Dos Gatos, Episode 1: Eyeballs

by John David Ebert and Mary Church

This is a series of comics invented by Mary Church and I in the winter of 2016 when I was living with her in St. Petersburg, Florida. She had already been planning a graphic novel entitled about a cat, so I suggested we should do a comic strip featuring two cats, a couple named “Artamis” (male) and “Butterball” (female). The stories are done in the tradition of “Itchy & Scratchy” from The Simpsons, which was in turn a parody of the Tom & Jerry cartoons from the 1940s. The two cats are loosely based on Mary and I, so the whole series is a parody of our relationship.

So I sat down and drew out rough sketches of what the story would be for each episode which she would then draw the images for professionally. But my drawings and stories, though amateurish, made her laugh so long and so hard that she said there was no way she could do any better (although I disagreed). But here’s the first episode that I drew, together with the splash page (which I sketched out over breakfast one morning) which is the very first image I drew.