Webcomic / Breaking Cat News

Lupin, Puck, and Elvis being their usual catty selves

A webcomic about the three cats Lupin, Elvis, and Puck, drawn by Georgia Dunn, owner of three real cats with those names.^note Later joined by orange tabby Goldie, who's portrayed as a detective and investigative reporter; later adoptees Iggy and Ora Zella began appearing in the strip in autumn 2022 They act like news anchors, and encounter other news agencies and recruit new cats. The cats act like normal cats in all other respects, and the comic is inspired by the antics of their real-life counterparts.

It has its own website. It is also syndicated at GoComics here, and was offered to newspapers as well by the Andrews-McMeel syndicate. By January 2022, about 150 papers picked it up.

In 2024, the conservative-leaning mass media congomerate Gannett^note the largest U.S. newspaper publisher, owner of USA Today, the Louisville Courier-Journal and the Indianapolis Star among others "standardized" its newspapers' comic sections. Many legacy strips like Peanuts were kept, but those with a controversial bent such as Doonesbury were dropped from the "Gannett 34"^note coincidentally, or not, the week Doonesbury ran a Sunday strip with Civil War facts along with a number of strips by women, nonwhites and LGBT artists, including Breaking Cat News, drastically reducing said artists' income. The net result is more dead males than living females on the comics page. This move has attracted its share of mainstream media attention^note Ms Dunn is interviewed in these articles and spawned a week-long exposé in which the cats spoke directly to readers, presenting facts and suggesting solutions — Breaking the Fourth Wall for the first time in the strip's ten-year history.

This webcomic provides examples of:

• Accidental Misnaming: The Toddler thinks that Lupin is named Puck.
• Alphabet News Network: BCN is Breaking Cat News (with a bluegreen yarn ball logo bug), but the cats often refer to it as CN News. "CN News, ma'am, is that bacon?" In the apartment above theirs is GN, Gatos de Noticias (News Cats), with a little toy mouse as their logo bug; and in the afterlife, the news service is RCO, Radio Cat Oracle, with a little ghost cat (in a sheet, yet) logo which reacts with gestures to what's going on.
• Animal Reaction Shot: When something shocking happens, another cat is often in the next panel, looking surprised.
• Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever:
  • The Fantasy Sequence with Fluffapurrus Rex and Kidzilla.
  • Lupin sees the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade on TV and thinks that the city is being attacked by giant animals.
• Bedsheet Ghost: The Toddler provides a slight variation on this when he pulls his white T-shirt up over his head and starts making "ooooh" sounds.
• Beehive Hairdo: The woman styles her hair this way when she's in the mood for a change.
• Berserk Button:
  • Elvis is made of berserk buttons (for instance, touching his tail makes him attack everyone in the room, and seeing a strange cat in his territory sends him into a state of puffy-furred rage), but one thing that sets off even gentle Puck and easygoing Lupin: running out of kibble.
  • Puck refuses to let anyone share his perch while he's watching birds.
• Big "NO!": Elvis has one here shortly after mocking people's reliance on electricity for everything during a winter power outage and realizing his own source of contentment, a heated blanket, needs electricity too.
• Bilingual Bonus: The "ceiling cats", Tabitha and Figaro, run Gatos de Noticias, a Spanish-language equivalent of Cat News. Tabitha is bilingual, but Figaro only understands Spanish.
• Bizarre Beverage Use: In this comic, Elvis is sprayed by a Smelly Skunk and is given a tomato juice bath, much to his dismay.
• Blanket Fort:
  • The Children build one in the living room on a fall afternoon, then cuddle up in it with the cats.
  • Beatrix and Trevor build an emergency blanket fort at the bookstore and hide in it during a thunderstorm.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: The week of March 18, 2024 saw Georgia Dunn using her strip as an actual broadcast studio to address readers about the notorious "Gannett 34 restructuring" (see above).
• …But He Sounds Handsome: Puck tries pulling this with Groucho Marx glasses here while trying to steal bacon from the table.
• Cast Herd: As the strip continues, expanding on the cat coverage and explorations into the nearby Wildlands, the number of characters and storylines has increased, confusing newcomers. A longtime fan of the strip ^note the late William Kyser Jackson created a spreadsheet, listing and cross-indexing significant elements in the strip. Georgia Dunn confessed she even used it herself to look up character appearances.
• Chameleon Camouflage: Lupin believes this happens whenever he hides in something white, like a sink or laundry basket. The People play along; Elvis... not so much.
• Character-Magnetic Team: As the cast expands, the original BCN trio has expanded into an entire broadcast crew, including Tommy ("Cat About Town" aka "field reporter"), Tabitha and Figaro (Spanish Language), Burt (Tech Support), Sophie (Fine Arts), Beatrix (Intern/Researcher) and Goldie (Investigative Reporting).
• Cone of Shame: Elvis was once put in one of these due to overgrooming, to Lupin's joy and Elvis's wrath.
• Cool Old Lady: Baba Mouse. She's been around since the 90's (and can tell you all about the music then), and for all her seeming crankiness, she's fantastic at calmly solving crises.
• Coordinated Clothes: One Christmas strip has the People and the cats posing for a family portrait in matching candy-striped pajamas.
• Crawl: As befits a news show. Burt the AV cat writes the chyrons.
• Creepy Doll: The Woman has a wickedly-grinning Punch puppet that belonged to her grandfather. She loves it, but the Man and the cats find it very disturbing.
• Cute Little Fangs: Iggy has the longest fangs of any of the cats, but his sweet and gentle nature don't make them threatening.
• Drunk with Power: Played for Laughs; at the end of an arc, the children award Goldie with a toy sheriff's badge for finding the Boy's favorite stuffed animal. The next arc sees her use her power to prevent Lupin from entering the kitchen.
• Embarrassing Old Photo: "Mommy's little pirate ballerina!" (Elvis is about to scream.)
• Eskimos Aren't Real: Elvis and Lupin doubt the existence of narwhals and mailmen, to Puck's annoyance.
• Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": The People are only referred to by the cats by what they are: The Man and the Woman. The Baby grew up into the Toddler, and now there's a new Baby. Once the younger baby grew into a toddler herself, rather than have two Toddlers, they were re-designated "The Boy" and "The Girl."
• Extra Digits: Beatrix is a polydactyl cat whose extra toes allow her to post social media updates very quickly and climb things with little effort.
• Face Palm: More like Face Paw in this strip.
  • Puck does this in response to Elvis not understanding that birds and weather are separate things.
  • Lupin makes a similar gesture when Puck and Elvis start attacking each other due to a misunderstanding about a mysterious lump in the bed.
  • Puck does it again when Lupin freaks out about Goldie living with them.
  • Lupin fails to take the hint to not talk about the archives, making Puck face-paw.
• Five Stages of Grief: Parodied when the Woman bakes a cake that doesn't turn out the way she wanted .
• Friend to All Living Things: Tommy. To him, birds are better on the belly than in it.
• The Glomp: At the end of an arc where Beatrix gets stuck in a tree, a mail carrier (they're Real After All!) rescues her and brings her to the Big Pink House. Elvis normally hates strangers coming to the house, but this time he's so relieved to see Beatrix safe that he leaps up and gives the mail carrier a big hug.
• Good Angel, Bad Angel: When the People leave some snacks unguarded, mini versions of the cast are Elvis' shoulder angel and shoulder devils.
• Gosh Dang It to Heck!: When Beatrix, the four-months' kitten, is nervous about getting microchipped, she exclaims, "It's been the week from HECK, in a year of STRAIGHT-UP POOP!" (This was in 2020.) Then she says she doesn't mean to be using such grown-up language.
• Grumpy Old Man: Elvis is the eldest of the primary reporters, and often comes off this way.
• Halloween Episode: There are two short Halloween arcs with the ghosts of exuberant tortie Tillie (who seems partly based on Nellie Bly and partly on the 1930s Torchy Blane, Girl Reporter film series) and her owner Freddie Quinn, the vastly wealthy old woman whose family once owned the Big Pink House along with most of the town. In the second Halloween story, we meet more ghost cats.^note RCO, Radio Cat Oracle, includes on-the-scene reporters Lady Jane and Angus, anchor-cat Admiral Whiskers, and ghost mouse Agatha, who has her own story in another arc. Tillie and photographer Carl (who looks to be using a Graflex Speed Graphic press camera) are likely working for a ghost cat newspaper. Tillie died in 1913, but Carl appears as late as WWII-era in the archived photos in part 8 of the first Halloween story.
• Handicapped Badass: Puck is missing a hind leg, and Lupin is deaf (he reads a teleprompter at the desk). This does not stop either of them from bravely reporting on the news that matters to cats. Averted (downplayed?) with Iggy, who is missing an eye but is just a sweet-tempered, diffident kid.
• Homage: In the October 8, 2023 Sunday strip, it turns out The Woman is a big fan of Scary Stories to Mess You Up Forever, and Georgia Dunn draws the cats in the style of Stephen Gammell's infamous illustrations (and quite well at that!).
• Hot Drink Cure: In one strip, a sick Goldie has a box of tissues and a mug of hot tea beside her.
• Illness Blanket: In a strip where the Man and the Woman both have colds, the Woman burrows so deeply into a blanket that Puck believes she is "morphing into some kind of babushka... or nesting doll."
• Innocent Swearing: The Girl learned a new word, and confirmed she'd picked it up from her mother having said it three years ago. (The strip's comment section on GoComics had also picked up on "@#*1!", using it as a holiday greeting as well as a standard swear word.)
• Intrepid Reporter: Lupin, to a T; it helps that his hat and jacket give him a very Indy-esque look. His ability to get into seemingly-impossible locations at seemingly-impossible speeds borders on Offscreen Teleportation.
• In-Universe Factoid Failure: Lupin believes that Arctic foxes are wild cats and that he is distantly related to them.
• Jaw Drop: Elvis gets an epic one during the "climbing contest", when the kitten Beatrix (one of the few cats Elvis likes) attacks Tabitha (the only cat Elvis fears).
• Kent Brockman News: The strip's protagonists are a bunch of Cat Kent Brockmen.
• Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics: The cats often preface their opinions with "studies show," and there was one pie chart with a nine out of 10 comparison, with the 1 being the time The Woman stepped on Puck's tail.
• Little Guy, Big Buddy: Beatrix the kitten and Trevor the dog
• Love at First Sight: Elvis is absolutely convinced that the new Baby is going to ruin his life... until he sets eyes on her.
  Elvis: Lupin, Puck, this just in: The baby is perfect and I'll never let anything happen to her.
  Man: [approaching the Woman and the Baby] How are my girls?
  Elvis: I'M GOING TO NEED TO SEE SOME ID.
• Meet Your Early-Installment Weirdness: Trying to comfort Sophie during a move, Elvis brings up an old comic based around his own moving worries. The rest of the strip is the other cats commenting on how weird it looks compared to the present comics.
  Lupin: Wow, the old footage was shot WEIRD.
  Puck: What happened to my whiskers?
• Morning Sickness: The cats see the Woman suffering from this in one strip, but they don't know much about human pregnancy, so they assume she has a hairball.
• Noisy Nature: The strip where the cats are listening to peep toads at night. Tommy describes them as "nature's car alarm."
• Not Allowed to Grow Up: Georgia Dunn has frozen the characters at their current ages (aging the children up a tiny bit). She did this because she wanted to keep Baba Mouse. Baba is immensely old — she was 26 in 2015 — and could not have lived much longer. She is based on one of Georgia's real cats, and Georgia says she could not stand to lose her a second time. (The real Sir Figaro Newton died some time ago, but is still alive in the strip, as is Beatrix, who died when she was just four months old and remains a kitten in the strip. The real Lupin died of heart failure January 11, 2022, the real Tommy (Admiral Thomas Whiskerstache) followed him July 7, 2022, and Trevor the border collie September 11, 2023; but all of course will also remain active in the strip.)
• Ouija Board:
  • In one of the Halloween arcs, the Woman and her neighbor consult a Ouija board after experiencing some spooky activity in the house. The board spells out "C-A-T" over and over because they've summoned the spirit of Winifred Quinn, who is looking for her lost cat Tillie.
  • When the Baby gets a battery-powered toy that makes various farm animal sounds, the cats are freaked out because they think it's a spirit board that is "summoning the disembodied voices of animal spirits."
  • The Man and the Woman summon Tillie's ghost during a Ouija session. Being a cat, Tillie alternates between swatting the planchette around and spelling out cat noises like "M-O-W." The People can't see her, but the Woman does note that the board is behaving like "a laptop with a cat on it." Then, of course, she curls up and goes to sleep on it.
• Our Vampires Are Different: Puck becomes Count Puckula in a Halloween story, complete with a red-and-black cape and fearsome fangs. Even as a vampire, though, Puck is a gentle creature; he only uses his fangs to puncture tuna pouches and drink the juice.
• Our Werebeasts Are Different: One pre-Halloween strip depicts Tommy as a were-floof: a fuzzy cat in a Hawaiian shirt that hugs other cats and transforms them into... fuzzier cats wearing Hawaiian shirts.
• Rain, Rain, Go Away: Played with in one arc. The Man and the Woman plan to have a backyard camp-out with the children, complete with a campfire and smores. When a thunderstorm ruins their plan, the Woman and the children are very disappointed, but the Man suggests they put up the tent in the living room and pretend they're camping outside. The indoor camping trip ends up being enjoyable for everyone, and they still get to have (stovetop) smores.
• Real Men Take It Black: Elvis likes his coffee "black and strong."
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: Elvis is red, always angry, skeptical, and serious, and Lupin is blue; playful, adventurous, and silly.
  • Of the younger cats, Ora Zella is very much red (she'll attack anything and everything) to Iggy's blue (shy and good-natured).
• Rich Kid Turned Social Activist: Winifred "Freddie" Quinn was the heiress to a vast fortune and used her wealth to open a cat shelter in memory of her beloved childhood cat Tillie. She didn't just fund the shelter, though; she also spent plenty of time there doing things like bottle-feeding orphaned kittens. She's died and come back as a ghost by now, but she's still watching over the cats who live in her former home.
• Russian Reversal: Puck lies down on a memory foam mat, finds it unpleasantly hot, and complains, "It's like a marshmallow that toasts you."
• Security Blanket: The Toddler is frequently seen holding Pengo, his stuffed penguin. One strip reveals that he won't go to sleep without it.
• Show Within a Show: Our IX Lives, a Soap Opera that most of the cats (as well as the Robber Mice) watch regularly. It's a sendup of pretty much every soap from the 80's and 90's, and even got its own Christmas Special during the strip's hiatus.
• Snowed-In: New England blizzards occasionally prevent the family from leaving the house, but since they have a fireplace and keep plenty of cocoa and fuzzy blankets on hand, they don't find this unpleasant.
• Soup Is Medicine: The Man brings the Woman a bowl of hot soup when she's feeling ill, and Lupin comments that soup is "People's most powerful medicine."
• Sticky Situation: When the Man tries to glue a broken mug back together, Lupin gets in the way, and the mug ends up glued to the Man's hand.
• Talking in Your Sleep: Beatrix watches Trevor taking a nap, appearing to chase something in his sleep, and mumbling about a herd of wild pepperoni pizzas.
• Tears of Joy: Puck is overcome with emotion when the people move the couch and he is reunited with his long-lost Buzzy Mouse toy.
• Tomato Skunk Stink Cure: Elvis gets sprayed by a skunk and then put in a tomato juice bath. Naturally, he's extremely annoyed about it.
• This Means War!: When the Robber Mice abduct Puck's favorite toy Buzzy Mouse, Pucky does not take it well (updated version here). Even Elvis is terrified.
• Wainscot Society: The Robber Mice are Blatant Burglars who swipe food and various objects from the People to festoon their living arrangements. Here they are, out of "uniform" for their Thanksgiving celebration (updated newspaper version here).
• Waking Non Sequitur:
  • In one strip, Elvis wakes up suddenly and exclaims, "I HAVEN'T BEEN TO MATH CLASS ALL YEAR— WHAT'S GOING ON?"
  • Another time, Elvis calls Puck's name to wake him up and Puck replies, "Ham?" Incidentally, ham is Puck's Trademark Favorite Food, so it makes sense that he'd be dreaming about it.

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