This is fantastic

Walter would be amused, I’m sure.

Ah, but is it worth all the pollution through dumping apostrophs into the river? You know they degrade into commas & can inhibit the rivers flow. Or even worse a full stop could get into the water and cause the river to stall prematurely -especially if you get enough to develop an ellipsis…

One of the good ones

What does it run on? Certainly not blood, sweat, and tears or any such old-fashioned nonsense.

Am I reading these levers right?
Prose-Poetry
Comedy-Drama
Hemingway-Proust
Hardcover-Paperback

This is positively the sexiest Cat and Girl ever.

hehe, kinda reminds me of “Thursday Next” series and those Bookworms xD

<3

She must be close to the Faulkner setting, since she doesn’t need those quotation marks and commas.

Wouldn’t this just be art in the age of mechanical production?

@Ben everything that’s been said… well, it’s been said before? (-*- or maybe I’m just being a bit pessimistic today:( ? -*-)

This reminds me of that short story by Roald Dahl – The Great Automatic Grammatizator, I think…? Man, I loved that. And I love this.

this reminds me of that long novel by Umberto Eco – Foucault’s Pendulum, I think…? Man, I loved that. And I love this.
sincerely tho

I’ve never seen a machine I wanted more, in my whole life.

That’s some old style strip, not novadays walking-and-talking one wow.

Dorothy…are you trying to tell us… that a book is in the works??

“Trurl let the machine warm up first, kept the power low, ran up the metal stairs several times to take readings )the machine was like the engine of a giant steamer, galleried, with rows of rivets, dials and valves on every tier) – till, finally satisfied all the decimal places were where they ought to be, he said yes, it was ready now…

Now that the potentiometers indicated the machine’s lyrical capacitance was charged to the maximum, and Trurl, so nerous his hands were shaking, threw the master switch. A voice, slightly husky but remarkably vibrant and bewitching, said:”

From The Cyberiad: Fables for the Cybernetic Age, by Stanislaw Lem

I prefer the hand-cranked version of the Automated Novel Writer. Sure, it’s slow and takes a bit more effort, but it’s much quieter — and I don’t run the risk of contracting black lung, which kills a handful of promising young novelists each year.

you are genious! for reals! this is why i read cat and girl!!!

Cat slamming the door is priceless. A steam boiler wit ha coal firebox? Keen! And the dial type emergency phone on the side is a nice touch.

steampunk cat & girl! you always give me just what i want, dorothy.

Cyberiad FTW! Thank you John Fries!

Steampunk is what happens when goths discover “brown”.

I can’t completely enjoy this strip as apostrophe’s pollution concerns me.

In addition to being amazing, this comic is also noteworthy in that it is one of the few where we can actually see that Girl possesses legs.

Most excellent. I can’t figure out if Girl is attaching the lever to the machine in panel five, or simply moving it with great effort, but I like this fact.

Goddamn I wish it worked like that.

The “Quiet, Novel in Progress” sign is what slew me. This is wonderful in every way.

Reminds me of the fist part of this:
http://dresdencodak.com/wp-content/gallery/stickman/stumptown.jpg

Good god, I haven’t thought about Walter Benjamin since I dropped out of grad school. I guess he’s still dead.

Steampunk? I don’t know if this qualifies… but then everyone has a slightly different definition of the genre.

This cartoon features actual coal, and there are no top hats, monocles or corsets. The goggles are simple and practical rather than elaborate and purely decorative. The machine is practically designed and all the levers have an obvious function. Soon, Girl will die of consumption. None of this says ‘steampunk’ to me.

This is… LiteraryIndustrialRevolutionPunk. Litindrevopunk.

Novel writing has become mechanized? rather than being from a ragged soul?

Love it, love it, love it! I’ve always suspected that this is what university writers’ workshop classes look like.

@Ben JB, yes you got it. Note the settings are leaning towards Prose, Drama, Hemmingway and Hardcover. Hard to tell if she’s shifting toward 1st or 3rd gear, err… I mean 1st or 3rd person narrative.

It occurred to me that I should explain what I meant last night, otherwise my comment is just a bizarre non sequitur. Therefore, see The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by everyone’s second favourite German Jew, Walter Benjamin.

http://www.jahsonic.com/WAAMR.html

Although, just to be a pedantic jerk, this comic itself has little to do with the essay besides the allusive title.

PLEASE make this into a shirt.

I love it when there are many comments.

It works this way because the most of the raw materials that you can find any more are from before 1923.

I know this from experience in the ongoing manufacture of my own novel. Another brill insight, Dorothy.

The Manuel de Landa reference in the title of the comic is great.

Dude it’s a Walter Benjamin reference. See my comment up high. I’m kind of disappointed that apparently no one else has caught this. Benjy’s not that obscure is he?

I’m not well versed in my Marxist theorists which is probably why I didn’t catch it.

@sarapen: dont feel bad. walter benjamin may not be so obscure, but it this is the first ive heard of him and i just took the comic at face value. I think its cool that people like you and the other commenters have so much to say about literature/philosophy here.
ur attitude about walter benjaminis similair to my own about Minus The Bear. i know their a relativly popular band and im always suprised when i meet people whove never heard of them.

personally i like the comics adressing music and pop culture. i have a bit of a crush on Grrl too.

Somewhere between a human and mad libs, there’s got to be some sort of system I could sell to Harlequin romance novelists and Goosebumps series type writers.
25 $ can school an African kid for a year.
I would probaly send the money to infowars, though.

i just realized, a weezer reference is what made me start reading catandgirl.

“if you want to destroy my savior…”

i was in college at the time. i still sing those lyrics. jeez i just got nostalgic.

Cute! Nothing on Hemingway in Benjamin’s collection _Illuminations_, plenty on Proust though.

@P
Obviously her pollution isn’t too much of a problem – your comment shows incontrivertible evidence that the river is suffering from apostrophe deficiency as it is. Girl may be part of a government program to return the river to its proper punctuation balance – I bet she’s getting carbon credits for it.

i love returning to the commenting on here; always brings me out of a depressive slump:)
… i’m off to investigate ‘sandalpunk’ and to read some Jacek Dukaj
Nny: haha, cheers 4 a nod to this one – campfire marshmallows are ‘the business’;)

I think this comic just gave me a flashback to last year’s NaNoWriMo…

This is utterly briliant, I must have a print or a T-Shirt, possibly both.

Love how it’s being written in 2nd person.

And the moral of the story is… modern literature is complete garbage full of only enterntainment and made for mentally challenged teenagers and dumb yuppies.

I would love to post this comic, embedded, with a link back to your site, from my writing magazine.
Won’t do it without permission, so let me know.

Lovely novel-writing comic.