When Nancy Beiman was 65 and contemplating retirement from her job as a professor of animation, she had no clue as to how she would fill her days. “Many people take up an artistic hobby. But what was I, a professional artist, supposed to do? Take up accounting?” Before she could embark on a crash course in spreadsheets, she woke up one morning with the idea for a comic strip.
Beiman had been doing much of her drawing on computer but for this new idea, she returned to sketching characters on paper, then inking the drawings with a Pentel brush pen. “I just started doodling this kitten from a previous film I’d abandoned, alongside two dogs and a little girl who reminded me of the children’s book character Pippi Longstocking.”
