VG Cats

• 1. Introduction

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  VG Cats debuted on the 1st of September 2001, a webcomic about two anthropomorphic cats with a passion for video games, written and drawn by Canadian cartoonist Scott Ramsoomair. The strip launched at an unusual moment: Ramsoomair's own FAQ page notes the timing was bad, almost certainly a reference to the September 11 attacks that struck the same month. From those unlikely origins, VG Cats grew into a recognized name in gaming webcomics, earning awards and attracting the attention of major game developers. What drove a cartoonist working through his lunch breaks to build one of the web's more enduring gaming strips? And what caused him to announce its end, then reverse course entirely?

• 2. Born at a Desk

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  Ramsoomair has said plainly that boredom at work was the reason VG Cats existed at all. He drew comics during his lunch breaks and started publishing them online. The strip's first home was www.vgcats.cjb.net before Ramsoomair secured the VGCats.com domain. For a period, the comic was affiliated with BuzzComix, a webcomic ranking and community site popular in the early 2000s.

  The two main characters took their names from Ramsoomair's own pet cats. Those cats were themselves named after characters from Final Fantasy, which meant the strip's stars Leo and Aeris arrived carrying a layer of gaming nostalgia before the first strip ran. Ramsoomair acknowledged that VG Cats was shaped, at least initially, along the lines of Penny Arcade, a gaming webcomic that had established the format. By 2006, he noted that in the preceding one to two years his focus had shifted away from two-gamer banter and toward direct parody of specific games.

• 3. Leo, Aeris, and Pantsman

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  Aeris is a blue-eyed female cat with pink fur who first appeared on the 4th of September 2001 in Strip #2, titled "Pika?". She is quick-tempered, prone to both verbal and physical abuse of Leo, and the strip depicts her interests as including fan fiction, reading yaoi, and writing yaoi. Leo Leonardo, The Third, a green-eyed male cat with grey fur, debuted in Strip #1, "Feelin' Gassy", on the same date. The strip implies Leo may have been born with an intellectual disability, though he occasionally shows flashes of competence and participates in the same violent behavior as Aeris.

  Gaming website Joystiq described the characters as "adorable characters who feel most at home with violence, language, and sexual innuendo." Ramsoomair himself said all of his characters relate to him at some point. A third recurring figure, Pantsman, functions as Ramsoomair's alter ego: an incompetent superhero who hides his identity by wearing trousers on his head, carries a jeans cape around his neck, and whose greatest weakness is vodka cooler. Pantsman was introduced in Strip 37, "I Like Bunnies", specifically to address the comic's irregular update schedule.

• 4. April Fools and Maxis

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  Each April 1, Ramsoomair replaced the VG Cats homepage with a joke page. In 2003, that meant a fake "Krug" page. In 2007, he put up a Myspace profile for Solid Snake. These recurring pranks became a feature of the strip's calendar.

  The most notable external collaboration came in 2006. Ramsoomair drew a strip featuring creatures from Maxis's video game Spore, then still in development. Maxis responded by recreating the entire strip using in-game character models and sending Ramsoomair custom figurines of the creatures depicted. The exchange showed the strip had enough reach to draw a response from a major game studio.

• 5. Animated Adaptation

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  Chris Boe, described as a friend and associate of Ramsoomair, wrote and animated an adaptation of VG Cats. Only the first half of the first episode was ever produced. That episode, subtitled "A Tale of Two Kitties," was released on the 21st of January 2006. No further episodes followed, leaving the animated series as an incomplete experiment rather than an ongoing project.

• 6. VG Lewds and Financial Strain

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  After comic #380 in 2018, Ramsoomair launched a Patreon account for adult content based on Leo, Aeris, and other video game characters, under the name VG Lewds. On the same day as that comic, he wrote in a blog post that advertising revenue from the main site could no longer support him financially. He asked readers to help "support me in this newest venture."

  By March 2022, the VG Lewds Patreon was shut down without explanation. Ramsoomair later said he wanted to concentrate on bringing the strip to a proper ending. That same February 2022, he had announced the end of VG Cats in a Patreon post that was later deleted. He then began updating his main Patreon again on the 20th of July 2023, and released a new comic strip in December of that year, reversing the announced conclusion.

• 7. Awards and Related Work

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  VG Cats won two Web Cartoonists' Choice Awards in 2005 and one in 2006, with finalist nominations in 2007 and 2008. The VGCats.com domain also hosted several other Ramsoomair projects. Bad Mushrooms, a sprite comic he made before VG Cats, lives on the site. Adventure Log, his official Final Fantasy XI webcomic, has not been updated since 2008. Super Effective, a Pokémon parody that began in April 2008, went on hiatus in 2014 and resumed updates on the 8th of September 2024.

  Merchandise passed through multiple vendors: CafePress served as the store provider starting in 2003, followed by Hyperion Press from the 16th of June 2004, then ZeStuff, and finally Shark Robot, which hosted the store as of 2008. CafePress continued selling VG Cats products independently even after Ramsoomair ended his relationship with the company. The Super Effective resumption in 2024 marks the most recent sign that Ramsoomair's output, across multiple strips and formats, remains ongoing.