Simon’s Cat
Author: Simon Tofield
Published by: Text

This review began embarrassingly. The Text publicist emailed me saying that she’d heard I was a cat person. What?! WHO TOLD YOU – I mean, of course The Enthusiast would be interested in this title!

Turns out the tattletale was Sophie Cunningham of Meanjin, who I will state for the record owns not one but two cats. But Text was well informed. I’d mentioned Simon’s Cat while heaping scorn on the Whiskas Purple Cat. Also, since I generally like cats and have The Enthusiast’s indefatigable book packaging reviewer living in my house, I suppose I am a cat person.

While the book cover may have fudged matters a little (at the time of writing, the Simon’s Cat YouTube channel had received 2,986,323 views; the 144,811 subscribers constitute a far less impressive figure), it’s a bona fide YouTube phenomenon. As well as the official Flash animations, the first of which won ‘Best Comedy’ at the 2008 British Animation Awards, there are various mashups and homages online, some of which are epic fails. Want to have Simon’s Cat sing on your phone? There’s an app for that. As yet, though, British animator Tofield hasn’t secured his own TV series, as Beached Az did on the ABC.)

So to the book. It’s a handsome hardcover in an unusual landscape format, short and wide. There’s no text, and while some jokes unfold over successive drawings and pages, there is no overarching narrative. Rather, it feels like a sketchbook: a series of vignettes and ideas. It’s possible to dip in and out at will, which makes this the perfect Christmas gift to peruse lazily after a vast feast of turkey.

Speaking of which, the primary gag of Simon’s Cat is that the cat always wants food. It will inflict all sorts of damage on Simon and his house – including with a baseball bat – to hasten feeding time. But plenty of jokes in this book revolve around the cat’s elaborate ruses to catch mice, fish and birds. There are also some cute jokes about the cat’s one-sided friendship with Simon’s garden gnome, and its antagonistic relationship with Simon’s sister’s dog.

An image from the book.

The black-and-white illustrations are wonderfully evocative, with an impressive economy of line. There’s no shading, except for in a lovely section of sketches that are set at night. Tofield always makes the cat look recognisably felinomorphic, even though so much of its expressions and behaviour are human-like. There’s a dynamic quality to these images, which should please fans of the animations.

Tofield also has a canny eye for those little feline foibles that cat owners will instantly identify: their ability to nap in the oddest places; the way their pupils dilate in low light or when they’re excited; their preference for improvised cat toys over purpose-made ones; their mysterious ability to ‘lose’ their collars.

The only drawings that didn’t work for me were a series juxtaposing ancient and modern cat behaviours to suggest that little has changed. The point seemed too obvious.

My fellow non-cat-owning Enthusiasts were noticeably unmoved by Simon’s Cat. The consensus was, “So what? It’s just a cat, doing stuff cats do.” Clearly this kind of gentle humour has a very specific target audience. But it’s the elegance and deft observational comedy of Tofield’s work that lift this enjoyable book above the morass of festive-season gag gifts.