Laugh-Out-Loud Cats

I'll admit that I was mildly annoyed by the whole LOLCats meme. I don't say I didn't get it; I did, I just felt it overdone after a while and couldn't be bothered to pay attention to yet another photo with funnilz missspelt all-caps would-be-jokes superimposed on them.

Until Ape Lad created something wonderful out of it.

Ape Lad, or Adam Koford is an illustrator maybe best known for his graphical interpretation of various hobos from John Hodgman's book "Areas of My Expertise", but I think that soon he'll be referred to primarily as "the guy who created Laugh-Out-Loud Cats".

So, what is it he did with the LOLCats phenomenon? He created a 1920-style cartoon featuring two vagabond cats, as he himself says "one Meowlin Q. Kitteh (a sort of cat hobo-raconteur) and his young hapless kitten friend, Pip". These cartoons are produced traditionally, pen-and-paper, and have an incredibly authentically-feeling atmosphere of the '20s, plus a fantastic chemistry resulting from mixture of innocence, mischief, and cuteness overload in the characters. Just click on the image to the left for the gallery -- it's all available for free viewing on his Flickr account, and I'm looking at its RSS feed with most anticipation every morning for updates (and I'm seldom disappointed, because the guy is really prolific)!

Of course, you might as well check out his other fine works, like his graphical interpretations of various HTTP error codes (to the left, you can see "415 Unsupported Media Type").