Hello there!

My name is Kathleen and I'm an artist, digital creator, writer, and comic book creator. Incidentally I also love cats and I have a soft spot for aliens. 

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You may have seen me go by Kat Crow from time to time. This is another of my many past experiments, still wandering around out there. KerBop is another such experiment, but the experiment is still going. 

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So basically, KerBop is a character I thought of when I was bored out of my skull in art history class in college. I was sketching to keep myself from falling asleep, and suddenly there she was. A cat-person, tall and skinny, with wings and a tail on fire, antennae and whiskers, a bow and arrow, and a smirky expression. It was like she was a character I'd seen before and was familiar with, but I didn't know her story. It took me *years* to figure out her story, and I've learned that she has way more than just one.

 

I knew right away she was a comic book character, for a little while I just didn't know what kind of comics she belonged in.

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I had a lot of false starts trying to write a KerBop comic strip. Some of you who've been following me on Tapastic for some time remember the blunder that was my first ever attempt to write a KerBop webcomic. It was 2013, and I tried to do the kind of webcomic where you kinda make it up as you go along. Started out fine, but everyone started noticing my story was getting tangled in knots, contradicting itself, and more or less falling apart. Oops. Apologies, but I had to yank that first attempt off the internet before it got any worse. Clearly, I needed to plan out a whole story before I plunged into this character.

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Around 2014, I kinda got a dare. Sorta. I was hanging out at a comic shop talking to some guys, and I said that I really like drawing with Prisma markers and like the effects I get when I color my comics in markers. The dudes there immediately started saying "Oh Paul Pope was coloring by hand too before he learned how to use Photoshop blah blah" and I took this as a challenge. I decided to create a comic all in markers.

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"Electricity is Her Element" is the product of that challenge, or it's the comic I spent the next year doing. It's a pretty zany story about space-dragons and KerBop makes an appearance close to the end, which makes it a KerBop story. Mainly I was just happy to see her in action and to get a story about her completed. Also, it was the story in which I realized she was a defender of this solar system, and also a young angel with much to learn.

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I'll admit that "Electricity" is kinda zany, but it gave me confidence. It wasn't until years later that I did another KerBop book, "Filaments." In "Filaments" I'm leaning into KerBop as a young angel, or focusing on the time when she is young, a child in 3rd grade in Angel School. That one's also a zany story, but it's likewise given me confidence :) 

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I see KerBop as coming into being when the universe is about 8 billion years old, emerging from a nebula like many other angelic beings, full of excitement to do angel-work. I also imagine angel school as lasting 5 billion years, during which young KerBop is impatient and eager to get to work. Finally, when she graduates, she's given the Earth and the solar system of Solaris as her guardianship, and she's excited to start fighting the forces of evil and darkness and protecting life-kind. The learning-trajectory of an angel, it turns out, is one of moving from a simplistic, good-evil view of the universe, to a much more complex, difficult, beautiful and tragic reality. I see KerBop as living through billions upon billions of years, seeing space battles and inter-dimensional war, and finally as an Elder angel, witnessing the conclusion of the universe, standing beside the other ancient guardians, as they prepare for the great compression back into One, from which all things begin again.

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So drawing from this, I have a ton of ideas for KerBop stories, and I've also had numerous false starts when I plunge into a complex story too fast. It's been a learning process. As I write this at the beginning of 2022, I have a story I'm almost done writing the outline for, called "Premonitions," which gets very galactic. If you'd like to read it online, I post new comics pages on Tapastic (www.tapas.io/thisiskatcrow) and I will try to put a notice on my Instagram as well. If you're interested in supporting the comic for a few dollars a month, and getting access to a lot more content, you can join my Patreon page, which will offer more info and insights about KerBop and her universe, previews and early access, more art and illustrations, sketches and so on. 

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That's just about all I can think of at the moment. Thanks for reading, and please check out the KerBop the Angel comics!

Kathleen Kralowec (Kat Crow)

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