Webcomic / But I'm a Cat Person

Underemployed queer millennials with shapeshifting battle monsters.

In a world not too different from our own, humans share the planet with a mysterious servant species known as Beings. Shapeshifting, flying battle monsters, they have spent countless ages dueling each other in a contest with no end, known as the Game...

...which most of humanity has spent just as long ignoring. It's not really that interesting if you're not involved.

Into this contest stumble two Ordinary College Graduates, cheerful Bianca and skeptical Sparrow, when a Being on the run drops into their life. He's called Patrick in human form (or Spot, when he's a dog), and at Sparrow's insistence he makes a contract to serve Bianca in return for a place in their home. But mysterious figures are keeping an eye on Patrick, and the Game has a way of not letting you go.

(None of this would have happened if they'd gotten a kitten instead.)

But I'm A Cat Person is an original webcomic from And Shine Heaven Now creator Erin Ptah. The official description from the website is "what happens when you take a heap of shounen-power-up and mahou-shoujo tropes, dump them all in a blender, and then throw the blender away and make a sandwich instead."

Not to be confused with But I'm a Cheerleader. Also has nothing to do with actual Cat People.

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Tropes found in this webcomic are:

• Animal Testing: The experiments regularly done on Beings may or may not be comparable to this, depending on who you ask.
• Apocalypse Cult: Timothy was raised in one.
• April Fools' Day: April 1, 2013.
• Armored Closet Gay: As of chapter 20, Bennett definitely is one. And now he's out of the closet, rather dramatically.
• Art Shift: Flashbacks have different spot-coloring, white gutters instead of black, and in some cases are done in soft-shaded pencil instead of cel-shaded ink.
• As the Good Book Says...:
  • Used in wildly different ways by Timothy and Ann Walker.
  • The Beings don't have their own religious beliefs, but you'll still see things like Lily referencing the Book of Ruth or Patrick quoting Psalms.
• Badass Adorable: A lot of the Beings have especially cute animal forms.
• Batman Gambit: Congressman Bennett tries to pull one of these on Ann Walker, introducing a bill that will put limits on her with the assumption she will attempt to buy him off to get special treatment. She easily turns it around on him, playing on his one-note conservative rhetoric to trap him into inadvertently promising her some benefits.
• Break the Cutie: Jany's entry on the character page of the comic lampshades the trope. And several of the Beings have demonstrated that they're highly vulnerable to breakage by abusive or out-of-control Masters.
• Cats Are Snarkers: Reseda. Not so much when she was known as Lily; it only began to come out after her then-Master died.
• Cat Girl: Three cat-based shapeshifters: Reseda (a housecat), Blake (an "every big cat that isn't a lion", typically seen as a tiger), and a not-yet-introduced Lion. They typically stick to entirely-human or entirely-feline forms, but will sometimes sprout ears and a tail for the cuteness/weirdness/otaku-appeal factor.
• Cerebus Syndrome: Not that the comic didn't have some dark shades from the beginning, but around the second interlude (Walker's Travels) those shades turned a pitch, sinister black.
• Christmas Episode: The first interlude, between chapters 4 and 5, consists of holiday-themed flashbacks for several of the characters.
• Clothes Make the Legend: Invoked in-universe by Ann Walker, who's always wearing a sleek red suit and pearl jewelry. (With a tiger accessory.) The woman knows how to get mileage out of having an iconic look.
• Combat Stilettos: A realistic way to use them: Camellia rams her narrow heel on a would-be mugger's toes to get him to release her.
• Corrupt Politician: Arthur Bennett tries to be this. He isn't as good at manipulation and ruthlessness as he'd like to believe, though.
• Creator's Show Within a Show: Thorn Estragon appears on a movie poster in the background once or twice.
• Curtains Match the Window: Several of the Beings, including Reseda (gold), Cybele (pink), Kaguya (teal), and sometimes Patrick (brown).
• Don't Call Me Master: Bianca to Patrick. (His refusal is one of the few stands he takes, though, so she goes along with it.)
• Embarrassing Middle Name: Sparrow Elbereth Applebaum.
• Expy: Several AU versions of characters from the artist's earlier works:
  • Miranda originated in The Eagle of Hermes.
  • Timothy and Reseda were last seen in And Shine Heaven Now.
  • Ann Walker is a derivative of Shine's version of Little Orphan Annie.
  • Several readers have identified Stuart Cohen as resembling (a sinister AU version of) Jon Stewart.
• Eye Scream: Frederick Oliver, the former owner of the Tiger, has a long scar that passes over his right eye.
• Facial Markings: Lightning has dark streaks down the sides of his face, loosely mimicking the coloring of his Bearded Vulture form.
• Female Feline, Male Mutt: Reseda and Patrick. Zig-zagged in the case of the Tiger, whose human forms seen so far include a little girl and a grown man. (It should be said that Beings are implied to be sexless and genderless, due to being shapeshifters, but Reseda and Patrick qualify for this trope since their currently favored human forms are female and male, respectively.)
• Fluffy the Terrible: Taking into account the powers Beings have, they have the capability to be this.
• Golem: One of the theories for what Beings are.
• God Before Dogma: Timothy/Camellia, thanks to having spent several of his teenage years in a doomsday cult focused on Reseda. Identifies as a Catholic, but has a strong aversion to any imposition of one person's beliefs on another.
• Hair Color Spoiler: The comic is all in greyscale except for green spot-coloring...and the eyes and hair (or, in Miranda's case, hair decs) of certain characters, mostly Beings and their Masters. If you see someone with colorful hair, odds are they're going to be important.
• Healing Factor: Beings have this, within limits. Food and appropriate treatment will still make a difference in how quickly they recover. After a few thousand years of dealing with injuries, they can be pretty blasé about the gory details.
• Hippie Jesus: Joshua ben Joseph, scruffy do-gooder who's into Eastern religions and civil disobedience.
• Hippie Parents: Sparrow's mother.
• Hypocritical Humor: Leave your weird fetishes out of this!
• I Know Your True Name: Beings are unable to even say the names their Masters use to make Contracts, that's how little power they have in the relationship. Other magic in the series is related to the Contract names of both Beings and humans.
• Ironic Name: Bianca, whose name means "white" in Italian, is black and proud of it.
• Jewish Mother: Sparrow's mother has traits of this (even as an ethnically Jewish pagan), as does her mother before her.
  "And when is that lesbian separatist coven of yours going to give me some grandchildren, hmmm?"

• Knight of Cerebus: Ann Walker: it was around the time we learned more about her goals that the mood of the comic took a sharp turn from a fairly light-hearted fantasy comedy to a dark urban fantasy adventure.
• Language of Magic: Also the language of the Contract, and the focus of much of the research at Cohen's Being-research division.
• Logic Bomb: Tested. Turns out Beings do, in fact, have paradox-absorbing crumple zones.
• Lonely Rich Kid: Miranda, whose Parental Abandonment comes in multiple flavors. As a child, she has a workaholic mother and a Disappeared Dad; as a teenager, she has a Missing Mom and an Archnemesis Dad.
• Love Martyr: plenty of Beings toward less-than-savory Masters throughout the ages, with Patrick's feelings for his last Master being the most notable current example.
• Meaningful Name: Since a Being's name is chosen by its master, it doesn't tell you much about the Being's nature, but might give you a clue about the master's interests.
  • The raven goes by Poe. No wonder Miranda was first seen lurking in a graveyard.
  • Cybele ("soothsayer", "prophetess"), however, indeed tends to spell out truths to her master that he'd rather not acknowledge.
  • Karen Park gave the Bear the straightforward name "Cub".
  • Theme Naming with Reseda, whose previous name was Sister Lily. Her Master also made a contract with her under the self-chosen name Camellia.
• Moment Killer: A loud and obnoxious ringtone starts blasting just when Bennett and Cohen are about to kiss.
• Mon: The fighters in the Game.
• No Such Thing as Wizard Jesus: Averted. Jesus is shown as an accomplished user of the same kind of magic that created the Beings. His "resurrection" came about when, after his death, Mary Magdalene became the new Master of his Being, and ordered the Being to take over Jesus' identity.
• Only One Name: Most of the Beings. Also, temporarily, characters like Cohen and Miranda, whose full names took a long time to be revealed.
• Panthera Awesome: The Tiger.
• Parental Obliviousness: Although Miranda's father is one of the world's foremost Being researchers, it doesn't take much effort to convince him that her Being is an ordinary human boyfriend.
• Power Hair: Ann Walker.
• Rich Bitch: Also Ann Walker, as seen here.
• Right-Hand Cat: The Tiger serves as one for Ann Walker in this strip.
• Rule 34:
  • In-story. Sparrow searches the web for information about Beings, and finds, among other things, links to Being porn. Some of them quite squicky.
  • Also on meta level: the first known BICP fanfic to be written is Sparrow/Reseda and rated NC-17.
• Scary Shiny Glasses: Miranda.
• Servant Race: The Beings, of course.
• Shed the Family Name: Miranda goes by her mother's surname, Lake. It's also the one she used when entering into the Contract with Poe, meaning that he's not able to say it, but is able to refer to her by her father's surname.
• Ship Tease: Cohen/Bennett. Just look at this page.
• Strong Family Resemblance: Sparrow and her mother Sharon. Justified in that Sparrow was conceived via a sperm donor, whom Sharon chose to look as much like her as possible.
• Suspiciously Specific Denial: Bennett, insisting he doesn't care about Cybele. Later, Sparrow, when asked if she's noticed that the Dog hasn't been seen recently.
• Talking Animal: The animal forms of the Beings. Inconspicuous as long as they don't open their mouths (and aren't of too exotic a species).
• Teleportation: Miranda has figured out how to do it. Eventually Sparrow tries to copy her methods, with less-than-perfect results.
• Tell Me About My Sperm Donor: Sparrow to her mother.
• Travel Montage: Lampshaded. "I wish we were in an anime or something, so that this whole trip could go by in a montage."
• Troubled Backstory Flashback: Chapter 4 is an extended one of these for Timothy and Reseda. Jany and Kara Lynn get a cute little one. As of chapter 8, one for Bennett is just starting to be touched on.
• Twisted Eucharist: A Cult drinks the blood of a being instead of the blood of Christ.
• Two Girls and a Guy: Bianca, Sparrow, and Patrick.
• Unreadable Disclaimer: Unreadable-entire-contract, even. There's no written version of Bianca's agreement with Patrick, and the spoken version consisted entirely of "I, Bianca Washington." Of course given how short their memory is, they would (or may already have) forget anything longer
• Urban Fantasy
• Voluntary Shape Shifting: Beings' most-used power, including the following properties:
  • Magic Pants: Their outfits are part of the transformation, as much as their bodies are.
  • Shapeshifting Squick:
    • There are background references to the use of certain forms of Beings in pornography that would otherwise be illegal.
    • And again with Kara Lynn, who has standing orders to earn her Master's family money as an exotic dancer and prostitute, and changes form to suit the fetishes of the highest bidder.
    • Again with a Being called Kaguya: "She's also a great boon to my film studio."
  • Morphic Resonance: Every Being has a few visual traits that stay consistent across all human and animal forms, if only for the convenience of the reader. Cybele's pink eyes, Patrick's brown-and-blond hair/fur, Reseda's sharp teeth and claws, and so on.
  • Shapeshifter Showdown: Depends on the fight. With novice (or nervous) Masters, Beings are more likely to enter battle in a single form and stick with it, sometimes with the Masters agreeing on that form beforehand. With more-experienced or more-daring Masters, or creative Beings whose options haven't been limited, look out for fast-paced and dramatic changes.
  • Transformation Is a Free Action: Averted. They're frequently drawn out during quiet moments, but when they need to happen fast, they happen fast.
  • Shapeshifter Weapon: So far, averted; Beings fight mostly with energy attacks and the natural weapons of their standard forms (fists, claws, etcetera). When Patrick used his arm as a club that one time, it stayed in its usual shape and was damaged accordingly.
  • My Instincts Are Showing: Usually played for cuteness. The Cat will curl up in your lap for petting; the Raven has a hard time managing legs.
• Wholesome Crossdresser: Bianca.
• Windmill Political: Bennett, regarding the possibility of Beings as a terrorist threat.
• World of Technicolor Hair: Bianca and Jany, unless they're examples of Purple Is the New Black; Cybele, a Rose-Haired Sweetie; Bennett, whose dark hair is kind of magenta-ish; Kara Lynn, lavender. Justified in the cases of the Beings.
• You Just Told Me: How Cohen confirms the identity of Cybele's Master.

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