Death, can I see her for one last time?
January 5, 2021 8:53 AM   Subscribe

Jenny-Jinya is a comic artist who, in her own words, makes people cry with her Loving Reaper comics
TW: As the name implies, the comics are about dying and dead animals due to issues like abandonment, neglect or abuse
posted by simmering octagon (34 comments total) 43 users marked this as a favorite
 
I've seen these before and just looked at the first one but yeah...no. they are really well done and beautiful but SO SAD :(
posted by supermedusa at 9:01 AM on January 5, 2021 [7 favorites]


Forwarded with fat tears dropping from eyes
posted by Morpeth at 9:17 AM on January 5, 2021 [1 favorite]


I tried my hardest not to look at the black cat comic with my black kitten in my lap but.... I did it. He's now smothering my face with his tiny face as I quietly weep. These are beautiful, thank you for sharing!
posted by travelingthyme at 9:26 AM on January 5, 2021 [6 favorites]


These are wonderful but so very very sad. The black cat one in particular gets me every time. I hope they have an impact on future pet owners. The artist feels like a very kind soul, I wish them every success and hope someday they enjoy a much wider audience. From the artist info page they seem to be at the start of their career and they've already developed a wonderful style and voice.
posted by jzb at 9:37 AM on January 5, 2021 [3 favorites]


I've seen some of these previously, but I can't bear to look at them or even think about them right now.
posted by briank at 10:05 AM on January 5, 2021 [5 favorites]


Damgoddit. I didn't need this today.
posted by Old'n'Busted at 10:08 AM on January 5, 2021 [1 favorite]


Do not want to see this. Thanks for the warning.
posted by mermayd at 10:13 AM on January 5, 2021 [1 favorite]


I'm pretty sure that our cat was one of those abandoned pets. She was caught in a feral cat trap and deemed suitable for adoption. She'd never been spayed or chipped, but she's always been a cat who just knows how to be a house cat. She doesn't break things, knows when she's overstayed her welcome and is just an easy, friendly, snuggly being. The organization that let us adopt her estimated that she was at least 10 years when she came to live with us. I'd assume that most feral cats are pretty set in their wild ways by that age.
posted by Alison at 10:20 AM on January 5, 2021 [3 favorites]


Oh heck. Having had cats for many years and a dog for some fewer years, I've found I have less and less capacity to cope with the thought of animals being neglected, even in comic strip form. It's just the knowledge of the fear and bewilderment they would be experiencing. It is deeply upsetting.
posted by Martha My Dear Prudence at 10:22 AM on January 5, 2021 [2 favorites]


I think that is the thing about these that is a gut-punch. DEATH, the grim reaper, comes to these animals with more kindness and compassion than they had received in life. its a beautiful idea that is completely heart breaking.
posted by supermedusa at 10:33 AM on January 5, 2021 [13 favorites]


jeeeeezus.
posted by Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon at 11:18 AM on January 5, 2021 [1 favorite]


There's one, "Opponents", where Death doesn't win - the spirit of "Life" saves an animal at the last minute, and the pair have a conversation where you realize that Life and Death aren't enemies or adversaries, they're actually something of a team.

It's less sad than the others and may be comforting.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 11:47 AM on January 5, 2021 [7 favorites]


you know what that's the one that made me start crying though. not sure why...
posted by Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon at 11:54 AM on January 5, 2021 [2 favorites]


WHAT CAN THE HARVEST HOPE FOR, IF NOT FOR THE CARE OF THE REAPER MAN?
posted by Halloween Jack at 12:07 PM on January 5, 2021 [25 favorites]


My reaction is evenly split between "Fuck these comics and fuck you for sharing" and "Octagon, thank you so, so much." And then crying.

I am a huge cat person, and lost my cat of 17 years almost two years ago, and I am still. not. close. to being over it. I do have a new raggedy cat who just recently decided she likes to sleep on me when I watch tv, so that's been a real joy. But I will never, ever understand people who abandon pets. It's absolutely psychotic.

Ok, now to attempt getting anything done. Sigh.
posted by hank_14 at 12:20 PM on January 5, 2021 [5 favorites]


Not sure I get the “shelters won’t let people adopt black cats in October because rituals” thing. It’s not as if the world is actually the Blair witch project for real. (Real monsters are more mundane and alas more common).
posted by aesop at 12:27 PM on January 5, 2021


She'd never been spayed or chipped, but she's always been a cat who just knows how to be a house cat.

Our cat seemed pretty clearly to have been lost or abandoned - she really took to being a housecat right away. The very first night, when she was staying in my room as her acclimation space, I woke up and she was sleeping on the bed next to me. Now she is the boss and has decided that I must dance attendance on her while she eats.
posted by Frowner at 1:10 PM on January 5, 2021 [4 favorites]


I don't know whether there's more cat abandonment in New Zealand than in the US/Canada or if I'm just more aware of it here. I think it may be the latter. I know a lot more people in rural areas here, which is where cats are likely to get dumped. More than half of the cats I've met (and I've met a lot of them) were either dumped as kittens and then rescued by their current human or showed up at their human's home and said "Hi, I live here now." (I also know someone here who accidentally acquired sheep in a similar way.)

France is the European champion of pet abandonment. People just dump their dogs at rest stops on their way to family holidays, which guts me. One of my friend's cats was literally in a bag about to be dropped in a river as a kitten and she stopped the guy. I knew people drowned kittens way back when but I didn't know it still happened.

I sent her an email literally begging her to write something in the vein of the Opponents strip because I'd been so devastated by so many of her strips. I'm glad she did but I'm sitting here crying just thinking about it. (Like, actual literal, not just kind of feeling sad.)

I love her work. I'm glad other people will get to see it. I don't think I can handle it today.
posted by rednikki at 1:54 PM on January 5, 2021 [2 favorites]


Just over two weeks ago, we found a stray kitten in our back yard. All alone (we looked for a momma or the rest of a litter in vain), 6-8 weeks old, hiding under our metal fire pit, with a bad upper respiratory infection and crying incessantly. Took her in, got her meds, fed her and kept her warm and safe, and now she's bouncing off the walls of one of our bathrooms, full of energy and vigor. (She's still in isolation until we get a thumbs-up from the vet to start integrating her with our household of two cats and two dogs, but that should be very soon.) Assuming that goes well, we are keeping her. Didn't plan on adding a fifth pet to our household, but we have the room and the money so here we are. Caring for her has been an absolute treasure.

I think back, though, to those first few days we had her. She was likely never taken care of by a human. Her meows were constant, the cries so clearly those of a kitten lost and confused and yearning for her mom. It broke my heart knowing that she was missing her kitty family, even though I'm sure taking her in from the cold Chicago winter was the right thing to do.

And then today I read an Instagram post from a kitten rescuer about the latest newborn kitten she's raising. The kitten was dropped off at the shelter at only about 1 week of age. The momma cat and rest of the litter? Still with the family that owns them. But this little guy was "too loud" so they separated him from his family and dropped him off at a shelter. The idea that someone purposefully separated a newborn kitten from its mother...

My heart can't take how horrible people can be to animals, and how good they can be to us.
posted by misskaz at 2:51 PM on January 5, 2021 [9 favorites]


Many years ago, I overheard a conversation between two of my coworkers. Lenore was annoyed and upset that her 11-year-old daughter was crying and heartbroken and carrying on. Why was the girl so sad? Well, the family decided to get a new sofa. So they got rid of their cat.

Yeah.

I am sure that my cat grew up in a loving family, because she's extremely sweet and trusts everyone except the guy who installed my windows; I wonder if there was an eviction or a foreclosure or a family crisis, rather than deliberate cruelty. (Yes, you shouldn't get a pet unless you have a reasonable expectation that you're going to be able to care for it for its full lifespan, but things happen, and things especially happen when people are poor, and there are so many apartments that don't accept pets, or only accept declawed cats.) That's almost sadder, to me.
posted by Jeanne at 3:40 PM on January 5, 2021 [1 favorite]


I'm not a violent man, but I really do want to throat punch people for the way they treat animals. December was rough with my sweet 7 year rescue kitten in the hospital unable to breath and my 15 year bird stick leg chihuahua suffering a recurrence of her melanoma that's going to take her away from us in 6 months.

That dog doesn't even like me that much, but I'll be damned if I'm not going to do everything to make her last months the best I can.

every time I've read these I get weepy, but it's worth it.
posted by drewbage1847 at 4:07 PM on January 5, 2021 [2 favorites]


My cat was found trapped in an abandoned building and meant to be fixed and released till they saw how friendly she was. I don't know anything about the first three years of her life but she seemed to know right away how to live inside, and I think she likes having a human friend.

The only clue I have is that if she hears kittens she goes into BEAST MODE. The first time it happened I just turned on a friend's video of hungry meowy little kittens, and she SHOT off the top of a high cabinet and across the room straight to me, meowing loudly and looking all around my laptop to find the babies and yelling at ME to Do Something About This.

It makes me so sad to think she might have had babies that got taken away from her, or that she might've been lost by nice people or a cat colony who wanted her, even though I love her so much and she has a good life with me. I'm not going to get her her own kitten, that is not a good choice for either of our lives, but when she's meowing to console a little baby kitten on YouTube I'm SO tempted.
posted by jameaterblues at 4:59 PM on January 5, 2021 [3 favorites]


yeah I looked at the black cat one and teared up a bit

----

We just gave away two cute little black kittens to a retired dude in the neighborhood who was in the market for a couple new kittens, after finishing his mourning for his previous cat; their mom (who is also a black cat) came into our place going "uh hey friends I feel weird why is there a paw coming out of me" and we spent a few stressed-out months giving her a place to safely raise them despite our place really not being cat-safe and us not having the funds/energy to fix much of that. Having a mama cat and two increasingly rambunctious kittens in the middle room of a shotgun house makes everything a lot more complicated.

Mom is one of the six cats who lives under our house due to our former neighbor's habit of letting grandma (who is also a black cat) wander into her place and have litters; Shadow had a total of twelve kids (variously pitch-black-with-little-bits-of-white, stripey-brown/orange, and tortiseshell) in the time they lived next to us, and a couple weeks after her kid came in and had two kittens, she came in and had three kittens who she refused to take care of - I got a distinct impression that she was just done with that - who I ended up spending a sleepless night keeping alive until we could get them to a place with a high likelyhood of hooking them up with a mom with some spare nipples, and then with homes - if they survived that rocky start they're probably getting adopted about now. If they didn't then maybe at least they had some moments of happiness and feeling loved, and a first name to hold in their secret hearts in their next lives. Maybe it would have been more merciful to just kill them quickly. I'll never know, we asked the foster organization to never tell us what happened.

I named the loudest one Orpheus, because their screams for milk and butt-wiping were what made me put in that effort. It would have been a lot easier to kill them quickly without one of them shrieking to have a chance at life. Maybe. I dunno. Still might have been super hard.

We hooked up with a cat-neutering charity after that and got everyone under the house fixed. Well, everyone but the one boy who is much more wary of humans than the rest. And he ain't gonna come drop more kittens in our living room so that's good enough for now.

Cats are really frighteningly efficient at making more cats, and apparently "I just had some kittens and I know damn well that I am not in a good position to take care of them, so I'm gonna abandon them" is a normal part of cat life. It's fucking horrible to think about now that I've seen it up close.
posted by egypturnash at 5:18 PM on January 5, 2021 [1 favorite]


Yeah, no. Not looking at these.

She'd never been spayed or chipped, but she's always been a cat who just knows how to be a house cat.

Same with my first cat. She had been on the streets in Chicago when she was brought in to the shelter, but there was nothing the least bit feral about her. From day one she was happier and more confident with me than without (I tried to set her up with a nice quiet bathroom space to acclimate. She raised hell. In my bedroom? She picked a spot next to my pillow and settled in.). And I know because I have a more or less true feral now, who even after a decade, and at a point where he's basically a super sweet house cat, still is a smidge too nervy to sleep on the bed at night.
posted by wotsac at 5:54 PM on January 5, 2021


jameaterblues, my cat ALSO goes into beast mode when she hears kittens. Every time I play a kitten video on YouTube or TikTok - and it's ONLY very young kittens, not any other sound - she cries and tries to bury under my laptop to find where the kittens are. She wasn't spayed until she was a little over a year old, and she was a stray for a while before that, so it does seem pretty likely that she would've had a litter at some point.
posted by Jeanne at 6:40 PM on January 5, 2021 [2 favorites]


I had made it as far as the one before Opponents before giving up because I am at work and probably shouldn't be having a cry. Then I read EmpressCallipygos 's comment, read the next one and was very glad I did, so thanks for that.

Unfortunately I then read Little Fish and now I am a wreck.
posted by Sparx at 6:53 PM on January 5, 2021


People on facebook or wherever share the black cat comic a lot, but they share it really badly. I've seen the beginning plenty of times, but I never saw the complete story until today.

If I were in a position to, I would adopt all the black cats, and have a vast black cat colony, because superstition can jump in a hole.
posted by Mister Moofoo at 11:02 PM on January 5, 2021


Man, I didn't even make it past the first one before tearing up.
posted by genuinely curious at 11:29 PM on January 5, 2021


this little guy was "too loud" so they separated him from his family and dropped him off at a shelter.

This story has been haunting me for the past few days. I'm glad to see that little one is doing well with his wonderful foster mom, but how he got there just kills me.

My black cat came from a shelter as a kitten. Her origin story is ostensibly that someone found her and her siblings in a box at the end of their driveway. We've always been a bit skeptical about that. But, as the shelter said, they were "absolutely delightful kittens" and the Morrigan has proved to be a weird and delightful cat 7+years later.

I can barely THINK about these cartoons without crying. I need to read the one that EC recommended, but I can't quite get there yet.
posted by dlugoczaj at 6:31 AM on January 6, 2021


I've been trying to comment on this for two days and I just couldn't manage it until now. I've got two geriatric bunnies and I'm doing my best to keep them happy and healthy but I know their time will come. I console myself with the knowledge that I saved them both from a terrible fate and gave them a long, comfortable life but I will still miss them so when they're gone.
posted by tommasz at 6:50 AM on January 6, 2021


... maybe at least they had some moments of happiness and feeling loved, and a first name to hold in their secret hearts in their next lives.

Sometimes I read something and I know that it will stick with me forever. Thank you egypturnash.
posted by twilightlost at 7:42 AM on January 6, 2021 [1 favorite]


We have three black cats from shelters. We always adopt black cats from shelters, as soon as we have fewer than three. It doesn't always work out: one of our cats was rehomed with friends of us this summer and is now much happier as an only pet.

I've heard that one of the reasons they have a harder time getting adopted is that it's harder to take good pictures of a black animal, pictures that show their facial features and expression and don't just show a black blob.

At the moment we have Wodan (came from a hoarding situation, had not been socialized, is now a snugglebeast), Wiep (was found in a box with her kittens, is a fierce little acrobat, likes snuggling but on her terms) and Kruimel (never socialized, had kittens at 1 year old, is tiny and shy and currently learning the perks of being a pet).
posted by Too-Ticky at 9:27 AM on January 6, 2021 [2 favorites]


Also normally comics don't make me weepy but these do it for me.
posted by Too-Ticky at 9:29 AM on January 6, 2021 [1 favorite]


These are powerful. Don't forget it's not just pets that suffer, but the animals you eat. I've had comments invisibly removed on Metafilter before for animal advocacy, but there's some easy steps you can take to make 2021 slightly less appalling than 2020 for sentient and non-evil beings everywhere. Hopefully things are changing before it's too late.
posted by davemee at 10:26 AM on January 6, 2021 [2 favorites]


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