Glasgow artist releases first book about East End gang of cats

Since the late 1980s, Catherine Neville has written and illustrated hundreds of comic strips based on the Wildcats gang, following the misadventures of sensible Droos, daft food lover Bogey, and troublemaker Mossop.

Made up of several stories collected over the years, The Wildcats: Pure Bravado has now been published on Amazon Kindle and is sure to appeal to fans of Scottish humour and cats alike.

Catherine, who also specialises in drawing cityscapes and old buildings, says the comics were inspired by life in the East End, with the characters developed over several years.

She said: “My flatmate and I had three cats and we used to kind of make up stories about them.

"I’ve always been artistic so I decided to do little cartoons of them and from there it just kind of developed.

"I used to do doodles with cartoons and make wee speech bubbles and I enjoyed doing it so much I just continued and that’s really all there was to it.

“I was inspired very much by what was happening roundabout me in the East End and by certain words that I heard which were Scots.

"It might have been somebody had said something and I would think ‘ah that’s such a funny word’ and suddenly a story would evolve round one word or an idea or something would happen and I would think ‘how would the Wildcats deal with that situation’ and it just seemed to turn into a bit of a passion with me.”

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Despite being told her cartoons would reach a wider audience if they were written in English, Catherine decided against it.

She said: “I always insisted that they speak in broad Glaswegian because I just felt as if it suited them.

"When you live in the East End of Glasgow you tend to fall into the way other people speak and it just seemed like a natural progression for the cats to speak the language of where they lived and where they met other characters who speak like that.

“I lived in Tollcross so it was full of people, real characters and a lot of what happens is based on a compilation of these characters and the way they spoke.”

The decision has served Catherine well as she was approached by Scots scriever Michael Dempster and had her cartoons published in the first two issues of Scrieve, a collection of Scottish comics.

While the cartoons don’t fall into any age group, Catherine says they tend to be enjoyed by adults more than children, though they’re suitable for everyone.

She said: “I don’t do swearing in the cartoons, I don’t do anything that would offend anybody, so it’s all politically correct, just what I would like to call gentle humour with Glaswegian dialect.”

She added: “I think they genuinely appeal to people who like the use of Scots language and who are also cat lovers because the cats have very cat like personalities in them.

"If you’ve ever owned a cat you’ll know cats are very selfish, self-absorbed and they tend to have a kind of character to them that’s different to say, for example, dogs.”

The Wildcats: Pure Bravado was originally published in 2017, but during lockdown Catherine decided to update the book.

Over hundreds of hours, she painstakingly redid all the speech bubbles and font, and tidied up the original artwork.

In the future, Catherine is hoping to have it published as a comic, as well as releasing another book made up of her comic strips.

The relaunched The Wildcats: Pure Bravado is currently available to buy on Amazon Kindle, or you can view the comic strips on Instagram and Twitter.

To view Catherine’s other artwork, click HERE.