Broken Frontier

Clan of the Cats is a webcomic that has been continually updating since 1999. In the second part of Broken Frontier's COTC interview, creator Jamie Robertson talks about his approach to his characters, influences on his work and advice for aspiring webcomic creators. For part 1 click here.

BROKEN FRONTIER: Your characters, I've noticed, feel a lot more realistic. How do you approach characterization? Do you base them on people from real life, fiction or a little of both?

JAMIE ROBERTSON: I get asked that a lot and I guess that's a good thing. However, the answer is I don't know. Maybe it's because I've had the characters for so long. The characters of Chelsea and Jubal are both roughly 25 years old, though they began very differently. Chelsea is based on a real person and her relationship with Jubal is based on my friendship with this person. 

Cynthia is based on two girls I have known and as for the rest of the cast, I have taken bits and pieces from people throughout my life. So maybe it's that I do take from life, then again maybe it's the combination. I just try and think how a real person, be it me or someone I know, react to a given situation. How does one react to being told they are a panther? I don't know, but I do know what it's like to be told that my kidneys were going to fail, that my whole life, in a span of a few weeks, was going to drastically change. 

When I was a kid I used to study people, their mannerisms, inflections in their speech and all that. The way people are with one friend or another, the masks we all wear was fascinating to me because I never understood why that was. Perhaps some of that rubbed off. Then again sometimes I just like to have fun. The character of Van Helsing in the Dracula arc is based on Peter Cushing, who played Van Helsing in some of the Hammer Dracula films. Dracula himself is a combination of the real Vlad Tepes and Christopher Lee's Dracula, both in look and attitude. So, to answer your question, it's a little of both.

BF: What kind of influences go into writing Clan of the Cats, from the beginning to the present? Which films or stories  informed Clan of the Cats' premise?

JR: Obviously the film Cat People had a huge influence. I loved that movie as a kid and as an adult could appreciate the finer points of the film. It was a very dark, very adult (for the time) fairy tale about sex and death. By the way, I'm speaking of the 1942 version, not the *Nastassja Kinski* remake. 

In the movie, Irena, played by Simone Simon, was doomed from the start. Not only was she doomed in her own mind, but that was the way her curse worked.  It's like someone reveling in their own illness. With Chelsea, she had hope. She was going to fight her curse, even though there was an inevitability about it. I guess her curse is based on my own experience of having kidney problems all my life and in fact having two kidney transplants. 

In the beginning of COTC Chelsea had a strained relationship with her family, but she reconnected and that gave her strength.  Now she's been separated from her family and has been worn down. The hope is almost gone and the inevitability of her curse is creeping up.  Chelsea is the monster of the story, but she's also the hero and we'll just have to wait and see if this is ultimately a tragedy or something else.

The whole horror movie genre from the early German expressionist films like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Nosferatu to the Universal classics Dracula and Frankenstein to the Hammer Films remakes of those classics have all had a profound influence on the comic.  Stylistically speaking the Hammer films had the most influence because I loved the contrast of the dark and the vibrant colors of those movies. And it wasn't just monster movies that
influenced the comic, but my fascination with religion and politics also played a big role. And then there was my grandmother, who used to tell me ghost stories and took me to church revivals and talked about aliens and Edgar Casey and all kinds of wild things. She was a big influence too and that's why the character of Ruth is modeled after her.

BF: Finally any advice for inspiring webcomic creators, especially those who want their creations to last on the Net?

JR: The key to any webcomic's success is consistent updates. Until I got sick a few years ago I rarely missed an update and I think that helped to cement COTC's small mark on the webcomic world. Once you build an audience, you have to fight to keep it. Sometimes it can be a struggle, but others can find the right niche. 

The best advice I can give is to do what you want to do. If you really want to do a manga style comic, then go for it, but don't do it just because the style is currently hot. One day it's not going to be hot. As far as staying power goes there's the consideration of a comic being timely vs. timeless.When I took a class in cartooning one of the biggest points was that comic strips should be timely. A great example of a timely webcomic is PVP and it is one of the most successful out there.So, it sounds like good advice and it is. 

However, if you make a comic timeless, meaning a story that could be told in any decade, then that will have greater staying power, though it may not be as successful.  Look at Bloom County vs. Calvin and Hobbes. Bloom County was a wonderful comic, it was in the now, it was great and it is still great. However the pop culture references can sometimes stick out like a sore thumb, while other times they lose their meaning completely. It's still a great comic, but it was better when it was fresh and new. 

Calvin and Hobbes on the other hand is just as fresh today as it was 20 years ago and IMHO that will never change. There is no right or wrong argument here. Just do what you want to do and have fun with it. That's what comics are all about.