HOME | DD

Description
I'm considering starting up a series of fan art sketches based around the theme "Cat Women": drawings of my favourite cat or feline-identified female characters, the criterion being that they are smart, powerful, funny or beautiful rather than mere catgirl eye-candy. My hope is that it might range from Aristocats to Jacques Tourneur's Cat People.

This is a wip sketch of Safa from Brian K. Vaughan and Niko Henrichon's graphic novel Pride of Baghdad, based on a true story. I'm quite fond of Vaughan's comics work - his writing often frustrates me, but his ideas and often his ear for dialogue are enjoyable enough to outweigh the flaws - but I'm afraid I was left a little disappointed by Pride of Baghdad on the whole. Aside from the nice artwork, it was Safa's characterisation that kept me reading and that worked best as the story's core. In a pride of four lions (one adult male, two lionesses, one cub), she is an older lionness who would be an outcast from the pride were it not for their being enclosed together in a Baghdad zoo.

It becomes apparent that she has been dealt a very bad hand in life both in the wild and captivity, her sexuality first abused by rival males (which leads to her losing sight in one eye and having one ear badly torn), then rejected by the comic's main male character, Zill, when she becomes too old for him. Her story is heart-breaking, and the strongest aspect of the comic for me was seeing a character who should have been so bitter still staying loyal to the other pride members (especially since I found Zill so unsympathetic and dull!), and becoming less antagonistic towards the other younger lioness still in Zill's favour, after their escape. Weirdly enough, in so far as it's a story about a 'fallen woman' in part, it makes an interesting companion piece to Vaughan's Y: The Last Man

Description
I'm considering starting up a series of fan art sketches based around the theme "Cat Women": drawings of my favourite cat or feline-identified female characters, the criterion being that they are smart, powerful, funny or beautiful rather than mere catgirl eye-candy. My hope is that it might range from Aristocats to Jacques Tourneur's Cat People.

This is a wip sketch of Safa from Brian K. Vaughan and Niko Henrichon's graphic novel Pride of Baghdad, based on a true story. I'm quite fond of Vaughan's comics work - his writing often frustrates me, but his ideas and often his ear for dialogue are enjoyable enough to outweigh the flaws - but I'm afraid I was left a little disappointed by Pride of Baghdad on the whole. Aside from the nice artwork, it was Safa's characterisation that kept me reading and that worked best as the story's core. In a pride of four lions (one adult male, two lionesses, one cub), she is an older lionness who would be an outcast from the pride were it not for their being enclosed together in a Baghdad zoo.

It becomes apparent that she has been dealt a very bad hand in life both in the wild and captivity, her sexuality first abused by rival males (which leads to her losing sight in one eye and having one ear badly torn), then rejected by the comic's main male character, Zill, when she becomes too old for him. Her story is heart-breaking, and the strongest aspect of the comic for me was seeing a character who should have been so bitter still staying loyal to the other pride members (especially since I found Zill so unsympathetic and dull!), and becoming less antagonistic towards the other younger lioness still in Zill's favour, after their escape. Weirdly enough, in so far as it's a story about a 'fallen woman' in part, it makes an interesting companion piece to Vaughan's Y: The Last Man