The Laugh Out Loud Cats

The lolcats phenomenon seems to be playing itself out in record time; with I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER? having fast outgrown its burger-laden britches and spawned a zillion knockoff gags, everyone feels obligated to get in on the fun. (My friends and I chose our own targets with an eye for collateral damage.)

With every digital image now ripe for Impact-fonted recontextualization, lolcats has now itself become a cultural reference for artists to recontextualize, and that is how you end up with the refreshingly olde-tyme comic stylings of Adam Koford, whose HOBOTOPIA is a collection of some of the funniest illustrations and cartoon art I've ever seen. His comic "The Laugh Out Loud Cats" takes common memes and pidgin cat-language from lolcats and recasts them as the adventures of two tramp cat-rascals as they ride the rails; the comics are bizarrely endearing and earnest. His cats are so at home in their anachronistic world of internet slang that you get the impression they originated it and that the rest of us took ninety years to catch up. Click the image for a slideshow of the whole set.)

For a small fee you can get one of his original drawings, custom-made from any meme or lolcats-ism that you'd like to see him riff on. I ordered one immediately, determined to get mine before his site was posted to MetaFilter and he became swamped with requests; he chose to refer to a running joke I have with my cat-- that she's saving up bottlecaps and bits of string and other valuable currency to finance her eventual getaway. Tex and I are pretty sure she's been hiding them in our mattress.

If this isn't your thing, then perhaps you'd rather send him the name of a monkey so he can draw it...