A cat defeated by Mickey Mouse, a robot cat from the future, a thriller cat, a porn cat, and a transgender cat. The comic universe is a space populated by pornographic cats, robot cats, and sadistic and obscene cats that often opened the way for that species to the world of the audiovisual industry and merchandising.

This is my top five in comic cats!

Doraemon

Doraemon is a very particular cat, a cat imagined by oriental minds. Doraemon is not peculiar because it is blue, nor because it lacks ears that were eaten by a mouse from the future, nor because it is a manga cat, nor even because it is a robot. Doraemon is the protagonist of a singular story: a mechanical cat sent to the present from the future by a descendant of Nobita Nobi, a skinny and snub-nosed nine-year-old boy.

Resembling a marsupial, Doraemon has a pouch in his belly from which he pulls out all the nonsense he needs to help Nobita, who gets into trouble anyway.

Doraemon was born in 1969 from the pen of Fujiko Fujio, the pseudonym of two inseparable manga artists: Hiroshi Fujimoto and Motoo Abiko. Together, they had previously worked on several projects, but their success came in 1970, with the birth of Doraemon.

Alongside the protagonist cat, there also appear the boy Nobita Nobi, his understanding mother, his friend Shizuki, the bully Takeshi, and the goofy Tsuneo.

Doraemon is considered a reference in Japanese popular culture, a character whose popularity in manga is perhaps only surpassed by Goku.

Motoo Abiko died in 1988 and Hiroshi Fujimoto in 1996; neither could see the enormous success of his robot cat, which also inspired a television series, a sequel of more than 900 episodes, some thirty films, and even a thematic museum in the Japanese city of Kawasaki.

Blacksad

Qualified as a masterpiece and one of the most important contemporary European graphic novels, Blacksad is a detective series whose protagonist is a big black cat named John Blacksad.

The private detective moves, throughout five volumes, in an anthropomorphic animal world that reproduces many scenarios and situations of the United States in the 50s:

The Cold War and McCarthyism also address current issues, such as white-collar corruption or the structural racism of that country.

This work was first published in France in 2000, but its authors are Spanish: Juan Díaz Canales, writing, and Juanjo Guarnido, drawing. It has already won a couple of Eisner Awards, considered the Oscars of comics.

Both do an exceptional job, both for the plot and for the powerful watercolor strokes, the complex scenery, and the atmosphere of the sequences.

Also notable are the cinematographic framing and the intelligent handling of color, and animal stereotypes that find a characterological niche according to their evolutionary place or to some temperamental characteristic.

Thus, the bad guys are usually reptiles, the policemen are canids, and the bodyguards are bears or rhinoceroses.

Blacksad adopts the characteristics of the hard-boiled, or crime novel.

Classic authors of the genre, such as Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett, established the basic structure of these works. A classic representation of the private detective and his world was consecrated very early on the cinema screens during the forties; the visual narrative included crime, corruption, mystery, violence, romance, and, of course, dead bodies.

If the universe of Blacksad reminds us of Disney's style and also surprises us with its exquisite cinematographic shots, it is because the cartoonist, Juanjo Guarnido, worked for the Disney studios in France as a designer and animator.

His hand can be seen, for example, in Hercules and The Hunchback of Notre Dame and in the character of Sabor, the jaguar antagonist of Tarzan, which is one of his most recognized works.

Somewhere in the Shadows, Arctic Nation, Red Soul, Silent Hell, and Amarillo are works that crime novel lovers, comic book lovers, and cat lovers should read.

Felix the Cat

The arch-famous Felix the Cat belongs to a tribe of proto-felines, or rather proto-animals, generically called “Funny Animals,” which began to evolve in the print media from the 1920s onwards.

Among these pioneer critters of audiovisual narration were Felix the Cat, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, Krazy Kat, and Mickey Mouse himself.

Felix was born under the auspices of Australian animator Pat Sullivan's studio, which held the copyright; however, it is known that many of Felix's attributes came from the pen of Otto Messmer. The paternity, therefore, of the charismatic cat with lively eyes, a huge smile, and a multipurpose tail is controversial.

It was not until Sullivan's death that Messmer's authorial work was claimed; however, it is probable that the birth of Felix was influenced by both artists, as seems to be demonstrated by the evolution undergone by the character since the short film “Feline Follies,” distributed by Paramount, when Felix was not even called Felix.

In 1919, he made his first appearance in an animated series under the name “The Adventures of Felix.”

Contrary to the path taken by other characters, Felix was originally created to be an animated character during the time of silent movies.

His debut as a Sunday newspaper strip was in 1923, becoming the first character to jump from animation to comics.

With a more fluffy and friendly curvaceous design created by Bill Nolan. Felix was already the protagonist of a daily strip by 1925. Joe Oriolo, the creator of Casper, the friendly ghost, was an outstanding collaborator in the making of the Felix newspaper strips, and it is worth mentioning that with William O'Sullivan, Pat Sullivan's nephew, he embarked on new audiovisual paths in 1958.

But to talk about Felix's transit through the television and cinema is sometimes to talk about tortuous histories of aborted successes.

In 1943, Messmer drew a bimonthly version of Felix for Dell Comics.

The strip in the press, the comic, and the animations gave Felix great popularity; the cat was adopted as a pop culture icon and mascot for automotive businesses, baseball teams, and even a bomber squadron.

However, one of the hurdles that Felix found difficult to overcome was the transition to sound films. Faced with works such as Steamboat Willie, the Disney work that marked the debut of Mickey Mouse on the screen and that was a showcase for sound resources, Sullivan, reluctantly, too, decided to venture into the field, giving voice to Felix.

Unfortunately for Felix, the results of such an adventure were uneven; it seems that he did very sloppy things, such as removing the signs from the silent shorts and replacing them with sound. The public became aware of the shoddiness of the affair at a time when the Disney empire was beginning to conquer the industry.

Felix the Cat became an icon, not a star like Mickey Mouse.

His inability to compete for the audience's preferences in the face of new creative and technical solutions made the tragic and popular feline destiny come true again: a mouse makes a cat bite the dust.

It seems that Felix's last appearance in a comic book, or one of the last, was from 1984 to 1987, as co-star of Betty Boop.

Fritz the Cat

While the adventures of some of the cats on this list take place in surreal or poetic worlds, Fritz the Cat lives in a mundane and scatological environment.

After Mr. Natural, Fritz the Cat is the most famous character of the father of the American underground, Robert Crumb.

The birth of the critter, according to the author, was inspired by Fred, a family cat who was himself the protagonist of an early “handmade” book called Cat Life, when Crumb was only 16 years old.

In honor of his father, Crumb, Fritz, like his predecessor Fred, has as his leitmotifs the unraveling, drugs, and sex, not precisely in that order.

Fritz was born in 1965, in the pages of magazines associated with the underground environment, such as Help, Cavalier, and The People's Comic.

In spite of not having been the character of a serialized story, Fritz soon gained popularity by portraying the carefree American urban life of the sixties and seventies. Crumb originally captured in this cat the feline character always associated with his kind: a lubricious, hedonistic character, and combined it with drug experimentation, the hippy movement, free love, and scenes of extreme violence.

A separate chapter would deserve the rocky history of its 1972 film adaptation, but suffice it to say that Crumb had many disagreements with this adaptation, despite the fact that the film eventually became the most successful independent animated film of all time.

Crumb discontinued the strip in 1972 due to disagreements with the film's producer, Ralph Bakshi.

In the pages of The People's Comic, as if wanting revenge for Fritz's popularity on the screen, which Crumb did not like, he draws, in a story entitled Fritz, the Cat Superstar, a long-legged ostrich that treacherously sticks an ice pick in the back of Fritz's head.

Krazy Kat

Krazy Kat is the fortunate creation of George Herriman, a man of Black roots born in New Orleans in 1880.

One of the greatest characters in the world history of comics, Krazy Kat, appeared for the first time in 1910, in the “Evening Journal,” to fill space in a strip called “The Dingbat Family.” Therefore, according to its author, Krazy Kat was never born, only grew up.

Krazy Kat, or Krazy, did not have his daily strip for himself and his friends until 1913, and three years later, in 1916, he conquered a whole page of a Sunday supplement.

Lasted until 1944 in several American newspapers with the King Features Syndicate and in William Randolph Hearst's newspapers.

George Herriman's work has as its primary protagonists a plucky mouse named Ignatz, a cheeky dog, Officer Bull Pupp, and, of course, a carefree and rather naïve black cat, Krazy Kat.

The classic plot of the strip depicts Ignatz obsessed with throwing bricks at Krazy, who has no defined gender and, in love with the mouse, interpreting every throw as a declaration of love. Meanwhile, Bull Pupp, the official dog, also in love with Krazy, tries to keep the mouse at bay by putting him in jail in an imaginary town called Coconino City.

This plot is much more than a comedy of misunderstandings that seems trivial or repetitive.

Krazy Kat has been considered by many a masterpiece; in 1999, the Comics Journal called it the best comic book of the 20th century, for example.

But why? What is behind Krazy Kat, a story that seems to tell us only about a masochistic transgender cat?

Krazy Kat is not only amazing for its graphic design, for a poetics of seemingly simple strokes that reveal a complex beauty when contemplated in its entirety:

Bewildering, vast desert landscapes with brief urban evocations and potato chip moons; terracotta rocky mountains that portray the Monument Valley of the Navajo territory; landscapes that, before being seen in John Ford's films, had already been experienced by Krazy Kat, Ignatz, the Official Bull Pupp, and other fellas.

But beneath Krazy's adventures, there is also another narrative, a metalanguage that moves along with an apparently monotonous story.

George Herriman takes time to address themes such as racism, Blackness, and freedom.

All these arguments, unlike other authors, pass through the filter of linguistic and graphic formulas that speak to us of deep personal introspection. Putting a playful language in the mouths of his characters, Herriman uses vernacular terms, sometimes incomprehensible, of the cultural minorities, making implicit the existence of an inclusive world in Coconino City.

And perhaps the most outstanding and subtly subversive aspect is the generic indefiniteness of Krazy Kat.

Herriman was well aware of the annoyance caused by the sexual ambivalence of his character among some readers or columnists, who even wrote him letters asking for clarification. Herriman was amused by this ambiguity, and in his strips, from the early 20th century, it should not be forgotten, he always managed to connect Krazy's double gender in some way to spontaneity and free will.

Herriman has been described as an author ahead of his time, an artist who gave voice to a character with a binary identity and exposed him to the gaze of the general public at a time when these issues were still far from the mass media and from the debate about rights and equity.

Perhaps it was Herriman's philosophical complexity and uncommon poetry that distanced him from the preferences of the general public, and at the same time was an inspiration not only for other comic greats like Schulz, Eisner, Spiegelman, or Bill Watterson, but also for writers and painters like T. S. Eliot and Edward Cummings.

The life and miracles of Krazy Kat are worth revisiting with the eyes and a more open mind of a new reader in the 21st century.