Long Tail Kitty: Come Out and Play - Hardcover

Lark Pien: Lark Pien was a comics-obsessed kid—especially Peanuts, Old Master Q, and Uncanny X-men. She carried her fandom into formal training in both art and architecture. As Lark became more adept at creating her own handmade mini-comics, she decided to make art and illustration her full-time profession. Since then, she made her debut with Long Tail Kitty, was proclaimed a Best New Talent and won the Harvey Award for her coloring work on Gene Luen Yang's Printz-winning American Born Chinese. The San Francisco Cartoon Art Museum and other fine arts museums have featured Lark's collected works.

"Four small adventures in the life of Long Tail Kitty. In the first, LTK and his friend Tony, an orange cat, try to go with their elephant friend to a magic show on a robot-run riverboat, but the robobarker says that Big E exceeds the boat's weight limits. In the second, LTK and Tony go to Big E's birthday party, and LTK is put out when Big E does not open his present first. On the way home from the party, LTK gets lost when Tony goes on ahead, but he is helped out by new friend Frances. Finally, LTK calms down from the excitement by working in his garden, but Tony, Big E and Frances start a water fight. LTK looks rather like a plump, fanged, six-pointed starfish with a tail rather than a cat, but neither anatomical verisimilitude nor plot is the main event in Pien's pastel-colored animal world. The solipsistic LTK is marvelously childlike, so concerned with his relationships with his friends that sometimes he doesn't even notice that he's having a good time. Big E, befitting his size, operates as the world's nominal adult, wielding actual, unexplained magic when necessary to make things right, just like a human parent. Pien's delicately colored panels have all the appeal of a bag of jelly beans, appearing first as an abstract agglomeration of colors and then resolving into the sweetest of narratives. A cotton-candy graphic idyll." Kirkus Reviews


"Four small adventures in the life of Long Tail Kitty. In the first, LTK and his friend Tony, an orange cat, try to go with their elephant friend to a magic show on a robot-run riverboat, but the robobarker says that Big E exceeds the boat's weight limits. In the second, LTK and Tony go to Big E's birthday party, and LTK is put out when Big E does not open his present first. On the way home from the party, LTK gets lost when Tony goes on ahead, but he is helped out by new friend Frances. Finally, LTK calms down from the excitement by working in his garden, but Tony, Big E and Frances start a water fight. LTK looks rather like a plump, fanged, six-pointed starfish with a tail rather than a cat, but neither anatomical verisimilitude nor plot is the main event in Pien's pastel-colored animal world. The solipsistic LTK is marvelously childlike, so concerned with his relationships with his friends that sometimes he doesn't even notice that he's having a good time. Big E, befitting his size, operates as the world's nominal adult, wielding actual, unexplained magic when necessary to make things right, just like a human parent. Pien's delicately colored panels have all the appeal of a bag of jelly beans, appearing first as an abstract agglomeration of colors and then resolving into the sweetest of narratives. A cotton-candy graphic idyll." ―Kirkus Reviews