Kevin and Kell

Setting

Kevin and Kell takes place in a town known as Domain, populated entirely by animals. The comic describes the world they live in as created by an organization of birds, commonly referred to by fans of the strip as the "Great Bird Conspiracy" (GBC). Birds were the next species after humans to reach sapience. After humans left the planet, the birds traveled back in time to create a world without humans, and gave intelligence to fauna. However, their plan failed to remove the predator-prey relationship and as a result, the world created is similar to that of twenty-first century Earth, but with a greater likelihood of a violent death.

The society in Kevin and Kell rather than identifying people by race or social class has class distinctions based on diet such as "carnivores", "herbivores", and "insectivores". There is also a "Wild" where civilized animals can leave civilization and act like normal animals, walking on all fours and not wearing clothing. Predation is central to strips and jokes are made about it being commonplace.

Humans exist in an alternate Domain, and are referred to as creatures with no natural defenses. Most believe that they are fictional creatures; but a few, including the Dewclaws, know that they exist. This was developed further in 2003 by the introduction of the character Danielle, a human who enters the animal world via the Bermuda Triangle and transforms into a rabbit. However, she later has a son, Francis, who is born human. The series features jokes on a variety of topics. Many draw satirical parallels between its world and ours, making fun and sometimes social commentary on politics, sports, society, class-snobbery, school, technology, pop culture and corporate culture, for example; in January 2008 the Predator's Union was described as going on strike, in a parody of the 2007–08 Writers Guild of America strike.

Main characters

The strip's main characters are the Dewclaws, a blended family as a result of an interspecies marriage. The comic's primary characters are Kevin Dewclaw, a rabbit, and his wife Kell Dewclaw, a wolf. They met in a web forum for carnivores, where Kevin was "lurking". They began to fall in love, but it was not until they met each other in person that Kell discovered Kevin was a rabbit. The relationship they developed online leads them to continue dating and eventually marry, despite knowing that they would be outcasts from the rest of society.

Originally, Kevin worked as a system operator on a herbivore web forum, although he later became the co-owner of his own internet service provider, Hare-Link. Kell worked for Herd-Thinners, a company that hunts down prey. Her job is to hunt down other animals. Originally she hunted down her own prey – any prey not eaten by her is later sold in grocery stores as "processed meat" – but she later became an executive and then CEO of the company , taking over from her old boss R.L., a ruthless wolf whose face is never seen apart from his drooling mouth. Kell was eventually be pushed out of her executive position in a bloodless coup by R.L., and started running her own start-up company "Dewclaw's Fine Meat Products" that exclusively doesn't hunt rabbits.

The couple has three children. The eldest is Lindesfarne Dewclaw, an English hedgehog daughter Kevin adopted during his first marriage. The second eldest child is Rudy, Kell's son from her first marriage to a fox. Rudy, a talented artist, once challenged Kevin for the position of alpha male, unable to accept a rabbit as head of the household and as his stepfather. He has since matured and has come to terms with the marriage. The youngest child is Coney, a carnivorous rabbit and their only child by birth. Although only five years old, she is a capable hunter, though Kevin's mother, Dorothy, keeps trying to make her into an herbivore, as well having an artistic streak like her half-brother,

Other regular characters include Fenton Fuscus, a bat who went to high school and university with Lindesfarne, to whom he is now married; Fiona Fennec, a half-red, half-Fennec fox vixen who is Rudy's girlfriend; George Fennec, Fiona's father who is married to Danielle, a sister of Kevin, and have a human son, Francis (the first of its kind in this world)since Danielle herself was human once; and Ralph Dewclaw, Kell's brother who was originally hostile to Kevin, but now accepts the rabbit as family after several unsuccessful hunting attempts. He now works for Kevin as part of Hare-Link and is married to George's former wife Martha. Another is Daisy, a daisy plant made intelligent by the GBC. It lives with the Dewclaws as a pet, having the same intelligence as a dog or cat in our world.

History

Kevin and Kell was one of the first comic strips to be syndicated online, although older webcomics exist. For example, Argon Zark! was created on June 1995, three months before Kevin and Kell. However, Holbrook was the first syndicated cartoonist to invest heavily in online comic strips. T Campbell wrote that Holbrook brought "an air of legitimacy and professionalism that many web cartoonists lacked then and still lack now."

The strip started in black and white, changing to a color-scheme on June 23, 2000. It is colored by husband and wife team Terrence and Isabel Marks. The strip has been considered for an animated television series, the latest attempt being filmed in Spring 2011. Kevin and Kell has appeared daily in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution since January 2004, after winning a contest where several new comics, (syndicated and/or on-line) were considered and voted on by readers; Holbrook has stated that this constitutes the "bulk of his readership", citing the paper's circulation. In 2009, Kevin and Kell survived a cull of several comic strips from the paper. In an online poll, the strip was voted as the favourite of readers of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Holbrook currently writes two other strips; On the Fastrack and Safe Havens. He uses a "three-week schedule", saying in several interviews, "During this week, for instance, I'll be writing three-week's worth of Fastrack material, and drawing the 21 gags I wrote for Kevin & Kell last week. Next week I'll write for Safe Havens while drawing the Fastrack batch. And on it goes… On a typical day I'll begin by writing four gags by 2:00, then I'll begin drawing, usually doing about four strips. At night, after everyone goes to bed, I'll write two gags."

In 1998, Holbrook was named "Cartoonist of the Year" at Pogofest, in part for his work on Kevin and Kell. In 2001, the strip won the award for "Best Anthropomorphic Comic" at the Web Cartoonist's Choice Awards, and was nominated for the same award in 2002. In 2003, Kevin and Kell won the award for "Best Anthropomorphic Comic Strip" at the Ursa Major Awards.

Supplemental Internet non-Comic-Strip content

Kevin and Kell has become more than just a webcomic. It has branched out into three other popular social network mediums (a blog, a Facebook page and a Twitter channel), with several of its characters ostensibly participating:

Lindesfarne’s Blog: Virtual Quill

Since February 2006, Lindesfarne has had her own blog titled "Virtual Quill". Originally, she was posting it as a sort of private journal, using the interdimensional portal to make sure that if it were ever seen by others, it would only be seen by humans from her native dimension (namely, our world), not the dimension she's called home for the vast majority of her life. She would post generally once a week, talking about the various events in her life and those of her friends and family, providing additional information and insights into what was shown on the strip. Many fans commented back to her as if she were a real person, but she couldn’t see those comments at first because her interdimensional Internet connection was one-way (write-only).

But beginning on Sunday, July 27, 2008, she activated a "portal receiver" that enabled her to, for the first time, read the comments on her blog, and post comments back to the readers. Since then, she has shared the existence of this interdimensional blog to some of her closest family and friends, some of whom have also posted comments (though only Lindesfarne herself posts main entries). As with any other prolonged contact with humans, instinct loss soon sets in, so Lindesfarne must of necessity limit her participation to only one day per week (usually on Sundays). There has even been participation from characters in other strips set in other dimensions that have had crossovers with Kevin and Kell.

The blog has since moved from being hosted on the webcomic's servers to Tumblr.

Catherine Aura's Twitter channel

Shortly after Lindesfarne had discovered her true origin as a human, Rudy's former schoolteacher Catherine Aura (a turkey buzzard) and her young son Nigel used an interdimensional portal to travel to "our" world permanently, taking both Lindesfarne's and Danielle's places there to restore the balance and cure the global instinct loss crisis that would otherwise have forced both of them to return to the world of humans permanently. Since the portal transforms travelers into a sapient species found in the destination world (which is how Lindesfarne became a hedgehog and Danielle a rabbit, though both were born humans in "our" world and had counterparts of those other species in the Kevin and Kell world), travelers from that world usually transform into humans, but Catherine and her son transformed into dolphins instead (indicating that dolphins are, in fact, sapient, and perhaps more so than humans). That was the last time they were seen in the webcomic strip.

However, the adventures of Catherine and Nigel are available via Catherine's Twitter channel. She posts updates about what she and Nigel are doing, which include covertly monitoring the activities of a certain human code-named "Subject A" who appears to be psychically connected to the world of Kevin and Kell as well as of another mostly human world in which the King Features-syndicated comic strips On the Fastrack and Safe Havens are set. "Subject A" is noted to be writing and drawing three comic strips for both worlds (based on his presumed psychic connection to them), making it plain that he is, in fact, none other than cartoonist Bill Holbrook himself. She and Nigel are having other adventures as well, including finally transforming into humans to better monitor events in our society. She has married a human sea captain, and now has a daughter, Ursala, who is a bear-like human child. Recently, she has been dealing with a conspiracy by rogue birds who wish to seize the portal by violence, and to re-establish bird control over the "Kevin and Kell" world.

Rudy Dewclaw's Facebook Page

Since February 12, 2012, Rudy Dewclaw has had his own Facebook page, usually consisting of witty comments and links to the daily strips and other visuals from the Kevin and Kell website.

Reception

Since its creation, Kevin and Kell been mainly been given positive reviews, although there has also been some criticism. Resident Zompist.com comic reviewer "Bob" praises the way the comic is written and illustrated, and its dealings with difficult issues such as divorce and death. However, he criticizes its suburban nature, saying: "All the family crises are defused within a week or two. No one has any aspirations besides a computer-related job and a quiet heterosexual romance. There seem to be no cities, no foreign nations, no art, no teenage sex." Another review from Disjointed Ramblings comments on the use of satire in the comic, writing that "while the satire is usually gentle, there's plenty of it."

Brandon Sanderson's review in The Official Time Waster's Guide cites the comic's world design, longevity and a discomforting setting where intelligent animals are killed as strengths. However, Sanderson also complained that Holbrook does not enforce this aspect in the main characters, saying, "While Kell, Rudy, and others make kills every day, none of the main character herbivores ever really have to worry about being stalked and killed. When they are threatened (such as when Lindesfarne is stalked by some cougars near the beginning of the comic's run), the enemy predators are presented as dark, evil things to be defeated.…This sense of careless, off-handed killing gives the comic a lot of its humor—however, to maintain that air of humor, Bill never allows the society to work its everyday worst on any of the main characters."

During a review in webcomic podcast Digital Strips, commentator Daku describes Kevin and Kell as "one of the few anthropomorphic strips that I actually like," saying that "this is as if animals had a society." Zampzon praises the quality of the artwork, but complains that the strip relies on too many animal jokes.

Kevin and Kell and Holbrook are both popular within the furry fandom. Holbrook was first contacted by the fandom in late 1995, soon after the strip was published. He attended his first furry convention, ConFurence, in January 1997. Holbrook holds an annual "Kevin and Kell patron social" at Anthrocon for people who sponsor the strip. Holbrook also works occasionally with other cartoonists, both furry and non-furry, and characters from his strip make cameos in other strips. Examples include Ozy and Millie, General Protection Fault, PartiallyClips, and Schlock Mercenary.

Products

There are 20 books containing collections of Kevin and Kell strips, including bonus strips. They are currently published by Holbrook's own publishing label Pencil Rough Productions, with older books originally published by Plan 9 Publishing.

A role-playing game based on Kevin and Kell was released in July 2005 by Comstar Games. Hare Link, the Internet Service Provider run by Kevin, is a real-life ISP available at www.harelink.biz.

In November 2010, a Kevin and Kell iPhone/iPod/iPad application was released to the iTunes App Store. The app is a joint product between the developers of the app, WareTo, and Bill Holbrook. Rather than selling a limited number of strips, this app allows users to read the entire Kevin & Kell library of cartoons. The app also contains additional features and content including video, cast descriptions, and hidden surprise "Easter eggs."

According to Write 2 Now's December 2010 newsletter, Holbrook and Phil Rogers are working to get the strip made into an animated cartoon series, with a pitch to cable executives, but as of this writing no deal has been made.