Liz Watson last did a makeup tutorial for high priestesses of the dark arts.
Meet Cathy Andrews. Cathy is a woman who wants to Have it All! In Cathy’s case, ‘it all’ includes a nose, the Employee of the Year award, and achieving ultimate flesh coalescence with her boyfriend, Irving.
Will Cathy’s head topple off if you remove her trademark heart necklace, a la the classic horror story ‘The Green Ribbon’? We can only hope!
Meet Irving. Testosterone is his only character trait. This is probably why his head looks like it should be sheathed in Durex at all times. His paper-thin soul is so steeped in machismo that when asked to list what is important to him, he can only bleat “Mud wrestling? Carburetor! Fly fishing?” Perhaps Irving once had ambitions and loved ones. If he did, they’re dead now! Only Cathy remains.
Pictured: A thin-lipped glans penis in a cheap suit.
Cathy, sanguine with news of her Employee of the Year nomination, drives Irving’s house to celebrate. At last, she is Having It All! Tragically, she finds Irving also Having It All, driven into the arms of another by the insatiable demands of his PhallusBrain. Blonde and recognizably human, this woman is everything that Cathy is not. The shock is too much for Cathy’s friable body, which begins to melt down in a scene probably taken from David Cronenberg’s dream journal. The walls, sensing Cathy’s distress, manifest rejected visuals from a Moby Grape concert as Cathy’s eyes merge into a single, pink, Jawbreaker that leaks mascara, tears, and other unidentifiable fluids.
The actual dialogue for this scene is just Cathy scream-mumbling “Irving. My mascara. Irving. I can’t see. Irving.” It is as horrible as you imagine.
Cathy’s friend Andrea is determined to for Cathy to get over Irving von Vas Deferens. Recognizing that they live in a Chernobyl Thunderdome where relationships are arcane bloodsport and flesh is currency, battle-weary Andrea faces the world armed with Mace. Here is a partial list of the men Andrea maces throughout the course of the cartoon: A waiter taking their order, two of Cathy’s prospective dates, and a man who attempts to open the door for her (fool of a Took!) At one point, Andrea—brimming with ferocity and lacking a male target—stomps around like a rhino, freely macing the air in a display of dominance.
Andrea is by far the best character on this show.
Look! Cathy is on a rebound date! Instead of ordering food or engaging in conversation, she and her date (sporting a Little Richard mustache and sex offender spectacles) stack carved fish like Lincoln Logs while mentally listing the other’s faults. You know, like you do on dates! Finding that a barrier of fish-Legos is not enough to mask the horror of the other’s company, they destroy their creations and her date departs in disgust. Not a single word is ever exchanged between them. This scene ostensibly takes place in a sushi restaurant, leading me to believe the creators of Cathy have no familiarity with sushi, restaurants, or any aspect of human behavior at all.
Fish-stacking! The latest sensation sweeping absolutely nowhere!
These are Cathy’s co-workers. They move as one, speak as one, think as one. They are like the Rat Kings of legend—once individual organisms, now merged into a unified, miserable corpus. A normal person would be horrified by this parody of life, but poor Cathy yearns so desperately for any kind of human contact that life in the Hive Mind seems a welcome prospect.They scream for Cathy to join them, begging her to find a boyfriend and bring him to the Employee of the Year awards so they can subsume him into their writhing meat mass. Cathy weeps at her desk.
The walls have now adopted the color and texture of cheese pizza, perhaps in an attempt to appease the unhappy Cathy. It does not succeed.
Lacking a human companion, Cathy brings a bag of Irving’s belongings as her date to the Employee of the Year awards. Finally recognizing that Irving is nothing more than an animate, dick-shaped collection of masculine stereotypes, Cathy hopes that an paper sack filled with man-totems will prove an acceptable substitute. (Items the Cathy writers believe provide insight into a guy’s psyche: Red flannel shirts, Springsteen cassettes, a blue necktie.)
Actual dialogue from this scene: “Hold my hand, honey!” Also, note the piece of pie Cathy thoughtfully left for her date, who is unable to eat it on account of being a grocery bag full of dude garbage.
Irving’s uncircumcised skull is drawn by the beacon of boy-goodies to Cathy’s place of power, just in time to see her clinch the Employee of the Year Award! Finally, a win for Cathy! A nose might still be beyond her grasp, but Cathy believes in counting her blessings. As she and Irving whirl endlessly on a single axis (what the Cathy team believes resembles human dancing), their bodies form the centerpiece of her office Rat King, at last part of the flesh-marriage she has long desired. How romantic!
Have you ever seen the movie Society? Kind of like that! (Please never watch Society.)
As a final treat, the only remaining recording of Cathy has this dialogue taped over the credits, playing over charming graphics of Cathy and Irving dancing and laughing. “Later, tonight it’s Cagney and Lacey on their new night! And when Chris is raped by someone she knows, she learns an ugly lesson in reality! Now stay tuned as Jake goes undercover as a hit-man on Jake and the Fatman!”
Cathy and Cagney and Irving and Lacey and Fatman say, “Goodnight!”
Tags: cartoons, cathy, CHOCOLATE CHOCOLATE CHOCOLATE ACK, liz watson, television
At whichever Universal Studios that has the Harry Potter thing in it, there’s also a “comics world” that has a Cathy-themed ice cream stand. It was weird.
What. How can and ice cream stand be Cathy themed? I need details!
They just hand you a tub of rocky road and a spoon, all you can eat for as long as you can keep crying.
I would be pleased if the walls around me were more pizza-like…
I know I say this a lot, but what
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xjGrg14qArc
The weirdness is almost entirely unembellished.
Oh my god. OH MY GOD.
OH MY GOD CATHY IS VOICED BY PEPPER ANN. THIS IS SO STRANGE.
Noooooooo
Pepper Ann was my strong female character growing up. She can’t have turned into Cathy!
I have so many feelings about this. Also a little motion sick from this animation? Why do her eyes when they are crying turn into one eye that morphs into a mouth? It looks like she has two mouths. What is going on with this? How long did this show last? Why is everyone crazy? Sorry so.many.questions.
Also this reminds me of Women and Women First – The Early Years. Before they figured themselves out and opened that nice bookshop.
does Irving’s neck have testicles in that animated clip
I’d never realized before that Cathy Guisewite was the Kafka of the New York social scene.
I have so many feelings about this. Also a little motion sick from this animation? Why do her eyes when they are crying turn into one eye that morphs into a mouth? It looks like she has two mouths. What is going on with this? How long did this show last? Why is everyone crazy? Sorry so.many.questions.
SERIOUSLY I keep staring at that one gif. It’s like a mouth-cyclops.
MOUTHCLOPS.
Ack! Ack!
I can’t believe it took until the tags to hear that word.
This is… monstrous.
Andrea clearly deserves her own spin-off. She could befriend Daria and Jane!
The gif of everyone dancing synchronizes almost poetically with System of a Down’s “War?” which was a completely unintentional gift from the ipod shuffle songs gods.
I have stared into the abyss and the abyss was trying on a swimsuit and eating chocolate.
Sometime in the nineties, I was given a book of Cathy cartoons from, I think, the early eighties, and apparently Cathy started life as something less cloying, and one long story arc was about Cathy getting sexually harassed by her boss and punching him in the face.
I realize this is hardly the point but – why does she take him back?? At least the bag of garbage didn’t cheat on her.
I have vague memories of seeing the fish-stacking scene, somehow. I don’t know when, or why, because none of the rest of it is familiar, but that part . . . I remember the fish stacking.
“a grocery bag full of dude garbage”
Can I make this my twitter bio? Because accuracy.
Permission gleefully given.
Can we talk about Andrea?
Early in the life of the comic strip “Cathy,” Andrea was a strident, bold, straw feminist who didn’t need no man to be happy. She was constantly urging Cathy to stop chasing after dudes, to focus on herself, etc. She departed the strip (job transfer?) and later on contacted Cathy about getting together because she’d moved back. Cathy thought-monologued about Andrea as a way of reminding the readers who she was, ending with “Andrea, who swore she’d never let a man lay a hand on her!” or something similar, and threw open the door… revealing Andrea’s vastly distended, pregnant stomach.
Now, one might argue that a true friend would have mentioned that she got married and pregnant, in passing, but no. It was a big surprise.
Strips focusing on Andrea after that focused on the difficulties of being a career woman and a parent, and eventually she dropped out of the workforce to raise her two kids (Zoe, I think, and I forget the boy’s name) as a stay at home parent. She enjoyed doing it, but sometimes felt bored, and also worried about the example she was setting for her daughter. Would she grow up to see a woman’s place as being solely a caregiver, a wife and mother?
It was, in other words, some pretty honest and meaty stuff for a syndicated comic that normally focused on diets and shoes. Earlier Cathy had a bit more going on, including Cathy’s realization that some of her body image issues were unrealistic and out of control, and hints that she was dealing with both disordered eating and compulsive spending as stress coping mechanisms. As time went on, however, the strips got blander and blander, recycling the same Ack chocolate Ack shoes Ack Irving moments over and over and over, treading water.
I was actually irritated when the strip ended with the reveal that Cathy was pregnant (and in her 40s). An actual real change, something new, something important, and that’s it? Just drop it? The strip treaded water for a decade and as soon as something unusual and unique for Cathy to experience came up the strip ended? I felt cheated.
OMG that Andrea was a shamefully huge part of my early feminist leanings and I was mightily pissed off by her reappearance as a SAHM.
I _think_ she was initially meant to be a screechy bitch, but I found a lot of her world view enticing and marvelous. I didn’t mind the STAHP as much because it lead to some juicy storylines where she questioned herself, her choices, her past, etc. It was a big quandary, and the kind of thing that actual women were (and are!) actually dealing with, and it was something that BOTHERED her.
IIRC, Andrea got the urge to marry and have a baby by standing too close to a microwave….
Petition to reboot, rename the feminist friend character Mallory.
Liz Watson, I can’t thank you enough for having a brain that would put all this together exactly this way. It’s joy.
This was the best thing I’ve ever read. Thank you for your sacrifice–your sanity may have melted away into the pizza walls but it will not be forgotten. *salute*
I had no idea this was a thing, now I’m silently laugh-crying at my desk.
Also, Cathy / Andrea for next Femslash Friday, amirite?
I had no idea this was a thing, now I'm silently laugh-crying at my desk.
Also, Cathy / Andrea for next Femslash Friday, amirite?
What is that sushi scene? WHAT??
MOUTHCLOPS.