Morning Kibbles, Noon Bits

The choice to switch Hellcat’s costume colors so the blue was predominant was mine–I thought, especially as a headliner, she’d look better that way. And virtually nobody liked this outfit, and it was discarded the next time the character made an appearance. So lesson two is that, as an editor, your ideas may not be any better than anybody else’s, so be careful not to fall in love with your own inspiration.

The cool thing is, writing the episode meant I got to head out to Vancouver to the shoot. When I arrived at the main show office, a revision of the script was waiting for me. A few things had been taken out and moved around… and this is normal. I met with the whole crew while I was there, went out daily with the director, Paul Ziller, and the heads of the art department, Paul McCulloch and Rudi Grant. Also along for the ride was the producer of the show, Richard Bullock, Abraham Fraser and a few more people I’m forgetting. We scouted locations, hit Starbucks like clockwork, and Paul, Matt Hastings and I did the casting for the episode the first week. I had a blast working with such cool people and watching so many excellent actors try out for the smaller parts. I think when you watch the episode you’ll understand why these people were picked. All did a great job.

The striking thing about lolcats–besides its amazing fecundity and variety and the fact that, unlike a lot of Internet cat humor, it’s actually pretty funny–is how little else like it there is online right now. The great, weird Internet meme, which once thundered across the Net in vast herds, is becoming surprisingly scarce, which may be why lolcats has a distinctly old-school, early 1990s, Usenet feel to it. It’s not based on a Saturday Night Live sketch, and nobody’s using it to get famous or sell anything. Yet.

“At Entertainment Weekly, I pushed them to cover comics on a regular basis. … In the process of starting that up, I met a lot of people in comics,” he said. “Every time they would say, ‘Hey, you’re a pretty decent writer, ever think of writing comics?’ I’d say, just every day since I was 12,” he added. The writer said things like paying the mortgage and having children caused him to postpone making the leap to comics. “I thought, I’m either going to go quietly into grown-uphood or make one last grasp for the brass ring,” he said, explaining his motivation.