Lackadaisy Cats has been running as an online comic since 2006. Based in Saint Louis in 1920, the world is populated by cats working around the ban on alcohol with their speakeasy in the back of the Little Daisy Cafe.
Here’s the synopsis:
Set in St. Louis, Missouri during the days of Prohibition, Tracy Butler’s Eisner Award-nominated webcomic Lackadaisy features the Lackadaisy, a speakeasy tucked away in a cave beneath the Little Daisy Cafe, where flashing the club symbol from a deck of cards grants every cat in-the-know access to more moonshine than they could ever drink. The joint’s packed full of tough dames, crooked cops, rum-runners, and wide-eyed ingenues. And they are, literally, all cool cats. The jazzy, sepia-toned crime story features action and adventure, comedy and crime, and a colorful cast of cats, including the Lackadaisy proprietors Atlas and Mitzi May, rumrunner Rocky Rickaby, and the sharp-tongued heiress to the quickly-dwindling Lackadaisy fortune, Ivy Pepper.
“Lackadaisy is the tale of a gang of jazz band stragglers, ruffians, and alley cats struggling to keep a once popular Prohibition-era speakeasy in operation,” said Tracy Butler. “Amidst their spectacular failures and unlikely victories under the nose of the law and up against their ruthless, outsized competitors, the Lackadaisy crew adapts and survives as a syndicate of St. Louis bootleggers, by relying on the strengths of their tight (if dysfunctional) family dynamic. In a broader sense, the story is an indulgent romanticization of the past, that explores the dangers of exactly that – the destructiveness of lingering on the good old days that were, perhaps, not as good as they appear, through the distortion lenses of grief, nostalgia and lovelorn desperation. The 1920s ambiance of hot jazz, hot bullet casings, and bad hooch isn’t without its heady sense of levity and humor, though.”
The series is looking to make the leap into a cartoon format with this Kickstarter. There’s already a proposed vocal cast and a great deal of support.
To support the Kickstarter for Lackadaisy, you can click here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ironspike/lackadaisy-the-animated-short-film
