Mean Cat (Steve Lafler, 1981).
This 24-page, magazine-sized, black and white comic is Steve Lafler’s second publication, as per his introduction on the first page. Our titular aggressive feline is featured in a couple of stories within…here he is in action:
…though half of the book is devoted to other characters and features, such as “Angry Young Carrot,” “Crazy Eddie,” and “Naked Avenger,” as well as a page of poems by Steve Beaupre.
I spent a lot of the eighties and the early nineties being a Steve Lafler completist, or at least as best as I was able. I think I’m still missing a couple of the Dog Boy comics he published under his Cat Head imprint, but I’ve got his short-run and one-shot books like Femme Noire and Out the Next and a complete run of his Buzzard magazine, and so on. When Bughouse came out in the mid 1990s, it didn’t really do anything for me and, for whatever reason, I just sort of fell out of following his work after that. But I still have fond memories of getting big laffs from Dog Boy and Benb and his other crazy comics, so thank you for that, Mr. Lafler. And the man is still producing plenty of comics, which you can learn about at his official website.
This copy of Mean Cat turned up in a very large collection we acquired at the shop in the late ’80s, from a collector who didn’t do very much to protect his comics from the elements. For example, by not bothering to invest a couple of bucks in some comic bags, his entire run of Iron Man had a half-inch of water damage at the bottom of each issue. You can probably see the water spotting in my scan above, though the paper of the cover is heavily tanned as well, particularly on the inside. There was a copy of Guts (another early Lafler book) in this collection, but seeing as then-coworker Rob was also a Lafler fan, he and I split the acquisitions and he took the Guts, and I took this goodie. (Come to think of it, Rob’s kind of been out of the comics world for a while…I wonder if I can get it back from him? If he even still has it.) (This is a terribly selfish geek-thing to think, by the way.)
I’ll be taking another weekend break from my journey through my collection, but I’ll be picking up again on Monday if nobody objects or shows up on my doorstep with rakes and torches. Thank you all for reading and, hopefully, enjoying my show-and-tell.
