Rockstar and Softboy Present: The Legend of Miaow Miaow

An exclusive short story that showcases the wild fairytale origin of everyone's favorite character

Hey everyone,

Here’s a short story I wrote and drew that had been prepared as handmade zines for a Rockstar and Softboy deluxe bundle on my webstore. This is my favorite thing about making creator-owned comics: I can do whatever the heck I want with the characters, whenever I want! There's no asking for permission or needing to wait out any exclusive periods. All I have to do is make sure my letterer Rus Wooton has time to do an exquisite job on word balloons and titles :)

I was in a weird Disney vault mood when I created the story, most likely because I was reading The Queens of Animation by Nathalia Holt and thus watching all the OG animated movies she was writing about before bed. My approach to Miaow Miaow’s origin was to not dull the darker edges of earlier folktales and fables.

Like so many iconic female protagonists, Miaow Miaow has a pretty traumatic past, but she still gives a DGAF attitude in present day. In an earlier draft of the story, Miaow Miaow was actually a female animator that savvy readers would catch is a fill-in for Lotti Reiniger who finds out that Miaow Miaow is a lot princess captured by the King of Dreams, and she sacrifices her talent to rescue the princess, only to find the princess is super ungrateful and just spends decades in an opium den chilling with her homies. Thank the gods of creativity that I put some random age for Miaow Miaow that didn’t align with the history of animation and I went in a slightly less bleak direction.

Miaow Miaow ended up getting a really fun subplot in the next Rockstar and Softboy book (Rockstar and Softboy Go to Space! Out January from Image Comics, please pre-order xoxo) that similarly took a minute to sort out. At first I thought about sending her to the moon to confront her asshole mom, but there wasn’t much room for that. Maybe in the next one.

At any rate, enjoy the legend of miaow miaow! And special thanks to Isabell Ivy Struble for helping me with the colors on this one :) Let me know if you want more stories paired with tales about where they came from/ how I got there.

Rockstar and Softboy present... the legend of Miaow Miaow!