Neko Machi

Neko Machi’s hiatus has gone on a bit longer than I’d like, but as much as I love doing this comic there are other things that will always have to take precedence. I’m really looking forward to what we have planned for the future of Neko Machi, but life has just been crazy for me and especially for Piggy, so I just can’t set a date. In the meantime, aside from reassuring you that we’re not dead, I wanted to tell our readers about what we’ve been up to (aside from stuff like writing a list of 700 Catgirl Names and starting a Daily Catgirl Tumblr). I’ve also been writing for Neko Machi of course, and writing with this new approach has actually been a lot of fun.

Golden Sky Stories
Back in 2008 I published a translated Japanese tabletop RPG called Maid: The Role-Playing Game, which was an amazing (if exhausting) experience. Now I and my longtime friend Mike Stevens are publishing another game called Golden Sky Stories by the same brilliant designer. Where Maid RPG is comedic insanity and a brutal satire of the whole maid thing that was sweeping Japanese geekdom at the time, GSS is a wonderfully heartwarming, unique game with more of a My Neighbor Totoro kind of vibe. In it you play henge, animals with just a bit of magical power, including the ability to temporarily take human form (though it’s easier for them to leave their ears and tail showing). We’ll be doing a Kickstarter fundraising drive to raise money for the first print run soon. And yes, you can play a cat. :3

Dead Boy
Part of why piggy was so insanely busy is because she took on Gerald von Stoddard’s Dead Boy comic. You can see a preview of it here.

We’re All Star Children
Piggy has a few different OCs of various kinds, but the one that always seems to stand out (enough that I got her a custom plushie as a gift a while back) is Rose Marie, the sullen little demon girl. Star Children is the story of Rose Marie that she’s been wanting to do for ages. Other projects have been keeping her from updating it as much as she’d like, but it looks like a really amazing, ambitious project.

With a W For No Good Reason
The new and improved Neko Machi is going to be a little more story-oriented and less of an outlet for putting stuff from my everyday life into comic form, and on a whim I decided to start doing this scribbly, spontaneous little comic (Tasha’s Comic was a key inspiration). I pretty much just do it whenever I feel like it, which is why I was doing it 7 days a week for a bit and have kind of… stopped for now. If for some reason you’d like a window into my real life, do feel free to check it out.

Other Stuff

• A while back I hit on the idea of making a tabletop-style RPG contained in a smartphone app, which won the Brain Full of Games contest. I decided to revive my 4-koma manga inspired slice of life schoolgirl RPG, Raspberry Heaven, as the first RPG app I want to do.
• Another project that’s been dragging on too long is Nekomimi Land, a novella about a guy who gets turned into a catgirl and taken to a dystopian fairyland of catgirls. I was always worried about finding a publisher for it, but with recent advances in self-publishing I’ve decided to finish it and self-publish.
• I’ve been working on an RPG for 90s comedy anime fantasy style shenanigans a la Slayers and Dragon Half, called Dragon World. You’ll need Vincent Baker’s Apocalypse World to play it, but I’ve been having a lot of fun playing it with my friends so far.