Awesome Kitty Kingdom: Chapter 1, Pages 1-2 Posted

I've uploaded the first couple of pages to "Awesome Kitty Kingdom" to the Picasa web albums site. I'll be updating every week on Monday going forward.

I'll also be publishing other works such as cards and sketches I've put together. Right now, I have a Christmas card from 2008 up for perusal.

I should give a little background on Awesome Kitty Kingdom, where this story comes from, and how it came to be. The story idea came to me back in college at Northern Arizona University perhaps sometime around 1994 (long time ago!). I had been exposed to Japanese animation and manga (comics) from my roommate at the time. I started playing around with my own characters as something of a joke. Ranma 1/2 was pretty popular back then, so I thought of a character that similarly changed into another form, except in my case, not due to water. I don't want to give too much away for first time readers so I won't go into details at this point.

I was just starting to learn Japanese when I started designing Awesome Kitty Kingdom. As such, I played around a bit with the last name. Similar to Ranma 1/2, another anime that was big at the time was "Vampire Princess Miyu". In Japanese, the title is kyuuketsuki miyu (吸血姫 美夕). For some reason, when I came up with the main character's name, I wanted to "rhyme" it with kyuuketsuki miyu. I came up with "Kyuu-katsu-ke Myu-ryu". The first name is complete mumbo-jumbo (although I tried to dig up kanji to fit it). The last name actually had a bit of meaning: Kyuu is Japanese for 9. Katsu is "Cats" said with a Japanese pronunciation. "Ke" uses the kanji for "house" (家). This gave the name "house of nine cats".

If this strikes you as a little arbitrary and silly, well, it really is. The thing of it is, I never intended for the characters or story to go any where -- this was just something fun I did in my dorm room on a weekend. However, as it happened, once I had created the story, I ended up liking the story so much that I kept creating this whole universe and, before you know it, I had something that I really wanted to draw. I guess the lesson learned is "be careful what you name something".

I've since made some changes to character names but there's still a lot of DNA from that one day back in college rolled up into the story.