Newshounds is a humorous webcomic drawn and written by Thomas K Dye. The comic updates on five days each week, from Monday to Friday, and is hosted on the Internet by the online comics syndicate Keenspot.
Scenario and Characters
The comic follows a group of pet animals and their human owner, living in an unnamed American city and together operating a small news station, KPET. There are eight central characters and sever minor characters with recurring roles.
Central Characters
- Kevin J Dog Dog. KPET's camera operator and technical person. A fairly gentle and sensitive character, often playing straight-man to the other characters' follies.
- Renata Fayre Dog. Female news anchor. Strong-willed, good at finding facts, and generally clear-headed when not in the grip of journalistic ambition.
- Wolfram Blitzen Dog. Male news anchor. Very fond of his looks and wardrobe.
- Rochelle O'Shea Dog. Field reporter, suave and calm but troubled by a secret addiction to danger. Wolfram's girlfriend. Rochelle is the only central character introduced since the beginning of the strip; she first appeared as a minor character in summer 2000, and returned to join KPET permanently in the fall of 2001.
- Alistair Katt Cat. Weather person and outspoken liberal commentator. In December 2003, he came out as a homosexual. He is very fond of catnip.
- Sam Shepherd Dog. Sports reporter. Macho and decidedly right-wing. Disagrees loudly with Alistair over politics, but has rescued and been rescued by him.
- Ferris the Rat Rat. KPET's janitor, though next to useless at the job. Irrepressible, obsessed with pop-culture, infatuated with Tori Spelling, and given to launching business plans which take off just long enough to cause chaos.
- Lorna Dilbrook Human. Owner of KPET and its animal staff. According to the comic's back-story webpages she started the station to follow her passion for news, finding its staff in the animal shelter she'd been working at. She has kept KPET going ever since, gritting her teeth through its endless crises and absurdities.
Minor characters
- Lorna's Parents Human. Her dad is somewhat financially irresponsible. Her mom is allergic to pets.
- Virgil Lishuss Human. Her foolishly idealistic half-brother, owner of Virgiltech software.
- Angie Lishuss Human. Virgil's sister, a power-hungry porn star.
- Hal O'Peridol Dog. CEO of Sunflower Chemicals, disastrously infatuated with Renata. He tricked her into marrying him once to go public with his control of the company per his owner's will. Initially annulled, they remarried when someone tried to usurp control of Sunflower. They divorced after two weeks.
- Stormy Knight Dog. Kevin's past lover.
- Connor O'Connor Dog. Neo-Elizabethan poet and Starbucks worker. Stormy left Kevin to return to him. He and Stormy are currently married.
- Manny the Mink Mink. One of Alistair's friends, a slacker turned computer geek. He was killed at his computer in March 2001; the KPET crew do not know his whereabouts. Manny and Angie are core characters in Thomas K Dye's other current feature, Manifestations (Manny's spirit was supposedly sucked into the Internet when he died, hence its premise).
- Dirk Snoogems Human. Lead anchorman at news station KRVL. Has fun denigrating the KPET team, particularly Renata.
- Della Dog. Kevin's girlfriend. A technophile and very playful. Now works at KPET as Kevin's technical assistant; was fired from a Radio Shack for trying to have a romantic interlude with Kevin on company time.
- Randy Dog. Della's cousin, and Sam's girlfriend. She is very manipulative. She is known to be cheating on Sam, and using him for money.
- Nigel Cat. Pet of a local gay-rights advocate. He is highly infatuated with Alistair.
KPET's animal staff have an uneasy status somewhere between that of human citizens and real-life pets; humans they meet generally treat them as people, but they are subject to animal hygiene regulations and for all Alistair's political passion, none of them ever gets to vote.
Stories
The comic is consistently humorous in tone, combining social and political satire with character-based comedy. Storylines range in length from a few days to several months and have covered fractured love-affairs, mysteries and conspiracies, the legally-enforced brainwashing of the city's animals into cheerful hygienic zombies, and a military invasion of Starbucks by the armed forces of AOL Time Warner. Sometimes the stories involve all the major characters, but often they focus on one or a few of them. No major character is more central than any other, and all get their turn in the spotlight.
History of the comic
Thomas K Dye's first precursor to Newshounds was Pet Sounds, a strip featuring Kevin and Alistair, which he drew in 1991 and 1992 and ran in the Montclarion newspaper. He also drew three episodes of a comic book, the Boy Shop Pets, including the earliest versions of Ferris and Renata. He began working on the first version of Newshounds in 1992 while living in Las Vegas. The comic began running regularly on the Internet on November 1, 1997.
The most recent major change to Newshounds was on March 3, 2003 when Dye launched the present "Mark IV" version of the strip. The character designs were changed from the previous version, though their personalities were not changed, and Rochelle first became officially a major character.
Dye's other current feature, Manifestations, started on February 28, 2003. This is an online graphic novel, with a new page every Saturday, and is due to be completed in late 2005. It continues and develops a Newshounds story from spring 2001, but is otherwise disconnected from the present and future stories of Newshounds. It is much darker in tone than Newshounds, and less overtly humorous.
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