian couples have also been on display. No bisexuals, transsexuals, or transvestites yet. There are rather few threesomes, couplings, or orgies. (1) There’s no dry humping, no BDSM, no weird fetishes. Yiffburg even robs public sex of its exhibitionist taboo, and thus its fun. Yiffburg citizens fuck constantly but their sex lives are surprisingly vanilla.
I also have no clue how anything gets done in this town if everyone gets to take fuck breaks every ten minutes. The post office is slow enough when those guys just go outside to smoke. Really, if you were allowed, nay, obliged by municipal code, to fuck all the time, would you do anything else? All the greatest achievements in art and science and other stuff have only been possible through the miracle of sexual sublimation. Which might explain why there aren’t any great furry artists. (2)
Back to the comic. For this article, let’s restrict ourselves to a brief look at the three main phases of the strip, enough to prove my thesis that Kit and Kay is the worst comic ever.
Phase 1 - Katellis draws a lot of fucking foxes.
Almost every storyline involves Kit and Kay encountering some mundane, everyday problem and then finding some bizarre sex-based solution. Like shooting a fly out of the air with Kit’s ejaculate or, after falling into a hole, having anal sex until Kit’s orgasm propels Kay up out of the hole to safety in a blast of semen. No, really. It happens. (3) Here’s an illustrative example.
This is the only picture of Kit and Kay that I've been able to find where their frightening genitilia aren't the centerpiece of the illustration. Part of what bugs me most about this comic is Kit’s perpetual whininess. Probably the only reason Kay’s always giving in to his advances is because it’s the only way to get this wet blanket to shut his fool mouth. As a man with an astounding 25 years experience of maleness, I think I can safely say that this doesn’t work in real life. Besides, what is he so down about? Licking envelopes is fun. When I was a kid and the teacher was assigning jobs, the only thing better than licking envelopes was pounding the erasers. It was great; you bashed those suckers together and created this huge cloud of dust. Ah, memories. But the envelopes were just as good, because of that delicious glue taste. It’s the only good thing about sending in the rent check every month.
So Kay comes up with an innovative way to get Kit to shut up about licking envelopes: she covers them in vaginal lubricant. That’s probably the worst place on your body to get a paper cut.
Surprisingly, the ruse works. This is honestly the stupidest thing I have seen in my entire life. To recap: who doesn't like the taste of envelope glue? Nobody, that's who. It's one of life's small pleasures - sorta like letting Elmer's glue dry on your fingers and then picking it off.
That’s it. For nine tenths of the strip’s run, Kit and Kay have various adventures in modern fucking. That, by itself, would be enough to make Kit and Kay Boodle dull beyond belief, but Katellis managed to outdo himself when he tried to vary the formula. And so we move on to…
Phase 2 - Katellis tries and fails to incorporate plot
Recently, Katellis apparently began to feel constrained by this predicable format, longing to stretch his creative muscles by tackling a longer, more involved plot. And the result of this artistic restlessness, so to speak, was a bizarre little sequence entitled “Kit and Kay Outfox the Tyrant.” (4) The basic premise was that Kit and Kay, beyond being merely a pair of horny fuckers, were also a pair of horny fucking secret agents, entrusted by Yiffburg’s Department of State analogue to infiltrate the vaguely totalitarian nation of Unnamed Country with a very special cargo and bring the oppressed masses the gift of fucking.
Yes. That’s it.
Truly, Kit and Kay are dedicated to their mission. Not only are they wearing clothes (The horror!), they also gave up fucking for a few minutes. On the train, they meet a helpful animal, possibly some sort of dog, wearing one of those vaguely Germanic hats that you’d wear with lederhosen. See, because this is either a vaguely Hitler-esque Fascist dictatorship or a vaguely East German Police state, the hat fits either way. This guy in the hat explains that his country is ruled by an evil ghost that hates fucking (Boo!) and won’t let anyone fuck because of its evilness and hatred of fucking. I think this might have been the plot of the first Elvira movie now that I think about it. Upon arriving at their destination, Kit and Kay meet their contacts, these mouse-like animals who might be mice, but who also might be little tiny hippos, and deliver their cargo. It’s a whole load of…boinkberries?
Oh, yeah, I should have mentioned these things. They’re the world’s strongest aphrodesiac, most effective contraceptive, and greatest performance-enhancing stimulant all rolled into one. They’ll also make you lose weight and allow you to earn your degree through the mail! And they’ll make you a certified reverend and get you some human growth hormone. And this guy in Nigeria will totally give you a million dollars. Oh, and you’ll be able to fly. And kill a yak from 200 yards. With mind bullets. That’s telekinesis!
As Kit and Kay do that, the hat-wearing dog gets arrested by the evil ghost’s goons. Uh oh! But then it turns out hatdog is a good friend of the evil ghost, who is currently residing in the body of another animal, probably a skunk, and the evil ghost just wanted to have a friendly chat. Hatdog and skunkghost talk for a few panels, and hatdog explains his theory that things in Evilghostland would be just spiffy if the evilghost were to inhabit his body instead of the skunk’s. The rationale is that, because the hatdog doesn’t want to rule the world like the ghost’s current host, he should be able to easily control said ghost. I think.
HOLY FUCK ABRUPT TONAL SHIFT ARGH
Just when the situation looks darkest, Kit and Kay are saved by the cartoonist’s short attention span. I mean, really, how many strips has it been since the last fucking scene? What do you think I am, a monk? It’s fucking time to get some fucking fucking!
FUCK!!!!! And that’s the end to this noble yet failed experiment in actual plot. Plot’s nice and all, I guess, but it distracts from repetitive, methodical fucking. Yes, so as long as the skunk receives constant fucking, the evil ghost is held at bay. By fucking. Yeah. I don’t know about you but I think I’m probably only good for about two orgasms in a row before I succumb to testicular pain. I guess this skunk has an unlimited supply of skunk jism and balls of fucking steel.
This strip’s complete creative bankruptcy, its weirdly pedophilic artstyle, its utter failure to entice at all…no, its very existence makes my soul sad, but that’s far from the end of it. In writing these articles, it’s always tempting to speculate a little about what a cartoonist is like in real life by reading into his works. But while most authors do put a little of themselves in their work, you have to be careful to distinguish the parts that reveal something deeper about a creator’s psychology and the parts that are just fluffy flights of fancy. Richard Katellis, however, gives us the following plotline, featuring furry versions of himself, his woman, and his mother-in-law, which, while it may not be entirely true, cannot be read as anything except a reflection of the author’s deepest Freudian issues. It just took me ten minutes to write that sentence. And so…
Phase 3 - Katellis goes completely batshit insane.
Whenever I write these reviews, people criticize me for drawing on the incidents portrayed in the comics to make inferences about the private lives of the cartoonists. Mindful of that criticism, I’m going to try really, really hard here not to jump to any crazy conclusions, especially crazy conclusions about three-way incest. So just put that thought out of your head.
Like many furry cartoonists, Richard Katellis has a “fursona,” an animal which most furries use to represent themselves when a) they’re not very good at drawing humans or b) they’re disgusting hambeasts in human form. Katellis draws himself as a cat. He draws his girlfriend Shirlee as a mouse. What’s that?!? Girlfriend, you say? Surely his comic’s ridiculous obsession with sex is due to his real-life loneliness. But no, sources indicate that he really is in a relationship. In real life, not on the internet. With a woman. Wow.
Again, he draws her as a mouse. Haha, he inverted the natural predator-prey relationship, that’s cute. Anyway, nothing too strange there. Lots of people do this sort of thing. I’m going to start drawing myself as an aardvark and my girlfriend as a termite.
Katellis also draws lots of pictures of him and Shirlee, like, doin’ it. A little obsessive perhaps but lots of furries do that, either to show off. Whatever floats your boat.
That’s all well and good, but, not content with just creating fursonas for himself and his woman, Katellis also invents a fursona for his mother-in-law. Well, maybe he just has a very close relationship with his mother-in-law. We should all be so lucky. OR SHOULD WE?!?
Shirlee’s mom actually appears in the strip as the fat poodle woman (Maybe Shirlee takes after her dad?), the mayor of Yiffburg. I like my mother-in-law and all, but I don’t think I’d write her into a comic that revolves around the joy of cartoon splodging. If I had such a cartoon, I would probably try to keep my mother-in-law from finding this out. We should all have such a pleasant relationships with our mothers-in-law that we could go up to them and say, “Hey, can I draw comics about you and me and your daughter fucking? Oh, and can I draw you as a big fat naked poodle woman? That’d be really nice.” My mother-in-law is a wonderful woman, but I think the occasional family dinner together is all of her that I can stomach. Katellis’ mother-in-law, meanwhile, is apparently quite cool with his comics, even to the point of roleplaying the mayor character with her daughter and son-in-law.
Um.
Okay.
That’s a bit odd. I’m not the sort who likes to discuss this sort of thing with his mother-in-law, but some people are more open. Why, it might even be considered, uh, charming or funny in some circles. Right? Right? Surely, there’s no need to jump to any crazy conclusions about THREE-WAY INCEST based on a few silly roleplay sessions. Right?
But wait, there’s more.
According to this storyarc, Katellis and Shirlee parade around naked in front of poodlemom. I’m not just extrapolating that from the fact that he drew the cat and mouse naked here: He admits to naked parading right there. But surely that’s harmless, right? Just a thing that hippies do when they’re comfortable in their bodies. And in those old “National Geographic” magazines, you saw plenty of mothers walking about topless and I’m sure their kids turned out just fine. So, sure, Katellis and co might walk around naked and engage in bizarre, suggestive roleplay sessions, but that doesn’t mean they’re having an incestuous threeway relationship, does it?
…
Okay, so Katellis and Shirlee have sex IN FRONT of poodlemom. Poodlemom is again, let me remind you, Katellis’s mother-in-law and Shirlee’s REAL MOM. This is unusual, even by the not-very demanding standards of hippies, libertines, and those third-world countries where eight generations all live, breathe, breed, and die all within the same two rooms and everyone does everything in front of everyone else. But surely, just because you have sex with your mom watching doesn’t mean you’re having THREE WAY INCEST, right?
Okayokayokay, but surely just because your mom is a creepy voyeaur and obviously a completely unfit mother, doesn’t mean it’s THREEWAY INCEST, right?!
(This image was so horrifying, neither Photobucket nor CYD would host it.)
And just because you’re the sort of guy who gets off on having your crazy mother-in-law finger herself while…while… JESUS CHRIST PEOPLE IT’S CLOSE ENOUGH LOOK AT IT LOOK AT IT OPEN YOUR EYES AND LOOK AT IT
I can’t say I’ve ever held my own mother’s lack of prurient interest in my sex life against her. Thankgiving must be a real affair at the Katellis household. “Why don’t you ever spy on us while we have sex like Shirlee’s mom does?! You don’t love us, Mom!!! Boo hoo!”
Shirlee’s ass has jism in it LOL
I really don’t like where this is going.
After all this, I still have no clue what’s really going on inside the tiny, pea-like minds of Katellis and his commune. I cannot begin to imagine what horrible horrible circumstances in Katellis’ and Shirlee’s respective childhoods could have convinced them that this is the way a normal household functions and further what cruel, mocking twists of fate must have conspired to bring two, er, three such monumentally screwy people together (5). And then factor in the fact Katellis is so convinced of the rightness of this situation that he posts a never-ending stream of fuck comics about it…and then is apparently proven right by the never-ending stream of praise and adoration he receives from the furry community in return. I dare you to read his forum. They fucking love him.
Especially vocal in his love, incidentally, is Seth Triggs who recently spammed the CYD boards, trying to solicit praise for his abortion of a webcomic “Buddies in Big Places.” (6) Nothing more to say there, just thought it was an interesting footnote.
In closing, what’s the deal with Shirlee? Knowing her mom, she never stood a chance at not being completely batshit, but let’s not analyze her solely through the lens of Katellis’ works. Nay, let’s look instead to her own Keenspace offering – The Mouse of Time, a comic about a mouse that travels through time – to hear her voice. For you see, Shirlee is also something of an artist…
Truly a monumental accomplishment because you know Keenspace doesn’t accept just anybody. Nosir, only the cream of the comic crop get on there.
Uh oh! A naysayer! How will Shirlee respond to this criticism?
Why, he only insults her art because, deep down, he longs to spank to it. This is certainly a unique accusation. But, alas, Shirlee’s logic is no match for this philistine’s biting wit. Time to bring out the stronger guns.
Since this pigboy scammed her out of payment for a sketch and thinks her art sucks, she travels back in time, gives a condom to his parents, and ERASES HIM FROM EVER EXISTING. It’s good to see that she doesn’t use her awesome, God-like for any petty, vindictive ego-maintenance. Because, Jeez, what kind of emotionally-stunted dramaqueen would do that? Yessirree, no issues here.
But, when all’s said and done, Katellis and Shirlee may have their quirks, they may draw mind-bendingly cutesy porn comics/ mind-bendingly cutesy revenge comics, they may be eyeball-deep in crazy Oedipal incest, but at least they make a cute couple.
Awwwwwwwwww! ^__^
Footnotes
1. There are, of course, times when several couples fuck simultaneously in the same room, but, to be a proper orgy, there has to be some minimum partner swapping. Really. I’m standing firm on this.
2. Rimshot!
3. I saw it. See what sacrifices I make for you people?
4. Cuz they’re foxes, get it?
5. Gonna go out on a limb though and guess, hmmm, internet.
6. There’s a reason I’m not putting a link there. Because that would just play into his hands. Take that, Triggs! OWNED