Litterbox Comics and self-imposed misery in domestic life

Take it from me, a guy who doesn't have kids: these cat-parents suck.

Media about nuclear families is incredibly difficult for me to understand. The core of my repulsion towards media starring a “family unit” comes from characters treating their family as an immutable necessity. If a character says anything to the extent of “We have to stick together, we’re a family!” I know I’m dealing with an alien species.

This “families stick together” sentimentality is only second place in shittiness to the classic “I only did (bad thing) to PROTECT YOU!” For Fuck’s sake, just talk to your kid.

In either instance, I can only roll my eyes when this type of character conflict comes up. Because the truth is, you do not have to do anything, ever. You didn’t have to lie to your kid, and your family sure as shit doesn’t “need” to stick together. To cite the profound wisdom of an image macro: if it sucks, hit da bricks.

And since my family sucked, that’s what I did as a kid: I packed my child-sized bindle and skeedadled. This probably sounds more dramatic than it actually is, mostly because I’m exaggerating for the sake of comedy (first of all, it was a teenager-sized bindle). But whatever, I don’t want to go into detail.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. If you are reading this, you, yes YOU, are one of my dearest friends and I love you and sure, I’ll give you a ride to the airport. But you’re all about a level 4 on the friendship level, and level 7’s when you unlock my tragic backstory. I’m not here to get too deep about my personal history (we’re here to talk about comics, not my own personal bullshit). But anyway, you should know my family is Very Uncool.

The family unit, this constant part of culture (or whenever villages stopped raising children, I don’t know, it’s been a hot minute since I read Guns Germs and Steel) - I just straight up don’t vibe with it. Writers keep putting the “families stick together” trope in their story because it’s a shortcut to making it relatable- well maybe “shortcut” isn’t the right word, after all, most well-adjusted members of society are going to agree with this sentiment. And I know that my resistance makes me the asshole.

If you give me the classic children’s book “Guess how much I love you” I’ll use it to wipe my ass, like Shrek did in his first movie. At this point in my life, I’m in the “All Star,” musical opener, happily farting up my bachelor pad and eating gruel all day. But even Shrek grew up, got over his trauma, and started pumping his load into a voluptuous ogress. Being effected by childhood happenings as an adult is, by all measures and metrics, cringe.

And it’s not like media including a family is an instadrop from me. I will always be down to watch The Simpsons, and I’m not even gonna be a snob and say “golden era only.” But I’ll never rank a “Homer and Marge are having marital problems” episode anywhere near my top 50 favorites. I can’t look at Homer and Marge’s problems and go “Why don’t they just get a divorce?” since, yeah, that would defeat the purpose of the show. Fucking duh. But more often than not, when a piece of media depicts a family, I turn into Emperor Lrrr, watching Friends. The toad-like alien, distant from human culture wonders, “Why does Ross, the largest friend, not simply eat the other five?”

Although I just explained the scene in text, I’ll also repost a screenshot of it, so everyone knows exactly how I feel

And that’s me. That’s me reading Litterbox Comics. This comic makes me feel like Emperor Lrrr more than any piece of media. Every strip I wonder just what is the fucking issue. And then I wonder why the characters are even in whatever predicament that week, because all of their problems could go away just by communicating with each other / eating each other.

Before I get deeper into my crab bucket, I’ll point out the good things about Litterbox Comics.

1. Character Design

Incredible work here. There’s a real timelessness to their designs. If you showed me their model sheet and said this wacky cat family was from a scrapped Powerpuff Girls episode, I’d believe you. They’re all cute without being too saccharine and unique without being cluttered. Each family member is distinct and carries themselves in a different way. It’s strong, clean cartooning but it never feels sterile. When the characters break model for a joke, the expressions hit hard. It’s all around excellent visual design. If this comic gets adapted to a cartoon, it’ll have the groundwork to be one of the the most visually pleasant animations in recent time

2. Clean

The comics themselves are bold and eye-catching. The punchlines are kept snappy. I’ve never had any confusion over the text placement or layout, and that has to be part of its reason for success. This is all the more impressive given that this comic is constantly experimenting with panel size and layout to better deliver their punchlines.

3. Surrealist moments

The little fantasy elements and comedic exaggeration elevate this comic. Otherwise it’d just be “shit mom groups say”, furry edition. Because of this, combined with the previous 2 points, I see why this has such a huge following. They’re doing something unique, and the writing style has a distinct voice. The most recent comic “Twik or Tweet” had a decent enough setup/punchline. It’s the kind of absurdist left turn I could see in a classic Spongebob episode.

Honestly, if they keep in this direction, I could see my cold heart warming and thinking they’re a pretty okay webcomic. (“Consistently funny” or “worth my time” is another hurdle to cross)

And… That’s about it.

Now if you don’t mind, I would like to brandish my backseat drivers license, (awarded to me when I decided I would never have children) and say that these parents suuuuuuck.

There’s a constant anger and frustration over scenarios that are entirely their fault. Take this comic, which they deemed hu-larious enough to draw twice:

I have so many questions, the first of which, why? Why are you doing this? Why are you posting your baby to Facebook? And if you’re going to post your baby to facebook, why do you feel so compelled to do it now, in the middle of a crying fit? I guess the joke is “expectations vs. reality” or “we only see the good parts online” and this is a peek behind the curtain.

I’m gonna sound like one of those “please think of the children” weirdos, but I’m on their side on this issue: parents shouldn’t be posting their kids online. It’s weird, it’s driven by peer pressure, and I hate it. In an ideal world, the only pictures of people in diapers are all fully consenting adults.

Exhibit B of “You could’ve prevented this” is the strip “Familiar”:

You didn’t have to buy your kid those noisy toys. You didn’t have to keep them around. You could’ve donated them sooner. And it’s scenarios like this where I’m just sort of scratching my head like, come on dude, you did this to yourself!

And onto exhibit C of “You could’ve prevented this” are all of the comics about kids being picky eaters.

These are a little more subtle, but all of them still piss me off the same. We’re all products of our environment, so if a kid is a “picky eater,” I’m not rushing to blame Junior. In the book “Your kid’s a brat and it’s all your fault,” author Elaine Rose Glickman has this to say about picky eaters:

Here’s a news flash: If your kid gets hungry enough, he’ll eat. I’ll say it louder, because this is truly amazing and important news, and you can’t possibly hear it over your anguished cries as you beg little Ethan to take another bite of chicken nugget, please, please honey, just one more: If your kid gets hungry enough, he’ll eat […] So let’s take a deep breath and dare to imagine that a meal is just a meal. That is, you offer your kid some reasonably appealing, nutritious food, he either accepts it or rejects it, and you call it a day. It’s not like he’s off to enlist in the merchant marines as soon as you unbuckle him from the booster seat; he’ll have the chance to eat again in three hours, and if he gets hungry in the meantime, well, perhaps he’ll be a bit more receptive to the perfectly acceptable black bean quesadilla he just hurled on the floor.

To summarize that chapter: parents, please chill out over the “picky eater” issue. The chapter also gives some pretty solid tips for how to correct this behavior, the entire book is full of no-nonsense parenting advice. This was required reading for my backseat driving licence, and I personally recommend it. Plus, in the library copy I read, a previous reader manually crossed out all the cuss words. This censorship adds a lot of Cool Points to any book.

Anyway, back to Litterbox. Here’s where this comic goes from feeling a little unrelatable to emotionally stunted. There’s an inability to empathize with the kid character. Too often the parents are expecting Junior to adhere to their rigid expectations. There is a profound inability to relate to their kid and speak on his level.

Exhibit 1:

I, too, think Star Wars sucks. He’s right to leave immediately. Maybe they should’ve waited a little longer when they’d be at the age to care about mainline Star Wars movies, or offer some media that’s more geared towards his demographic. Star Wars is a huge franchise. I guarantee if you looked beyond what you think is cool, you could’ve found something Star Wars-related that he would’ve liked.

Exhibit 2:

One of the more interesting generational divides are old folks feeling befuddled by letsplays. That is, the classic question of, “why would you want to watch someone play a game instead of play it yourself?’ To which you can instantly reply, “Why do people watch sports instead of just playing it themselves?” It’s such a tired boomer debate that I feel redundant and hack even spelling it out here. We’ve all heard this shit before, so why’s it being rendered in a comic?

Clearly, Junior just wants to fuckin’ chill and watch Ryan’s World. I can’t blame him for that. This is a completely different mindset from actually playing superheroes with your dad, who, well, might just suck at it. I’ve hated every game of Dungeons and Dragons I’ve ever played irl, but when a show has “the DnD episode” I’ve had a good time. And let’s be real - if I had the chance to play DnD with Dan Harmon or the McElroys, you know I’d take it.

So yeah, if your kid wants to watch Ryan hang with his dad instead of do that irl, it’s a skill issue.

Exhibit 3:

Okay, before I get too Lrrr-like, I get the joke. I do. You want to talk to your kid, he keeps saying “meh,” but finally opens up when it’s bedtime, which is a totally inappropriate time to get into a deeper conversation. Alright. I acknowledge the setup/punchline. But even here I’m still on Junior’s side. The one time he initiates the conversation, when he feels he has something worth sharing, it’s met with an eye-roll. Of course he’s gonna say “meh” when you badger him with inane chit-chat. What did you fucking expect?

Maybe instead of pestering him with small talk, try a better conversation opener. Once again: skill issue.

This brings me to the absolute worst subsection of Litterbox strips: the “I did this for you” strips.

Here we see the comic’s core philosophies strongly on display. Because they’re the ultimate “No one asked you to do this” “For the love of Christ please spend 30 seconds talking to your kid” and “This is your fault” all rolled into one.

Look, if I could have an Isekai reincarnation reroll, I’d take a mom who’s always doing elaborate Pintrest projects over a mom who’s regularly whipping out la chancla. But just because Pintrest mom is better than a mom who doles out corporal punishment, doesn’t mean she’s actually good.

I hate conflating parents effort/stress with “good” parenting. Just because you stressed yourself out doing some bullshit doesn’t mean it makes you a good parent. It just means you’re stressed out and bringing down the energy of the room, man.

There’s a part from some book that I’ll try to remember here, and if it comes to mind later I’ll edit this post. It was either from a book about sociology of the media, or a book about why puppets are fucking cool. But the author was talking about Sesame Street. In the book, they say that kids are such a couch potatoes, they’d rather watch Sesame Street than actually play.

The author, instead of blaming the children for their laziness, tries to explain why this might be.

Their answer: Sesame Street is a whole-ass puppet show happening in your living room. You’ve got to offer something more interesting than that. If you turned off the TV and gave your kid an irl puppet show, they’d want to watch that more than a recording of a puppet show. Before you call your kid lazy, ask yourself, what have YOU done that’s more interesting than Elmo?

And that hazy book memory is what comes to mind when I see Cat Mom stressing out over her Pintrest project. She’s trying to compete with the puppet show of Sesame Street. C for effort, I guess, and we can bump that up to an A if we’re grading on a curve. But it’s nothing the kid wants or even asked for, and now he’s the asshole for not being interested. Maybe instead of just springing your own bullshit on the kid, ask him what he wants.

I’ll tap my backseat drivers license one more time before anyone says “if you had kids, you’d understand.” Yeah, no shit it’s easy for me to point to parenting books on how it “should” be done without having attempted it myself. Would I get caught in a cycle of misery where my kid refuses to eat his vegetables? I don’t know, maybe, that shit looks hard, which is why I’m not gonna do it. But when there’s a cycle of misery, you should do everything in your power to break it.

And before I get any “tsk-tsks” in the comments section, I am not referring to anyone actually trapped in cycles of abuse/poverty. I’ve had some pretty strong victim blame-y language throughout this post. Since I’m dumb I don’t know how to reword that, so I’ll make myself clear: that’s not what I mean, and if you take me out of context or in bad faith you’re dumber than me.

Here’s the thing. These (fictional) parents are not the victims here, and I’m confused why the comic keeps insisting that they are. They are constantly in a struggle of their own making. This is a parent/child dynamic they’ve invented where the parent, the arbiter of power, is the one “victimized” by their own toddler. It’s downright weird. Why are you letting a kid tell you what to do? This isn’t even like some “We need to talk about Kevin” style behavior from a child, it’s just regular-ass kid shit that the parents are constantly struggling with.

Here’s one more comic I’ll nitpick:

Is this working? Is your stubbornness going to get your kid to wash his hands? Did it work before, so that’s why you’re doing it again? Are you planning on having this debate every time Junior curls out a shit? I feel myself getting more Lrrr-like the longer I gaze into this abyss.

Now say hypothetically, one night I can’t resist and I go in raw (the only scenario I can imagine this happening is if, much like Shrek, my princess gf is afflicted by a curse that makes her gain a cool 250 pounds overnight. Woof woof). And now I’ve gotta deal with parenthood. I’m sure I’d learn real fast that being a parent shore is tough and boy, I had no idea what I was getting into!

But I’ll do everything to make my family’s life more like Yotsuba or Bluey, and less like this dredge of misery that’s Litterbox.

No wonder this is what their youngest used a monkey’s paw on.

Copyright Disclaimer: Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for "fair use" for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favor of fair use. I’m not trying to be an art theif, just a critic. Pls no bulli.