Kat Johnston

Tag: rats

  • Sketch: Yarrr! Oarsome is on the scene.

    Kat Johnston Cartoon: Oarsome the pirate cat is here on the scene! You think your cat is tough? This dude can take em. Can take em with one eye and a peg-leg to boot.

    Ok, so this picture isn’t strictly for Zombie Annihilation: A Jimminy Jonestown Story… or whatever it should happen to be named… Even if he would be a fantastic addition to the cast. But just in case he should make an appearance… here’s the scoop.

    Oarsome is the picture-perfect definition of tough. He lost his eye in the first wave of Zompocalypse to an enterprising although very deceased rat. As I have always stated, the first to fall to zombieism will be the rats. Let’s face it – scientists don’t move immediately to human testing for stuff now, do they? Oh no. I think not.

    They test things out on rats.

    That’s right… first the rats – then the humans. Rats carried the plague around on their backs, they can damn-well carry zombieism to the masses as well.

    Oarsome has developed some sort of immunity through, it seems. Perhaps it is the dozens of little scratches he gained while battling with the legions of undead sewer rats… or the fact that he was willing to lose an eye rather than have one of them make it to his brains for a tasty rodent meal. Hell, for all he (or anyone else) knows, all cats might be immune to it – infections don’t necessarily spread across species.

    No-one has really looked into it to find out. Who has time when you’re trying to dodge and weave through an urban battleground littered with corpses… some of which are chasing after you?

    Anyhow, onto the real story.

    It just so happens that a friend picked up a gorgeous little fellow called Orson from the Animal Welfare League, a wonderful animal rehoming shelter with an amazing dedication to ensuring that the right animal goes home with the right person.

    It was love at first sight. She popped into the pen to see if he was the right cat for her, made a direct bee-line towards him – he greeted her with a rather hearty, ‘Meow!’ and started purring soon after. What a pair they will make together!

  • Sketch and Update: A tiny companion.

    Kat Johnston Art: A tiny rat companion sits inside a keyhole within the chest of a most delicate dame.

    Ahhhh, more of the same… can you tell that I am enjoying this? They’re beautiful, delicate, distinguished and ever so intriguing, don’t you think?

    So anyhow… I’ve finally gotten around to sorting out my things on Flickr so that all of my blog drawings (if not all of the blog photos, for certain reasons) are up. I’ve sorted them out, and there’s even a special category for the creative commons licensed photos so that you can just click on that to get them all at once, rather than having to find them one at a time scattered across the different sets.

    All thrown in together, it all seems rather random: sketches here, cooking there, some pictures of dandelions and other such things. Hopefully the collections and sets will help it seem a touch more structured!

    So yes… check out my Flickr page and explore the sets to see what you can see!

  • Sketch: Zompocalypse and You.

    Kat Johnston Sketch: Zombie lab rats… it’s really just a matter of time now, isn’t it?

    The other day I sat around playing a nice little game with a group of friends… it was called Zombies. The basic premise of the game is this: you (and a selection of your closest friends) are in need of a certain helipad from which to escape the encroaching zombie hoard. Rather than team up and fight the zombies in a concerted effort towards mutual survival, you are instead pitted against each other in a great game of ‘who can screw the other over the most in order to win’. It is, in short, a very amusing little game. Especially when you play a card to cover the entire board in slow-moving, grouchy, brain-eating zombies.

    Now it also just so happens that I’ve had quite a bit of zombie exposure over the past couple of weeks, and not just from blockbuster hits like Zombieland. There was the kitten zombie apocalypse in an adorable short animated video, my husband’s maniacal laughter as he’s plowed through zombie nazis in Call of Duty, and even an alternative reality in which a universe had all but been destroyed by zombies (save for one dottering priest) in a quirky and fantastic little adventure game, Ben There, Dan That made by, funnily enough, Zombie Cow Studios. Hell, I even went to our little Halloween get-together not that long ago as a zombie cat in a box with a bit of radioactive isotope – a bit of a quirky take on a little Schrodinger experiment, since I was both seemingly alive and dead at the same time.

    Now this got me thinking. Zombies have gotta start somewhere, right? Right? Let’s assume, as most movies do, that the scientists are to blame. Scientists are really the cause of most of our problems in these wonderful movies – they seem to have no end of joy in creating mutants, killer robots and other assorted menacing things… including the biochemical weapons/diseases, etc, that I so often see as the ‘origin’ of these zombie-related outbreaks. The moral is always pretty simple: one day the humans will poke too far in the realms of science, unleashes the end and we all die.

    Pip pip, tally-ho, let’s all try to escape while we can, shall we?

    Well that got me thinking. Scientists (at least not the incredibly over-the-top laughing-maniacally-while-experimenting-without-pants mad type) generally test their things on animals before they test things out on human subjects – and they seem to do so quite often on rats. Well… rats, mice, and other assorted animals, but we’ll focus on the rats for now.

    Why are there no movies about super awesome zombie-rats? You’d think that in all the scientific testing one would do on a killer biochemical weapon, you’d give it a go on the lab rats first, right? I know, I know – they’re in their cages, they can’t escape, <insert other perfectly logical explanations here>, and all that rot. I don’t care. These are zombie-rats, after all. They’re smart, they have a taste for brains, and they’d find a way out to plague the world with scurrying, brain-eating goodness.

    Perhaps the problem is that the moment one nipped at a human, they’d likely become a zombie too,thus stealing the thunder of a zombie-rat based movie… since it would then become a zombie-rat and regular ole human-zombie based movie from there on in. Unless, of course, the zombie-rats had some sort of zombie-brain-control over the human zombies, and kept them as minions. That, ladies and gentlemen, would be cool. They could have little zombie-rat wars, making the humans run around and smack each other with the dismembered limbs of their foes (a joke about ‘stop hitting yourself’ comes to mind right now), until one gigantic Rat King controlled all, and humanity bowed to the superior force that is ratdom.

    Cue the black screen, roll the credits, throw in an obligatory note on how animal testing is wrong, and that no humans were actually harmed in the making of the film, and I think we’d have a blockbuster on our hands.

    Hollywood, here I come.