Katie the Catsitter - Colleen AF Venable
Katie is a young girl who cat-sits for a lady named Madeline, who is actually costumed vigilante Mousetress. Katie wants to be a sidekick but Madeline is more or less retired and letting her army of intelligent cats do her work. She's thought of as a villain, but is more of a leftist animal activist. Two heroes, the Eastern Screech and Stainless Steel, seem to be framing her for villainy, but Madeline doesn't seem to mind, while Katie does. The tween subplot is that Katie is become estranged from her best friend, who returns from summer camp with a new nickname and a boyfriend. Gradually, these two plots merge, as it's revealed that several people Katie knows are actually costumed heroes. This is a childish and poorly-executed attempt at parody, with a baffling story structure; it has few introductions of the characters, little background on its fictional setting, and has almost no explanation of the action parts of the story. This couples with extremely basic art makes some of it hard to understand. Scenes shift suddenly without any clues as to where they are; I only learned that one place was a bodega because it was referred to that way much later. At one point a character destroys some lines that keep the subway working; the scene then cuts to what can only be a train, and then a station, but the art is so terrible that you can get this only from context. The end drags and relies on the most basic cartoony slaptick humor to keep things going. Venable also overuses the beat panel, then a shared laugh that's informed by tired sitcoms. For tweens only, and only if they care about superhero parody, I guess? [2]
