Comic+Creation



(The last panel says "Lesson 32.6 - Justice comes in all differet sorts of sizes, shapes and temperatures. When combined with discipline and honour, justice becomes a magnificent tool to reign truth upon all non-believers. Another slice of justice served.")



Pickle is just an ordinary house cat. He likes chasing mice, taking naps, watching the fish swim and having his belly rubbed. However, pickle has a secret identity. He takes it upon himself to serve slices of justice pie to those who do wrong. When he puts on his cape and mask, he transforms into Justice Cat – The law outside of the law.

Taking the law into his own paws, he makes it his duty to serve up honesty, integrity, valour, courage, truth and finally, justice, to all evildoers. He also misunderstands that Justice Pie is a metaphor and uses it as an excuse to eat lots of pie.

However, being a house cat, he is confined to serve justice within the boundaries of his home. Justice Cat often finds this difficult, which forces him to sometimes look for any excuse to serve justice to members of his household, like not putting away the dishes or leaving the roll of toilet paper empty. Often his punishments far exceed the “offences” committed, but Justice Cat is all about making a statement.

This comic was inspired by some of my favourite comics that I read on a regular basis, such as Cyanide and Happiness and Bob the Squirrel. The comic was intended to have a dark humour to it. I enjoy when comic strip artists take simplicity and through their imagination turn it into art. For example, Cyanide and Happiness is very plain, basic comic, containing nothing more than ordinary stick people on white backgrounds, and in very few frames, through dialogue, they make absolute hilarious and popular art. With my art skills being very minimal, it was also a very good way of taking the focus of the comic away from my drawings and focusing it on the story and feeling that I was trying to get across.

Similarly, the ideas from the comic strip Bob the Squirrel were incorporated into my comic because of the home animal interaction with humans. Similar to Bob the Squirrel, and according to Scott McCloud, viewer identification is a specialty of cartooning, which gives comics like Bob the Squirrel an advantage in breaking into world popular culture, using iconic drawing styles, keeping the drawings very basic.

I also tried playing with other comic ideas proposed by McCloud, such as one panel operating as several panels, multiple speech bubbles serving as time lapses, multiple images in one frame to convey motion, etc. I also toyed with McCloud’s suggested power of the word balloon. He mentions that through varying styles of bubbles, letters and characters can have a dramatic impact on those reading through accurately capturing the realm of senses and emotions, which can often be hard to do through text, especially in comic form.