"Me Before Cats"

I was so thoroughly delighted that my participation in Neatorama’s recent “Mystery Sale” netted me a copy of Adam Koford’s “The Laugh Out Loud Cats Sell Out”

Ooops. Wrong sell-outs.

That’s more like it. I thoroughly enjoy this ingeniously funny series, having evolved from its original concept of mashing-up LOLcat-speak with the comic strip style of 90 years earlier to a multi-layered delight of now-extinct hobo lore and other anachronisms, two well-fleshed-out hobo cat characters and their relationship, skillful visual humor and punmanship, and comical cultural references from all over, but I didn’t start keeping up with it until Koford made it the main focus of his blog partly because, well, Flickr still feels to me too much like somebody’s vacation slide show to enjoy a serious portfolio or archive of works.

Anyway, I was thoroughly enjoying the printed collection, containing many Laugh-Out-Loud-Cats comics I had never seen before, until I stumbled onto one in particular:

It seemed strangely familiar, like something I had seen before… or something I had DONE before.

Yes, “Neil Before Zod”, “My Geekiest Pun Ever”, posted May 9, 2007, and one of the few pieces of ‘PhotoSlop’ I have done that ever got any outside attention, prompting me to place a little watermark sig on the bottom right corner. And Koford uploaded his “Neil Before Zod” to Flickr on October 4, 2007. I definitely have first (or at least earlier) dibs on the pun. Yet, while it was the same pun, we did it as different jokes, me pointing out that Neil Armstrong got to the moon (Apollo 11, July 21, 1969) well before General Zod (“Superman II”, premiered June 19, 1981), while Adam was having fun with alphabetical order, in which General Zod is always the loser. I mean, even Wendell Wittler is before Zod! And I’m used to being at the end of the line; my spelling of Wittler is even after Whittler. At least I’m Alpha before Wolfram. And his choice of Neil Gaiman as the Neil Before Zod was interesting. Nobody would recognize a cartoon representation of Neil Armstrong, but recognizing Gaiman is kind of a Geek thing, and that cartoon is one of many examples of the Laugh Out Loud Cats “Geeking Out”. What other Neil could he have used? Simon? Young? Diamond? Peart? Sedaka? (why are most of the famous Neils in pop music?) Patrick Harris? (We both did our things before Dr. Horrible hit the scene, but that might make an even funnier graphic image)

Anyway, I’m not going to take any action over this maybe seemingly semi-plagiarism except to use the Laugh Out Loud Cats in one or more of my future “Square Root of Minus Garfield” contributions – because Garfield is more often an “Am I Supposed to Laugh at That? Cat”. Or Mr. Koford could draw a “Wendell-bo” in one of his cartoons (no superhero suit please, I usually wear a polo shirt or webcomic-design tshirt and plain slacks). Hint, hint.

BTW, that Who album is kind of cool in its own way, between its reminder that, in other parts of the English-speaking world “Heinz Meanz Beanz” more than Ketchup and containing one of my favorite Who songs “I Can See for Miles O’Brien” (Go ahead Koford, use that pun in a cartoon, I dare ya!)

ADDENDUM: Too late, I did it myself.