Webcomic / Litterbox Comics

L-R: Fran, Cooper, Vincent, Joel.

Litterbox Comics is a webcomic created by Francesca "Chesca" Hause and her husband Jeremiah Hause. Chesca was inspired when she watched Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood with her two young sons, and posted the first comic in May of 2018.

The comic follows a family of cats, headed by the geeky harried Fran and her husband, Joel, as they raise two quirky kitten-sons, Vincent (oldest) and Cooper (youngest). Much of its humor relies on relatable parenting mishaps inspired by the authors' own kids, with some other jokes based on the World of Funny Animals setup.

The first book collection Parenting Is Weird was published in 2023 by Andrews McMeel Publishing. On 2/12/2024, Chesca announced on her Patreon that there will be a Kickstarter to fund a 10-minuted animated pilot known as ''Litterbox: The Animated Pilot''.

Compare Bluey for another animal family of four dealing with parent-child relationships, albeit slightly more stable than the Litterbox household.

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Tropes in the comic include:

• Actually Pretty Funny: One comic has Fran meeting up with her oldest son's preschool teacher, Miss Hoots (who's an owl), to talk about Vincent making an inappropriate comment about another student's (accidentally phallic) sculpture. But just as Fran starts apologizing for her son's antics, Miss Hoots comes to his defense by admitting that it wasn't really Vincent's fault, admitting that pretty much everyone had been thinking the same thing, making Fran and Vincent start giggling.
• Animal Gender-Bender: Downplayed—Fran's a female ginger cat while her oldest son, Vincent, is a male calico—there are female ginger cats and there are also male calicos, but they're super rare^note Only about 20% of ginger cats are girls while only about 1-in-3,000 calico (or tortoiseshell) cats are boys. One comic plays this straight, having Fran become a calico cat and Vincent become a ginger cat, but also points out that cats can't talk or wear clothes, and thus Fran and Vincent transform into normal housecats.
• All Periods Are PMS: In "Warpath," Fran gets unusually angry, and Joel suggests she check her calendar. Fran lashes out about Joel brushing off her problems, swinging through three different moods in three panels... then checks her calendar and realizes he's right. Good thing he already has chocolate and tea for her.
• April Fools' Day:
  • "Calico," which turns Fran into a calico and Vincent into an orange cat (then turns them both into realistic non-anthropomorphic cats) to appease those complaining about the Animal Gender-Bender issue, came out on April 1, 2021.
  • The April 1, 2022 strip is repeat of "Serenade" from (almost) a year previously, except with the family drawn as dogs instead of cats.
• Art Evolution: Later comics are more dynamic with more complex shading compared to the flatter style of the earliest comics. Chesca has even redrawn some of the older comics in the newer style.
• Baby Talk: Cooper alternates between a babyish style of talking (such as pronouncing "yellow banana" as "lellow manana") and meowing in place of babbling.
• Badly Battered Babysitter: The bonus panel of "World of Parentcraft" implies that Vincent's not going to treat his babysitter kindly.
  Vincent: You dare enter my realm? You are not prepared...
• Beat Without a "But": In "Opinions," a cow calls out Fran for feeding her baby milk formula, accusing her of not wanting him to do well in school. Fran responds with "You, know, when I first met you, I didn't really like you". The cow smiles, expecting the sentence to have a second half, before Fran confirms that nope, there is no second half.
• Bland-Name Product: The kids eat "Froot Hoops" for breakfast. Dad eats Papa Don's Pizza, Cheesos, and drinks "ZZ" beer (a parody of Dos Equis, aka "XX").
• Brain Food: Zombie kids prefer them with ketchup.
• Brand X:
  • They do their online shopping on "Amazing.com"
  • Fran takes the kids to "Mouseworld" on vacation.
• Carnivore Confusion: In one comic, Vincent is uncomfortable that his chicken classmate enjoys eating chicken nuggets, which his classmate thinks are nuggets for chicken. He almost has a horrified realization... then relaxes when he sees these are dino nuggets.
• Cats Have Nine Lives: Vincent has six lives left, as the Grim Reaper helpfully shows him via punch card.
• Catch-22 Dilemma: In this strip Fran wants some fish, but doesn't want to interact with a sheep lady, so she pretends to look at some bananas until she moves. Then we see a baboon man looking at some salad waiting for Fran to move... And then turns out the sheep lady is waiting for the baboon to move.
• Chocolate-Frosted Sugar Bombs: Fran won't let her sons have candy for breakfast, but will give them Frosted Candy-O's, which is basically candy.
  Fran: It's fine, look...only 10g of sugar per serving!
  Joel: Serving size...1 piece.
• Christmas Creep: It ultimately results in Christmas, Halloween, and Thanksgiving being rolled into one holiday.
• Companion Cube: Vincent befriends a shoe with a tennis ball in it, named "Bally." Joel becomes enamored with Bally when he realizes he can use Bally to make Vincent behave.
• Constantly Curious: Vincent asks so many strange questions that even the boogeyman gets annoyed with him.
• Cloudcuckoolander: Fran's oldest son, Vincent, is prone to some of the most wildly imaginative ideas and unpredictable behavior ever—but he is just a preschooler, so it's perfectly justifiable.
• Crossover: With Ben Hed's Pixie and Brutus in "Worlds Collide," in which Vincent and a more anthropomorphic Pixie become buddies. Hed and Chesca alternate drawing each panel.
• Crossover Cameo: Fran appears in Poison Ivy Gulch for a high noon showdown where she draws her gun before protagonist Lotta Doler.
• Expressive Shirt: The words on Joel's shirt change every strip. Lampshaded in "New T-Shirt", where he keeps a closet full of statement shirts.
• Fake Interactivity: Cooper doesn't seem to understand the concept.
• Faking the Dead: A possum mom, naturally, regularly pretends she died so her kids will go bother Fran instead.
• Foreign Cuss Word: The waiter at the Chinese restaurant says something in hanzi in response to the cats playing Harry Potter with their chopsticks. If you can't read Chinese, you're not going to have a clue how to even pronounce it, making it overlap with Symbol Swearing.
• Formerly Fit: Some of the flashback comics show that Joel wasn't quite as overweight as he is now.
• From the Mouths of Babes:
  • Preschool-aged Vincent has a tendency to repeat unsavory words, such as curse words he overheard from his parents, or shouting "Cars don't have penises — except Lightning McQueen!" at his mother while she has company. Even better, the latter is his Establishing Character Moment.
  • In one comic, Fran's shocked when Cooper asks her if she "ate all the penis." Luckily for her, it turns out that he was just trying to say "peanuts."
• Fun T-Shirt: The dad's otherwise-identical raglans have a variety of sayings. Among them: "DAD BOD", "DATED POP CULTURE REFERENCE", "GUITAR BAND", "INDOOR CAT", and "Hi Hungry, I'm Dad". He also has an apron that says "Will cook for food".
• Furry Confusion: The existence of real-world Funny Animal cartoons in their universe adds a layer of confusion to the fact that some of them are Half Dressed Cartoon Animals.
• Furry Reminder: A lot of the jokes stem from applying parenting mishaps to a World of Funny Animals —
  • One comic has Vincent and Cooper get in trouble for burying poop in the neighbors' bushes. Their dad gets them out of it by accusing the neighbor of Fantastic Racism.
  • One comic has a gecko classmate of Vincent's lose his tail during class.
  • In one comic, Fran loses Vincent in a grocery store and gets him back by whispering "pspspspsp" over the loudspeaker. He finds her...as do several other cats.
  • When Vincent gets his pug friend a stuffed toy for his birthday, the pug chews it to bits. The bonus panel also shows the pug is terrified of balloons.
  • Joel sprays Fran with a water bottle to prevent her from getting into social media fights.
  • Fran sometimes uses a laser pointer to distract her sons.
  • Fran's pug friend calls Fran freaking out because someone left the house for two minutes. Fran snarks to herself, "I need more cat friends." (The bonus panel reveals that her pug friend's partner had left to chase the mailman).
  • Fran has to take a teething Cooper to the dentist in a cat carrier.
  • Vincent, Cooper, and Fran wake up at three in the morning with the "zoomies" and run around meowing. The next day, Fran's pug friend says she can relate — "I took a bath and then could not stop."
  • One time Cooper drops a stunned baby mouse on the doorstep. From Fran's apologetic call to the mouse's parents, it's apparently not the first time he's done it.
  • A subtle one when the kids have been decked out in assorted science fiction gear: Vincent is wearing a Red Lantern ring on his tail, just like the feline Red Lantern Dex-Star does.
  • Vincent and Cooper are always on the wrong side of the door.
  • A number of one-off characters exist solely to be walking animal jokes:
    • In one comic, Fran's with a group of mom-friends and asks if any of them have any good birth stories—she asks the hyena in their group what her childbirth was like, but Fran's pug friend warns her not to ask their hyena-friend about it, and implores Fran not to Google it.^note To put it as simply as possible without going into too much detail, hyenas have a rather...strange and painful birthing process compared to most other mammals.
    • Baby crocodiles hatch as fully-formed miniature adults. Litterbox Comics takes that to its logical conclusion.
    • Then there's the antelope mother whose child took her first steps within minutes after being born.
    • The shark father in "Tooth Fairy" is distraught about his kids asking about her because not only do sharks regrow their teeth for life, but they lose their teeth frequently due to lacking roots.
    • There's also a bird-mom whose huge eggs have been the subject of multiple misadventures.
    • One of Fran's friends is a lioness whose new boyfriend is good-looking but useless.
    • The mother who chides Fran for not breastfeeding is a cow.
    • Then there's the time another kid bites Vincent at school. That kid happened to be an alligator.
    • A group of baby possums tell Fran that they have to live with her because their mother died. Fran is briefly distraught before she realizes the act.
    • And multiple bird moms who feed their kids by vomiting into their mouths.
  • The whole family going crazy after spotting a fly in the house, which finally ends when Cooper eats it.
  • The pug-mom that Fran frequently hangs out with wears a dog collar with a heart tag.
  • Apparently, the cat family uses literal litterboxes instead of toilet training potties.
• Geek: Fran and her husband are huge pop culture nerds, especially when it comes to things related to videogames, comic books, sci-fi and superheroes, and try getting their sons into that sort of thing as well.
• Good Angel, Bad Angel:
  • An interesting variation of this trope has Fran about to scold Vincent for preparing to do something dangerous, only to be told by her angel to chill and "let him be a kid", while her devil is against it among the lines of "Do you want to spend the day at ER?!" eventually...
  CRASH!
  Fran's Angel: -she's got a point.
  • Another comic has Joel consult his sons on whether he should confront an annoying woman taking too much time in the checkout lane. Vincent thinks he should beat her up, but Cooper is worried she'll die. Joel then picks them up and remarks, "You guys are the angel and devil on my shoulders." The bonus panel shows Cooper as the angel and Vincent as the devil, but they both agree on their dad getting them some candy.
• Groin Attack: In the promo poster for the Kickstarter, Cooper jumps off Joel's lap, causing the latter to clutch his groin in pain.
• Hartman Hips: Even for a woman who gave birth to two kids, Fran's got a rather wide set of hips.
• Heel–Face Turn: Parodied in one of the superhero comics, when Joel decides to do a heel-turn because "all the cool superheroes are doing it" and becomes the Dad Joker, taking the boys along the way. Fran ("Mommy-Brain") doesn't bother saving the day from them.
• I Need to Go Iron My Dog: Fran tries to weasel out of a friend's one-woman show by claiming, "Gotta stay home, otherwise I'll catch on fire." She clarifies that she's gotten bad at lying due to all the outlandish lies she tells her kids.
• Innocent Innuendo: Fran gets furious hearing Vincent say "Never waste diamonds on a hoe!" He's talking about farming in Minecraft. (Although he's almost definitely quoting a common saying in the Minecraft community with a very deliberate double meaning.)
• Innocent Swearing: "Clock" has Cooper pronouncing "clock" as "cock," which makes Fran worry when she takes him to an appointment in a room full of clocks.
• It's Quiet… Too Quiet: Kids in the other room screaming? They're just having fun. Everything goes quiet? That's a bad sign.
• I Want My Jet Pack: As a kid, Joel was excited for flying cars, jet packs, and robot butlers in the future. Now he's frustrated that he needs to verify his email to check the temperature of a ham.
• Just the Introduction to the Opposites: This comic shows a happy anthropomorphic wolf couple interrupted by the man's full-moon-induced transformation into a vicious human.
• Limited Wardrobe: Downplayed with Joel's shirts, which are all red-and-white raglans with slogans in Cooper Black but have a variety of different slogans (see Fun T-Shirt above).
• Literal Genie: In "Three Wishes," Vincent pretends to be a genie granting wishes. Fran wishes he'd put on his shoes, so he puts them on his head. She wishes he'd put them on his feet, so he puts them on top of his feet. Finally, she gives a very specific request, but Vincent's too bored to keep playing by that point.
• Literal-Minded: Joel tells Vincent not to fight with his fists, but with his mind. Vincent then gets in trouble for headbutting other kids.
• Lost Food Grievance: Vincent gets upset over someone eating the last cupcake, which turned out to be him! Fran learns this and also flips out.
• Mathematician's Answer: Vincent uses one to, ironically, dodge a math question. When his mom asks, "What's 2+2?" he simply says "Math."
• Missing Steps Plan: While potty-training her youngest son, Cooper, Fran promises to give him a piece of candy every time he uses the litterbox. Cooper knows that he'll get candy if he poops, but he's (unfortunately) ignoring the "litter box" part of the deal.
• Not Me This Time: Both of Fran's sons are troublemakers, but especially Vincent—his parents are often getting calls from his preschool for his school-related antics. In one comic, Fran gets a call from the principal at her oldest son's school and she immediately starts apologizing for whatever she thinks her son did—but the principal informs her that Vincent didn't do anything and that he got bit by another child...who turns out to be an alligator.
• Painting the Medium:
  • When Fran turns into a Yoda parody, her dialog is in the Star Wars logo font.
  • Fran tries to get Cooper to eat Green Eggs and Ham and the strip is even drawn mimicking the Dr. Seuss style.
• Parody Displacement: In-Universe, Vincent thinks his dad's Meowie album is just "bad covers of Kidz Bop songs."
• Picky Eater: Even for a kid his age, Vincent's a ridiculously picky eater and has got some Bizarre Taste in Food—for example, instead of having lasagna or a turkey dinner (both of which were made by his dad), he'd rather have mashed up Lucky Charms mixed with ketchup.
• Puppy-Dog Eyes: Vincent and Cooper give their dad big sad eyes when asking if he came home with ice cream.
• Putting the Pee in Pool: Double Subverted in "Yellow". Vincent and Cooper put a yellow-colored tablet in their bath to make it look like they peed in it...but then the boys realize that they really did pee in the tub.
• Red Shirt: Fran's familiar with this trope but gets it confused with the academic term of the same name when her pug-friend questions if she and Joel are planning to wait a year before enrolling Vincent in Kindergarten.
• Shout-Out:
  • One comic replicates the style of Webcomic Name.
  • The bonus panel of "Litter Training" has Cooper reenact the "Phase 3: Profit" meme from South Park.
  • Fran makes the Grinch face when she uses an Elf on the Shelf to make Vincent go to school, complete with narration. Returns when she comes up with a lie to cover for her failure to move it every day.
• Spit Take: In the very first comic, Fran's friend spit out her tea when Vincent burst in to talk about Lightning McQueen having a penis.
• Stock Animal Diet: Used to subtle effect when Fran, a sheep, and a mandrill are shopping for groceries. Each of them want the other to move because they want to check out the nearby food — fish, salad, and bananas, respectively.
• Super Gullible: Fran and Joel's sons, Vincent and Cooper, will believe pretty much anything you tell them, no matter how outlandish it sounds. But with how young the boys are ^note Vincent's a preschooler while Cooper's still basically just a baby it's a justified trope.
• Super Hero Episode: "Supercats" reimagines the family as superheroes.
• Toilet Humor:
  • Being a preschool-aged kid, Vincent really likes jokes about butts, farts, and poop. And being a baby, Cooper's the primary source for the various poop-related gags.
  • One comic shows the cat family expressing their love by calling each other "poop-face," "you butt," and "fart-pants."
• The Twelve Spoofs of Christmas: "The Twelve Days of Momsmas" plugs a limited-edition Fran plush toy by placing her in a "Twelve Days of Christmas" parody showcasing the weird stuff her sons give her.
• Unfortunate Character Design: In-Universe; Fran and Joel are weirded out at Vincent's creeper toy because it looks like "a badly censored dick." It's even creepier when he wants a cup shaped like one.
• Unnamed Parent: Unlike Fran, Joel was simply referred to as "Dad Cat" up until June of 2021, where he was finally given an official name.
• The Un-Smile: During a grocery run, Fran wants to show empathy to a woman with a restless baby, buuuut her attempt makes the woman silently accuse her of being obnoxious.
• Webcomic Print Collection: Parenting Is Weird: Tails from the Litterbox, the first collection book, published by Andrews McMeel Publishing in 2023.
• World of Funny Animals:
  • Everybody in the universe is an anthropomorphic animal. Even pop culture icons have animal equivalents (for example, Dora's a sloth).
  • Strangely averted for the pups in PAW Patrol. Whenever the show is referenced in the webcomic, the pups are portrayed as their non-andromorphic selves. And Daniel Tiger is still a Half-Dressed Cartoon Animal.

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