Kevin and Kell

"I'm nothing special, in fact I'm a bit of a bore
If I tell a joke, you've probably heard it before
But I have a talent, a wonderful thing 
Cause everyone listens when I start to sing"

ABBA - Thank You for the Music


Wolves normally eat rabbits, so it is unusual for them to be married. Carnivores eat herbivores. Rabbits eat grass. Wolves have a good sense of smell. Vultures eat roadkill. Carnivores eat herbivores. Hedgehogs are spiny. Fennec foxes have good hearing. Carnivores eat herbivores. Bats and hedgehogs eat insects. Bats can echolocate. Rhinoceroses have bad eyesight. Dogs and cats don't speak the same language. Carnivores eat herbivores.

How many jokes do you think you could spin around the above observations as punchlines? Kevin and Kell is one of the earliest webcomics, or at least the earliest few that went beyond some teenager slapping a dozen random doodles online then acting shocked at not getting crowned Grand Poobah of the universe for such an achievement. It kicked off with an anthropomorphized rabbit who owns an internet service provider, married to a wolf working as a huntress for a meat supply company. From there it gradually developed an entire inter-species society mostly revolving around the social conventions of who gets to eat whom. As such it started as a very "niche" product. In fact for most of its early years it was often cited as a representative furry comic and little else. It did try getting political around issues like sex changes and disabilities for a while, but did so in a low-key, self-aware fashion which likely appealed less and less in the increasingly fanatical snowflake era. It also tried its hand at longer storylines (Y2K or Domain's furries making contact with humanity) but these often proved counterproductive.

When mentioned these days, Kevin and Kell is likely noted for its incredible stamina... and little else. Where most webcomics vanish after a hundred pages or so or go into a permanent "hiatus" Holbrook has managed to keep a more or less daily comic running steadily for over two decades. But it's insulting to degrade a creative pursuit as merely an endurance test. Kevin and Kell is remarkable not just for staying online but for staying funny. While its family-friendly cutesiness and humor certainly won't register as "edgy" or unexpected, there's a certain fascination in seeing just how many three-panel facets can be polished on a topic as simple as bats hanging upside down. Though thematically it should by all rights be as boring as Garfield, on a day by day basis it's managed to consistently mix quaint facts of the animal kingdom with the sort of homey attention to mundane life that defined early seasons of The Simpsons into a reliable chuckle.

And, with several hundred thousand animal species out there, it won't be running out of material anytime soon.