Review by Win Wiacek
Under the conceit that the Breaking Cat News station needs technical upgrades, this collection revisits earlier evergreen episodes (more on that later). But professionally unable to simply coast, Georgia Dunn kicks off with an extended special saga pulling together plotlines from the in-world telenovela/soap opera Our IX Lives Christmas Special. It’s an outrageous, hilariously histrionic sequence of episodes piling up millionaire skulduggery, murder, nuns, piracy, abductions, romance and forced marriages upon unsuspected siblings and secret parents, medical crises, legal shenanigans, warring families, ghosts and prophecies. The non-stop dramady culminates in a many aborted weddings, and a multi-vehicle ambulance chase in a snowstorm. Pretty much any day at Viejo Gato, in fact.
Accompanied by deliciously whimsical behind the scenes commentary, such as how Puck’s “changing colour”, and plenty of cartoon interjections and graphic stage whispers about how and when the strip moved from pixels to print, the recollections then commence. On March 27th 2017, a fully redrawn and recoloured version of the web wild world began newspaper syndication, alternating with new material designed expressly for print consumption: a situation mirrored in this tabby tinged tome.
(Re)Drawing attention on the home front are items such as ‘The Woman is Cooking Bacon’, The Woman is in a Room We Can’t Get Into’, ‘The People Bought Some Stupid-Looking Thing For the Dining Room’, ‘The Woman is Trying to Use a Laptop’, and expansionist future tearjerker ‘That Cat is in the backyard again. It’s Elvis’ opening salvo in a lengthy but subtle discussion on lost cats that would pay off in many hankies over the years ahead.
Rolling news is backed up by In-Depth packages devoted to moving house (‘The People are building box forts’, and ‘Packing tape: Dangerous Hazard?’) and the entire household undertakes a lengthy brush with maternity as seen in ‘The Woman is Slowing down’, ‘The Woman is Trying to Make the Bed’ and ‘The People are Awake in the Middle of the Night’.
Perennial favoured topics include animals who aren’t cats, the war with vacuum cleaners, weather and changing seasons, vet visits, what constitutes food, lamps and house plants and Puck’s lifelong efforts to prove the existence of fabled cryptid “The Mailman”.
Most crucially you’ll also learn the derivation of household boon the “bellywarmer”, how trees fall apart, see the traditional ‘Bi-monthly 2 AM “Running of the Cats’, the joy and wonder of takeout, how cats enjoy Halloween and Christmas and why kale must be eradicated.
We pause (tee hee) for now with ‘Breaking Cat News More to Explore’ presenting a selection of the first strips reformatted for newspaper consumption in ‘Digitally Colored BCN Strips’ (as opposed to Dunn’s preferred and now restored method of hand water-colouring her artwork.
Smart, witty, imaginative and deliciously whimsical, Breaking Cat News is a fabulously funny infinitely re-readable feel-good feature, and Everything’s Coming Up Beatrix follows.
