I like that girl clearly had no time to pay for that leaf.

Folk rock.

Every time I think Girl might be as bitter and cynical as I am, Grrl pops up with an even more negative tone. Grrl needs to hug a puppy (or Dog — what ever happened to Dog?).

As for produce, even the vegetables at supermarkets look gross and unappetizing. Perfection comes right off the vine, because, let’s face it, that tastes delicious.

i’d like to see a comic or something where icarus takes a bus and it somehow gets to close to the sun and it melts and icarus is all ‘god dammit’

Dog is dead. And Girl got his flowers.

I second the demand for this comic, which should be titled “Icarus Takes The Bus.”

Icarus is the bus.

Grrl’s clearly having a bad day, and spoiling for a fight. She was mad before the first frame! Girl, on the other hand, is unusually mellow today.

Actually, the Girl/Grrl interaction today is very like two distinct personalities or more properly personality types. Today Grrl is more
in the Guardian/Rational quadrant (for instance by distinguishing factory-made things so… definitely), and Girl more toward Artisian/Idealist (obliquely teasing out Grrl’s …grrlishness, yet somehow or other avoiding anything like open disagreement).

“Handmade” carrots aren’t as big or as consistent as supermarket vegetables, but they’re better in other ways, and (I think) a heckuva lot better than either could achieve fifty years ago. Both types of growers reach for perfection, but they’re starting from different places.

OK, I just realized that there’s a cash register in the second panel.

I’d still like to imagine that Girl is a shoplifter.

Man, I wish that I had Jes’ kale.

Seen this before somewhere… Oh yeah, Nietzsche, “Beyond Good and Evil”.

Ooh, is that too spoilery? :-)

GUYS. STOP BEING SO SMART.

No, but seriously, I learn far too much just from reading “Cat and Girl” and all the comments. It’s like I’m auditing philosophy classes (except, you know, without all the jerks). Sweet.

And as for the shop, is it “Jes’ Kale”, like “Just Kale”, but with some kind of accent so it sounds like “Jes'”, or is it “Jes’ Kale”, like “Someone-Named-Jes-Possesses-Kale”?

I’ve got to agree with Krimson. The comics are great, of course, but I also check back to old comics sometimes just to check out what comments have accumulated since I read it last. There are always at least a couple that make me think, or make me look up something interesting.

All in all, the discourse is far more intelligent, and far less sneering than, for instance, the I-was-quite-good-at-maths-in-high-school-and-people-picked-on-me lot who tend to surface on XKCD to congratulate themselves for understanding the comic, who always make me slightly dislike the comic by association.

Particularly because I’ve never heard of half the things Dorothy talks about (Lasagna aside, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” led to possibly the most interesting learning experience upon which an anthropomorphic cat has ever sent me)I appreciate a comments section where people explain the references, and then get down to a good, honest exchange of ideas. I’m rambling but, in short, I love you guys.

DOG IS DEAD?!

Dog just moved to the big city. He gets to chase buses all day and has block after block of alleys full of garbage cans to rummage through at night, and there are plenty of vents to hang out near in the wintertime. And fire hydrants everywhere, He’s so happy there!

Wait, I always sort of assumed Cat and Girl was set in New York. (Sure, Cat and Girl have been all over the place, but Boy doesn’t seem like much of a traveller.)

Where’s the “big city” from there?

I like to replace ‘vegetables’ with all sorts of things, like ‘comics’ for instance.

The comic community where I live revels in the kind of quality you’d expect from a bored kid in high school. Drawn with biro, left untouched by computer software, dialogue that gets more squashed towards the end of the speech bubble, photocopied and stapled together to be sold to other comic creators at the back of a local comic book store. Maybe some glitter and a piece of fabric sewn into the cover to celebrate handmade creativity.

And then they sit around and pat each other on the back and discuss how they were inspired by avant-garde film. This is not just conjecture either – I have seen it happen. They even have little award ceremonies to celebrate themselves every year.

“This years award for fresh new produce goes to… the brown-edged watercress with a dead beetle on it!”

It’s an interesting question: how many people are in the audience for both Cat and Girl and XKCD?

I love XKCD, but I love Cat and Girl a lot more.

I also vote for Icarus Bus. Everyone get on the Icarus Bus!

Severn:

I think the big city is Manhattan, as viewed from Brooklyn.

It’s like when you get the family dog put down and you tell the kids you took him to a farm, except in C&Girl-verse.

NNY:
I think you just won the internets.

BenK:
I love both xkcd and cat & girl.
But I’m a philosophy/literature grad’ who writes SQL for a living, so whilst I now wish to construct a Venn diagram I probably shouldn’t be considered representative of anything.

Battle perfection with incompetence!

I wonder if Friday comics are typically more heavily commented than Monday comics.

Pfft. Produce is *NEVER* real.

None of these plants ever existed in the wild. They’re cultivars that are in most cases not even recognizable as their wild ancestors.

(You can tell how unusual human food is by how fast a garden will be ravaged by local wildlife if you don’t take active steps to protect it.)

Just to provide a bigger sample for the data set: I read Cat and Girl religiously, but have no idea what XKCD is. Though I am going to check it out now and perhaps move into the overlap part of the Venn diagram.

OH GOD DID SOMEONE SAY WALTER BENJAMIN AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

I think you’re missing the point. It’s not about progress being anti humanist, its that the pesticides and g.m. techniques are bad for your long term health. As soon as those techniques progress to the point that they’re better for you, I’ll stop worrying.

All humans got as close

I’d like a couple of good storytellers to look at the Icaraus story from Dedalus’ point of view – trapped by a paranoid king, works out a clever method to get self and offspring the hell out of Minos, daring escape, and loses his only son because the dumb kid wouldn’t pay attention…