Beginning in November 1976, Cathy appeared in syndication in newspapers across the country. While Guisewite was something of an accidental cartoonist who never seriously studied art, she found inspiration in her favorite childhood comics, as she explained in an interview with Tom Heintjes:
I loved reading the comic strips. I usually read them with my dad.
The ones I remember reading the most were Peanuts, Nancy, Henry and Blondie. It never would have occurred to me to put my thoughts into a comic strip if it weren’t for Peanuts. That strip was absolutely, 100 percent the guiding influence on my comic strip. I grew up read-ing Sparky’s strip about real anxieties and frustrations and humili-ations and all those real human emotions, and he gave a voice to all those emotions on the comics pages. (“Cathy”)
While focusing on “real human emotions,” Cathy was never lauded for the quality of the art. In fact, Doonesbury cartoonist Gary Trudeau commented, “I’ve always thought that my main contribution to the comics page was that I made it safe for bad drawing, that Cathy and Bloom County and particularly Dilbert would have been unthink-able had I not challenged the assumption that competent draftsman-ship was prerequisite to a career in cartooning” (qtd. in Soper, Gary Trudeau 130). Guisewite’s creation process, utilizing tracing paper, pens, and lightboxes, remained much the same throughout the entire run of the strip, although a closer look at the first few years of the car-toon reveal the artist’s development from a rougher, shakier style, to a more practiced and solid line—still simple, but definitely more pol-ished. In his essay, “Storylines,” Jared Gardner expresses the impor-tance of the creator’s linework in understanding comics, noting, “the physical labor of storytelling is always visible in graphic narrative, whether the visible marks themselves remain, in a way unique to
any mechanically reproduced narrative medium” (65), and Cathy as comic undeniably calls attention to its eponymous creator, encourag-ing the audience to believe we are comencourag-ing “face to face with a graph-iateur” (64), creating our own idealized author figure for Guisewite, so much so that interviewers frequently expressed surprise that the actual Guisewite was so unlike her creation. And while Guisewite did utilize assistants as the strip gained in popularity, they worked primarily on the licensed products, suggesting that the vast majority of her strips were drawn by her own hand. And these strips, from a self-professed writer and drawing autodidact, rather than trained art-ist, suggest a humble, accessible aesthetic, with the rounded edges, thick, frumpy bodies, and simplified facial expressions positing a cutesy or sweet aesthetic one might associate with children doodling in notebooks and diaries.
Cathy appeared as a black and white daily strip, usually com-prised of four panels, as well as a larger color strip on Sundays, usu-ally featuring seven to ten panels following a larger initial panel featuring a stylized, decorated Cathy logo that changed from week to week. The art style is decidedly simple, with rounded, abstract fig-ures and minimalist featfig-ures. The backgrounds are sparse, and the bodies of the figures do little move the story forward, remaining, for the most part, static and inactive. Rather, movement is conveyed by the use of supporting details, such as sweat droplets or move-ment lines. While there are momove-ments of physical comedy, particu-larly when Cathy falls or screams, the strip is typically not one that relies on broad bodily gags, but rather one that utilizes situational humor and wordplay as the basis for the joke. While the daily strips, as previously mentioned, generally have four panels, there are occa-sional exceptions, and apart from a rare explanatory caption, there is no narrative text box or heterodiegetic narrator, with the language coming directly from the characters, written in slightly stylized but highly readable font and surrounded by straightforward speech bal-loons. Cathy is a loquacious strip; the characters chatter incessantly, often to themselves, for Cathy frequently engages in long-winded monologues, as well as engaging with other characters. The audience acts as a heterodiegetic focalizer, watching the scenes as they unfold, but always removed from the actions of the diegesis. The characters age extremely slowly, but they do reference current events, even as they are divorced from real time, evolving incrementally. Over this leisurely evolution, the humor of Cathy reflects the artistic style—
the wit displays a soft touch as embodied in the gentle curves of the
characters’ rounded bodies. The comedy primarily emerges from character-driven misunderstandings, witty dialogue, and situational humor. This is not a strip of grand guffaws or scathing take-downs, but of small, knowing smiles of recognition and sympathy.
The strip followed the daily trials and tribulations of its main character, Cathy, as she navigated what the creator called the “four major guilt groups,” “food, love, career, and mothers,” surrounded by a cast of several recurring characters, including Cathy’s domineer-ing mother, her agreeable (and often absent) father, primary suitor Irving, best friend Andrea, and several years later, her rescue dog Electra. Cathy’s age is indeterminate, particularly as time moved so slowly, but she appears to be in her late twenties or early thir-ties for over thirty years. Cathy spends much of the strip working at Product Testing Incorporated, although she is eventually laid off and then rehired. Throughout her career, Cathy strives to find an appropriate work/life balance, often lamenting the impossibility of adhering to unattainable standards of beauty, decrying the fashion industry and media pressure to remain thin. In the first renderings, Cathy’s silhouette is shaky and insecure, something of an agitated scrawl rather than practiced illustration. Over time Guisewite settled into her style, drafting main character Cathy with a thick, solid out-line that formed a sloping, oval shape for her body. The rendering evokes the smooth, comforting silhouette of a Russian nesting doll.
Cathy’s head is round and full, and she is known for the long strings of hair, parted in the center, that frame her face, apart from regu-lar hairstyle disasters. Cathy has regu-large, wide, conjoined eyes, dimin-utive eyebrows, and a mouth that transforms to evoke a variety of emotions. Fans and critics frequently commented on Cathy’s miss-ing nose, which appeared very rarely in profile. (The other characters in the strip do have simple noses.) Cathy’s eyebrows and mouth are her most expressive features, with her mouth transforming from a simple sweep of a smile to a wide-open scream and her eyebrows frequently tilting to convey a range of emotions from exasperation to shame. While Cathy’s outfits change and are the frequent topic of discussion, she is most frequently depicted wearing pants and a red sweater (when in color) with a small pink heart in the center, and it is this look which is frequently parodied in other popular culture renditions of the character.
The other key players in the strip share a similarly simple aes-thetic, with soft, rounded bodies but marginally different hair-styles, noses, and accessories. Cathy’s neighborhood is decidedly
not diverse, and fails to feature people of color, a range of economic backgrounds, or the LGBTQ+ community. Cathy exists in a small, homogenous bubble and if she represents any version of feminism, it is a strand associated with middle-class white women, situated apart from diversity or difference.
The most dominant (and domineering) character other than Cathy is her mother, Anne Andrews, clearly identified by her glasses and frilly apron. Anne is an ever-present force in her daughter’s life, worrying about her daughter, offering her advice, and encouraging her to settle down and get married. The two women represent two distinct generations affected by the Women’s Liberation movement of the 1970s. While Cathy vocally embraces many of the tenets of Women’s Lib, particularly in reference to her career and the notion of
“having it all,” Anne hearkens back to an earlier image of ideal wom-anhood, stressing domesticity and family, in spite of a brief inter-est in Women’s Liberation after forming a “Consciousness Raising”
group that ultimately failed and cemented her commitment to more traditional notions of women as homemakers. As Christine Stansell argues, at the time, motherhood and feminism were frequently pic-tured as incompatible: “Motherhood seemed to be about concessions to others, not revolution. It was most certainly the state that femi-nists wanted to escape, not that which they wanted to become” (262).
Thus, in many ways Cathy and Anne played out a humorous enact-ment of a contemporary conflict over women’s evolving roles in soci-ety, a tableau unfolding in many American homes.
Other characters contributed to the diegesis, fulfilling vari-ous functions, although none held the import of Cathy’s mother.
Cathy’s father, Bill, is a generically pleasant man, who remained in the background much of the time, both literally and figuratively, although he provides a solid and supportive counterpart to the offi-cious Anne. Two other characters, Irving and Andrea, form the core of the cast, and represent vastly different worldviews. While Cathy dated a rotating cast of swains over many, many years, she returned time and again to Irving Hillman, eventually marrying him in 2005.
Irving, a sturdy man with thick, dark hair and a somewhat bulbous nose, changed his look over the years and very slowly evolved from a cheating, chauvinistic philanderer to an ever-so-slightly more mature partner. Cathy’s friend Andrea, however, presented a staunchly femi-nist point-of-view, attempting to bolster a dithering Cathy. Andrea,
easily identified by her dark, bob haircut and jaunty scarves, eventu-ally embraced the nuclear family, marrying and having two children, Zenith and Gus, but maintained her fight for equality while strug-gling to reenter the workplace after her job was given away. As the overt political struggle over women’s equality as represented in the strip waned, Andrea disappeared from the daily pages, appearing only in the final years when Cathy found her old friend and asked her to be a part of her wedding. Cathy was also supported by her close friend Charlene, the receptionist at Product Testing Inc., and was bedeviled by Mabel, a returning character who appeared in a variety of service positions, including as a server, a salesperson, and a bank teller. Mabel, who always positioned a pencil in her dark, curly hair, could be counted on to hassle Cathy at any given institu-tion. Over the years the characters formed a community, addressing new trends but continually circling the same themes.
As Cathy and her community visited and revisited the “four major guilt groups” of food, career, love, and mothers, they also reflected the historical moment. Many readers and critics critiqued Cathy’s repetition, particularly in the later years, as a distinct break-down and lack of imagination on the part of the creator, who failed, in their eyes, to find new ideas and keep the strip fresh. However, Guisewite indicates that, while the trends, fads, and technology changed a great deal since the beginning of the strip, for women, ultimately, very little changed in their status or positions of power.
Could it be, that, rather than a failure, this repetition represents a choice to exhibit the rhetorical strategy of epimone, or the repetition of an image that speaks to its enduring relevance? Sister Miriam Joseph claims that, “because of its insistent repetition of an idea in the same words” (or in this case very similar images), “epimone is an effective figure in swaying the opinions of a crowd” (220). And Cathy, which appeared in so many newspapers and on so many refrigerators, was certainly influencing its readers. Furthermore, as Kerry Soper argues in his analysis of Doonesbury, “the identities, habits, even politics of the characters remain somewhat static. They are like sitcom char-acters that can never learn from their experiences; the same story, with minor variations, is told again and again” (Gary Trudeau 126).
We cannot, as readers, expect fictional characters in comic strips to exhibit the same growth and development as real-world counter-parts. Part of the charm of the serial strip is the comfort of the
famil-iar. Furthermore, the audience learns from the foibles arising from the inertia of the characters. Soper, once again, studies the lessons of Gary Trudeau’s Doonesbury, concluding:
While Chaplin’s Little Tramp or Trudeau’s Zonker persists from epi-sode to epiepi-sode as an unchanging, unintentionally wise fool—never abandoning delusions, obsessions, and a selfish engagement with the world—the reader can spot the lessons that need to be learned and thus can use the repetitive motifs as prompts to overcome their own delusions or political naiveté, in effect, we learn from their experiences because they cannot. (Gary Trudeau 127)
Although Cathy doesn’t “learn her lesson,” but rather continues to struggle with the pressures of unattainable beauty ideals, with bal-ancing her desire for a fulfilling career and her wish for a success-ful romantic relationship, and with her weight on a daily basis, the reader can learn from Cathy’s mistakes, understanding the lessons she fails to grasp.