Kate Worley has passed away

Details are here.

Omaha the Cat Dancer was one of the first "Adult" comics I read, and it was because it had more than sex to recommend it. Reed Waller's art was incredible, but that wouldn't have kept my interest if not for Kate's scripts. She brought each and every character to life in a way that few authors in comics ever could. Even the character who weren't "likable" had real reasons behind their actions, and she was one fo the very few authors who could make any character she wrote a whole person.

The story was left unfinished due to medical problems of both parties, and even with a LOT of interest by publisher, it never really wrapped up.

I knew Kate and Reed, working on the comic con here in Minneapolis, and Kate was a wonderful person to just talk to for hours at a time over a few drinks. She told a great story about how, whenever she was low on money in college, she'd run an ad for "training cats to use the toilet", run off a sheet showing how to put their litterbox on the toilet and use smaller and smaller boxes until the cat would just use the toilet instead of a litterbox...and she'd charge $10 - $20 for the "course" depending on how short she was on rent for the month.

I heard a couple of weeks ago that she and Reed were working together again on Omaha, and I just didn't have time to shoot her an e-mail to let her know how happy I was that they were working in comics again, and how I'd like to put my feeble web efforts into promoting the return of the comic. Now, she's gone.