Fat Freddie's Kat

Fat Freddie’s Cat is an unusual comic for me, I’m very much used to the modern superhero and newspaper comic, and the underground comics are a new world to me. The style of Fat Freddie’s Cat is clearly limited by the resources available to the underground comics, there’s no color, the images aren’t very complex and would be easy to print, and with the exception of the first story in the volume that I read, each story last only a page, usually four panels. The styles in which the characters and environments are drawn remind me a great deal of Canadian style animations such as the classic “The Cat Came Back”. Space is very simplistically represented by very simple light shading, usually some hatching lines to imply form and distance. There is an amount of craftsmanship to the drawings, the characters aren’t anatomically perfect, but they are pretty consistent, which, to me, implies some amount of training for the artist at some level. These comics tend to have a very crude sense of humor, often involving the Cat pissing on something, or crapping on something (or usually in Freddie’s shoe). By today’s standards the jokes are pretty lame, but they we’re the jokes you were seeing in the mainstream comics of the time, the Sunday funnies and such. They were more straight-laced and family friendly, I think the comics code had something to do with that. Yet these comics existed outside that realm and eventually began influencing the mainstream more and more as time went on.