We did this comic as part of the Little Bird Project kick off event art show we’re contributing art to being put on by Sarah H. at the Mama Cafe in the outer Mission on Oct. 13th (see details of art show). The show will attempt to address the subject of street harassment through the arts, focused in San Francisco and specifically the Mission district.

Although this comic deals with the very serious subject of street harassment towards women, we tried to approach it in a humorous manner (we’re always cartoonists first, activists second). It’s always difficult to try to bring humor to such sensitive topics, but hopefully what we achieved with this was a funny comic that will help start a dialog in men’s minds and get them to think about how they interact with women in the street. We had a long talk/interview with Sarah before coming up with the script for this comic (which me and Mikey wrote together) trying to think of an angle to address the comic. We decided on the format of a conversation between two bro-ed out Catbirds (the theme of the art show – a little grey bird that makes the stereotypical catcall sound) because we thought it would be important to have the discussion come from a male’s perspective, so male readers wouldn’t feel like they were being lectured with a feminist message and “throw down the book before they got the message”. Plus, bro speak is just kind of inherently funny, so a lot of the comedy just wrote itself. There were plenty more points we wanted to make about street harassment, but we’re limited by the 8 page mini-comic format… Maybe a sequel someday, maybe even have him interact with Happy Bunny in the Shady Brook universe.

Oh yeah, this comic was drawn by Mikey, Audrey, Justin and myself based off a script inspired by talking with Sarah and written by Mike and me.