LETO ARMITAGE: CATGIRL FROM SATURN

Description

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Talented comic book artist Michelle knows it’s crazy to fall in love with Galatea, the curvy, kick-ass, catgirl she’s drawing. When she meets curvaceous cosplayer Kaylee, the spitting image of her creation, the lines between art, fiction and reality begin to blur.

Has fate intervened to make Michelle’s dreams come true? Has her life turned into a strange tale of star-crossed love destined for tragedy? And, maybe more importantly: Would it still be worth the potential heartache it was?

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Excerpt

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You get so busy with the mechanics of life that you don’t always know when you reach a goal, but I got an email today that I guess means I made it. It read:

Dear Misamo,

We are publishing a collection of chapter-length autobiographical stories from female manga creators relating a connection between their life and their art. We would be honored if you would consent to be included and would supply us with a manuscript.

There was more but that’s the important bit. I guess I’ve done it. Am I famous? Established at least. So, here I am, writing the story I never thought I’d tell. My own. Even as I type the words in a manuscript I can’t help but think in panels. To start, imagine an awkward girl of twelve named Michelle Sarah Moore. Write ‘Misamo’ in an elegant script just in case the reader doesn’t get it. Okay, I need to stop doing that.

When I was twelve I wanted to study dolphins, so my dad said the first step would be learning how to swim. I decided the local recreational center’s Little Swimmer’s Pool was an impenetrable and terrifying barrier. Dolphins would have to fend for themselves. When I was thirteen I wanted to become a runway model. Then someone told me I had to get undressed in front of lots of people in the changing areas. Not happening. At fourteen I decided I wanted to become a nun. Look, growing up Catholic is weird.

I was fifteen when I discovered Ranma ½. He was a revelation. I liked being a woman, but sometimes I felt more masculine and sometimes more feminine, and Ranma spoke to that. Sometimes I liked a guy, but only situationally, and only when I really knew him. Girls… I liked looking at girls—it didn’t matter if I liked them or even knew them. Now I would describe myself as 98% lesbian.

Once we hit later installments where Ranma became more comfortable as a girl and flirted with guys, I felt validated even if he was doing it as a joke. I tore into everything Takahashi wrote and studied it. I began tracing characters, then learning to make them without tracing, and then I’d try to make changes to them. Sometimes, I’d trace a character and draw a new background for them. I even had a silly crush on Shampoo, the purple-haired Chinese Amazon.

So, at the age of fifteen, I decided to become a manga-ka, a female comics creator. As you have probably guessed—that one stuck. Two years later, it was fifth-period English and I was drawing when it happened. My warm-up character, and what I often turned to when idly drawing, was a
catgirl. She had started off as Felicia from Darkstalkers. I liked the combination of playful and feral in her, and it’s a rule of the universe that catgirls are hot. And before we go further—yes, so far I’ve established that my teen sexuality was heavily influenced by comics and video games. If you want the trifecta, let me tell you that seeing a red-headed cartoon of Kim Possible getting tied up worked for me too. But let us return to my unnamed catgirl.

She had stopped being Felicia a long time ago. I had made her just a bit thicker and removed the strange proportions with her hands and feet. The hair became black with pink stripes in the front. The silly costume of straps became a never-ending change in wardrobe. That day I was putting her in a white suit with a long white jacket.

I had Advanced Placement English for college credit with Mr. Kojima as my teacher, and we were discussing Greek Mythology. One of the reasons he was awesome was that he didn’t mind me drawing in class so long as I was paying attention. He was doing a survey of myths that were relevant
to literary themes, you know dad fuckers, mom fuckers, and… a swan fucker? Seriously, the Greek myths just seemed like endless early kink porn to me, but then we got to statue fucking.

It wasn’t the statue part that stood out to me, but that he said the statue’s name meant something like milky white skin and, just at that second, I had written ‘pure white fur’ next to my character. I had two little sketches in my notebook, my catgirl as a feral creature on all fours and the one of her in the stylish white suit and jacket. I wrote ‘Atea’ under her in her feral state and ‘Gala’ under her stylish dress. Then, to emphasize it to me, I drew arrows from both to ‘Galatea.’

My catgirl had a name.

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© 2023 Leto Armitage

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