Hepcats

Hepcats is a comic book series self-published in the 1990s by artist Martin Wagner. It deals with the lives of four college students, rendered as anthropomorphic animals (humanoid bodies, but animal heads), and is inspired by Wagner's own college experiences.

The series began as a comic strip in The Daily Texan, the student newspaper at The University of Texas at Austin, in 1987. Each installment was typically four panels (but with frequent variation), usually with a comedic gag at the end, but with ongoing storylines.

In 1989, inspired by cartoonists such as Dave Sim who were successfully self-publishing their comics, Wagner began publishing Hepcats as a black and white comic book series, under his own Double Diamond Press imprint. In this format, the series took on the highly detailed pen-and-ink artwork that would become one of its distinguishing features. Wagner immediately began experimenting with page layouts, including turning the pages sideways, using a double-page spread for each layout for issue #2. Issue #3 began what was intended to be an 18-part graphic novel entitled Snowblind. Critics have frequently cited Sim's Cerebus the Aardvark as an artistic influence on this material.

Though critically acclaimed, with a cult following, the series was not a financial success, and this led to an erratic publishing schedule that frustrated readers. In comments written later, in the summer of 1996, Wagner cited poor sales, his weak business skills, and his 1991 divorce as the causes of a financial "hole" he was struggling to get out of. Despite Wagner's increasing prominence as one of several acclaimed self-publishers of the period—along with Jeff Smith (Bone), Colleen Doran (A Distant Soil), James Owen (Starchild), and Sim—the series stalled after issue #12 in 1994. Collections of the Daily Texan strips and of the first volume of Snowblind were released, but Wagner said those sales were not enough to make continuation of the series financially viable.

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