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In 1991, a world of anthropomorphic cats needed a hero.
… So I made dozens. What started with an innocent second-grade assignment, to think about two different animals and draw what it might look like if they were combined, became a years-long, nigh-pathological worldbuilding exercise.
… So I made dozens. What started with an innocent second-grade assignment, to think about two different animals and draw what it might look like if they were combined, became a years-long, nigh-pathological worldbuilding exercise. Batcat came first, followed by Catman, Cybocat, Scratch-Off, Ninjacat, Slapcat, and, of course, Supercat. It didn’t end with cats in costumes; soon Scratch-Off was sharing his love of gardening, Cybocat starred in a sprawling (by third-grader standards) plan for a cinematic video game, and Kitty Katt (certified genius in the mold of Peter Parker) was the subject of a somehow yet-to-be-produced stage play.
Said one fifth grader in 1994, “Jared’s going to grow up and marry cats.” Which was a silly thing to claim, as the milieu did not contemplate interspecies relationships even once; it was cats all the way down. I hope that through the great rear-view mirror of time and experience, that now-fortysomething understands how ridiculous they sounded.
Insofar as I can actually remember my “process” as an artist from ages 7-12, I believe I was certain all of these concepts were completely original. And yet with a fresh eye, almost every character, and even some compositions, were lovingly lifted from media influences. Scratch-Off was definitely a response to Bubsy; Cybocat was a G-rated Robocop; Slapcat was Mr. Fantastic; and I’m pretty sure that Kitty and his ripped-denim-clad band The Cats were an amalgam of any of the hair bands my parents played on the local classic rock radio station. Stories were mirrored almost beat-for-beat from Power Rangers and VR Troopers. Whole drawings responded to key art from Wolfenstein 3D and any number of Sierra’s point-and-click adventures.
There was a period, long after all this art was made but way before today, when I felt embarrassed or regretful about how imitative my artwork was. But revisiting these characters through the lens of being a dad to an eminently creative kiddo has brought all these old drawings into a new kind of focus. Good artists copy; great artists steal is a fun adage that’s often attributed to Pablo Picasso, and was subsequently copied and stolen by any number of people from T.S. Eliot to Steve Jobs, and there’s a wisdom there worth stealing.
As I watch my son build worlds in his supercharged imagination, a pattern emerges: new details almost always mirror stories and media he’s recently experienced. He created a race of hyper-intelligent birds, born after our family invested in a big full-color bird reference book and we started using Merlin to identify all the songs in our backyard. We find out how his birds teach their young in a big college, and descriptions of the school’s faculty map suspiciously over characters from Monsters University. The birds become militarized against the tide of human colonialism after conversations about the European colonization of North America. Following a trip to the Boston Tea Party Museum, they mount an ongoing conflict to claim their independence following the American Revolution’s playbook. Most recently, we got to see the first fully-rendered map of the civilization the birds built for themselves in the age before the human invasion, and it looks suspiciously like the maps I’ve shown him from The Lord of the Rings and the hexcrawl I’m developing in my Shadowdark campaign.
This seamless and shameless folding-in of new inspiration into the kiddo’s imagination-continuum is a great illustration of how we all work together to push art forward. For as long as a kid’s drive to create outpaces their context and experience, every doodle and story becomes a window into their journey of synthesizing new information. It’s no different for us grownups, and it was my son who called me out on precisely that fact: while sharing the fiction from my Shadowdark campaign with him recently, he pointed out that the writing sounded just like what he was used to hearing in Lord of the Rings. Without realizing it, my practice of reading LotR aloud to our family started to flavor my writing style. Guilty as charged!