welcome 2 the cafe :^)

hi i’m emmett, a 31 y/o transmasc artist who loves dolls and cute things! more about me on my website, https://meltycat.cafe 💕 doll blog: @meltycatdolls

[meltycatcafe]

hi, y'all!

many moons ago (around 2013!), i blogged here as em panasonicrxft500.

this place was the home of my teens and 20s angst, mountain goats blogging, and lots of other sweet, special memories. for those of you who are still here: hello again! it's nice to be back. since then, i’ve started transitioning and becoming an artist! i work in brand design full time and do digital illustration, mixed media, small press in my spare time. i still love the mountain goats, and even had a lovely tenure at their label, merge records, for a couple of years. so why tumblr again? like a lot of folks, i’m sickened with the current administration and working slowly towards a self-hosted online presence. in the meantime, this site is a good holdover and still a fun place for me to be!

if you want to find me other places, links are on my website! i also have a dedicated blog for doll stuff @meltycatdolls.

please feel free to reach out and say hi, and look forward to more art stuff soon as i figure out how to get better at posting my stuff on the internet.

love,

[heathcliffexplained]

Step one of Heathcliff’s plan, flooding the birdbath with plain kefir and leaving it out in the sun, worked to perfection. The second part of his plan, diving at the birds with blender in hand, was doomed to failure. Not only could the birds just fly upwards, as they did here, leaving Heathcliff covered in yogurt, he forgot to take the lid off the blender.

[meltycatcafe]

heathcliff explained explained: a brief glance back at 2010s comics blogging with colette arrand

Colette Arrand is many things. She is a poet and the author of the book Hold Me Gorilla Monsoon. She is a ruthless wrestling critic for the website BIG EGG. She is also a crazy good zinemaker, my girlfriend, and brain behind heathcliffexplained.tumblr.com. We sat down this week to chat about her first post since 2018, AKA I started asking her a bunch of questions about her blog during one of our daily phone calls while she was dogsitting for a friend.

MCC: How would you explain Heathcliff Explained to someone who's never heard of it?

CA: Well, if you've ever seen a Heathcliff comic and been like 'what the hell is happening here', my blog offers one of an infinite number of explanations that are possible when gazing upon a single panel.

MCC: It does. The ones that involve Heathcliff's fixation with ham make me laugh the most. But why Heathcliff, and why tumblr?

CA: Well, it actually started on Blogger. (We laugh, remembering Blogger.) Back then, I wanted to have a lot of blogs doing a lot of different things. One of my favorite styles of blog at the time were ones that made fun of legacy newspaper strips, and I was looking for a strip I could do. I remembered the Heathcliff cartoon from when I was a kid. The comic strip was also featured in a West Virginia newspaper that my Great Aunt Peggy would send me clippings from. I didn't think Heathcliff was getting enough shine in the comics department, and I was right.

MCC: I never thought about Heathcliff before I started reading Heathcliff Explained. Do you think you started a Heathcliff renaissance? 

CA: I don't think I started a Healthcliff renaissance, but there was and still is a comics blogging presence. I think the big one at the time was like, the Comics Curmudgeon. What made my blog different was that I was singlemindedly focused on Heathcliff – I was trying to engage with the strip's absurdity in a way that added absurdity to it.

MCC: Yes! Your art and writing have a tendency to bring fut is what made the blog catch my eye all those years ago on tumblr. It was and is so funny. So… is Heathcliff Explained back?

CA: Not really. But I think it might be fun to re-engage with comics and have something that I can do a little daily practice with. Maybe I'll advance the field of Heathcliff studies.

Follow along with Colette Arrand in 2026 and beyond at colettearrand.gay and read Heathcliff Explained at heathcliffexplained.tumblr.com.

[colettearrand]

BURDEN OF DREAMS TEE

I always forget about Tumblr when I'm making new stuff — my bad, those of you who are still on this platform. My partner and I are making this shirt based on the documentary Burden of Dreams, about the making of Fitzcaraldo. It costs $28. I am placing the order tomorrow, 12/4. Please pop on over to my webstore and place a preorder if you want one.

BURDEN OF DREAMS TEE - $28

[meltycatcafe]

co-designed this shirt with my lovely girlfriend @colettearrand with assist from the good folks at LVAC, who are printing these magnificent shirts for us.

[meltycatcafe]

today i discovered that painting teeny-tiny versions of jd’s twitter icon is not my Strong Spot in art. learning and growing

[meltycatdolls]

doodled the original 3 american girls! ⭐️ besides dolls, drawing and design are some of my greatest passions. i usually post my art over at my main blog, @meltycatart! 💕

[meltycatcafe]

i drew these wrestler portraits for @colettearrand and joseph montecillo’s inaugural BIG EGG zine, BIG EGG mixtape vol. 1! i really love how these turned out! if you’re interested in the (free!) zine, deets are on colette’s bluesky here.

[meltycatcafe]

a frilly n fun breakfast pastry monkey! 🐒🎀🥐🍓

[furniturehuschle]

i don’t post much of anything besides shitty reblogs on this tumblr anymore, but i wanted to share these pieces from a sketchbook i just finished! these were inspired by old-school egl fashion and angry grrrlz and there will probably be more of them sometime idk

i did these in fountain pen and alcohol marker, then cleaned them up in illustrator! 

[meltycatcafe]

crayon doodled a little cloud kacheek having a fun time in the sky!! 🌥️

[meltycatcafe]

returning to my roots of pen-only drawing at the coffee shop today 💫

[meltycatcafe]

a collection of diary pages i posted on my old blog but wanted to have over here!!

[meltycatcafe]

today i discovered that painting teeny-tiny versions of jd's twitter icon is not my Strong Spot in art. learning and growing

[meltycatcafe]

the startings of a new artbook, ft. a title that really resonated with me and then became a shoutout to my girl tove jansson and a new place to channel feelings about important things that happened this year ?? starting with the Most Important Thing, which was incidentally the mountain goats' tuttlingen warriors 2013 at the bottletree in birmingham, al over the summer !!

[meltycatcafe]

from an artbook (formerly a copy of nancy drew and the secret of the old clock) that i worked in a lot over the summer during the lengthening hours barista-ing in a shitty southern coffee chain while the mountain goats were slowly becoming The Thing That I Lean On When I Am Weary; even though that was just a few months ago i already feel a vague and creeping sense of nostalgia for wiping down tables outside amid a humid alabama sunset to all hail west texas and the minty-bitter smell of my coworkers cigarettes and for the feelings and moments that made these pieces and yeah. yeah. mediums are fabric from an old pillowcase, thread, acrylic, ink, found plants, and ikea markers etc etc etc