Breaking Cat News: Cats Reporting on the News That
Matters to Cats. By Georgia Dunn. Andrews McMeel. $12.99.
Lupin Leaps In: A “Breaking Cat News” Adventure. By Georgia Dunn. Andrews
McMeel. $9.99.
Imagine the unimaginable: think about
giving cats microphones, an anchor desk and their very own news broadcasts.
Then imagine what they would report on, and how. In Georgia Dunn’s words and
art, the whole notion becomes, well, unimaginably funny. And when you think
about it, it actually makes a weird kind of sense. After all, we humans report
on news that matters to humans, don’t we? You will rarely see a story about,
say, a wildebeest’s view of the predator-prey relationship. Our stories relate
to us, so of course cat news stories would relate to cats – involving humans
only incidentally (which is essentially how everything about cats relates to
people: only incidentally).
Anyone who lives with cats, and most
people who don’t live with them and are pretty sure they know why they don’t,
will find Breaking Cat News
delightful. Dunn simply takes everyday occurrences in a straightforward human-family
setting and has three cats – Lupin, Elvis and Puck – narrate them from a feline
viewpoint. In the first book, for example, it is obvious that the cooking of
bacon is a major event, bringing all
three cats to the kitchen to climb all over everything and question “the Woman”
about what she is doing and whether she needs “someone to eat all the bacon.” Actually,
having all three cats at the site of a story is unusual, because Lupin usually
serves as Breaking Cat News anchor, with Puck and Elvis handling field
reporting. But this is, after all, bacon,
so all bets are off. Continuing the coverage of what is really important, the
cats report that when the couch is moved one day, “amid a pile of worthless
people junk, many priceless cat toys – thought lost forever – are being
unearthed.” And speaking of the couch, when “the Man” naps on it, “under the
fuzzy blanket,” the cats promise that they will “be covering this story closely
all afternoon,” which they mean literally: the three climb onto the blanket as
the man remains asleep, and they take peaceful, extended cat naps on top of the
blanket covering him, while wearing their news-reporter clothing (jackets and
ties), their cat-sized microphones cast carelessly aside in the name of
relaxation.
The point of all this is that, whatever
else they may be – reporters, news anchors, explorers of the house and its environs
– they are first and foremost cats.
And what Dunn does so well is to have them retain catlike ideas and
personalities even while assuming the very human jobs of broadcast journalists.
This probably works as well as it does because Breaking Cat News is so closely based on Dunn’s own
human-and-feline family – even the cartoon cats’ names are identical to those
of Dunn’s real-life cat companions. It is obvious that Dunn has really lived
through scenes such as the one in which the cats panic because “the vacuum is
out,” with Lupin hiding behind the anchor desk, Elvis pressing tightly against
“the Woman,” and Puck announcing, “I’m live under the bed and I’m not coming
out.” Yes, the cats’ outfits are exaggerations, but the whole setup seems just
like what cats would do in the way of
news if they could.
The second book, Lupin Leaps In, offers more of the same with even better art. For
example, Lupin offers to “gently high five” the man’s face to encourage him as
he is “practicing [his] pouncing” (which is what push-ups look like to cats). And
in an extended series – the stories are usually short, so this one is an
exception – Elvis decides to investigate the outdoors while it is snowing, gets
lost, and is rescued by Tommy, a stray cat who initially appeared in the first
book (wanting to get into the house) and who turns out to be lost and to have
people of his own. The way Elvis eventually comes home and then helps Tommy
reunite with his people is just the
sort of heartwarming story that fits the Christmastime setting of this tale
perfectly. This is also a book in which babies become a bigger part of the
cats’ lives (well, and the people’s lives, too). The birth of a child near the
end of the first book provokes the expected feline response: “It’s going to eat
all our food and no one will ever love us again.” But things are going somewhat
better than that in the second book, at least until “the baby is mobile!” Then
the cats have trouble figuring things out: “How is he so fast? He’s like a tiny
cheetah!” They also have difficulty understanding every “people holiday” they
encounter – and no wonder, since their people keep dressing them up in costumes
that look hilarious but are distinctly un-catlike. For instance, Elvis wears a
shirt for St. Patrick’s Day that says “Kiss Me, I’m Irish,” but his comment to “the
Woman,” who put the shirt on him, is “Don’t touch me. I’m Siamese.” By the end
of the second book, major things have happened. The cats have had a
laundry-room encounter with “the ceiling cats,” who live upstairs and speak
Spanish – this is another extended sequence, and one in which the
misunderstandings are distinctly feline and entirely appropriate. And there is
a second human baby in the family by
this book’s end – this time, a girl, with whom Elvis (who did not think much of
the first baby) falls immediately and completely in love, declaring, “This baby
is perfect and I’ll never let anything happen to her.” Human-protecting
instincts in cats? Well, yes – they may not be strongly in evidence most of the
time, but they are certainly there under some circumstances. Clearly Dunn is
well aware of this, and makes sure that readers of Breaking Cat News are aware of it, too. It is all good, clean fun –
except when things get messy, of course, as they often do when cats are around.
The cleverness of Dunn’s plotting and drawing will have readers hoping for much
more of Lupin, Puck and Elvis in the future. And that’s the way it is.
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