I made the header drawing to show you all which characters in which webcomic were used in the harassment campaign against me.
I’m such a menace, I merited two characters in the angry, crappy webcomic about my hater’s targets.
For years on my platform, I’ve joked about the tale of the Cat Con Stalker. Humor is quite a coping mechanism. This is a person who started as my friend, but later broke up with me, threw me out of their life, and went on a six years long campaign of stalking and harassing me. This person came after my jobs. Came after my work acquaintances. All to smear me to the world as some kind of awful troublemaker, and to make sure I would lose work and connections. And they did all this because I refused to go with them to Cat Con.
Yeah, you read that right. Cat Con. This all started over a convention about cats.
And it has now ended with them at the center of the collapse of a Comics Professional Organization, because they raided the org’s coffers to the tune of $10,500.
I take that back. None of this is over. This is a developing situation. Strap in. It’s a long story.
The Comic Art Professional Society was established in Los Angeles decades ago by creators Sergio Aragones, Don Rico and Mark Evanier. Though the org hummed along for decades, eventually it would disband in the beginning of 2025. What brought it to an end is a story so shocking and so absurd, I had to lay it out for you all.
CAPS recently posted on their Facebook page the name of the org’s latest President who, given use of the org’s debit card, cleaned out the org’s bank account. She drained that account of $10,500 with personal purchases, completely destroying the organization’s ability to function financially.
And this person is the Cat Con Stalker.
I’ve been told not to mention this person by name on my platform and I plan to stand by that. However, before the Cat Con Stalker embarked on a campaign of embezzlement, she was on a campaign of stalking and harassment. I was one of her top targets. I’m writing this to answer questions you all might have on this whole situation. I think. I’m gonna be so for real with you. I can’t actually make sense of this situation and I was in the middle of it.
The Cat Con Stalker embarked on a six year long campaign (and counting) of stalking me online, making shitty webcomics based on my personal photos, but more importantly, attempted several times to get me fired from my syndicate and tried to blast me to a publisher whose book I was promoting for funsies.
Gosh, Jules. What horrible thing did you do to raise this person’s ire?
I know I’m a jerk. I have knives in my logo. I make comics about people who do injustices to me and I can say some pretty sharp stuff. So what did I do to CCS to make her the CCS? I told her I didn’t want to go with her to Cat Con.
That only sounds bonkers because it is.
Let me add some context. We had been friends for a few years at that point. I met Cat Con Stalker as I was recovering from my divorce. I had a rough experience with my break up, and CCS started as a friend who understood where I was coming from. I was angry. She was angry. And we became very terrible friends together.
Our friendship was always a little odd. She wanted to be friends with me very, very quickly. Every time we hung out, I was at her house all day long. She encouraged me to make fan art of her work, while never reciprocating. She wanted a lot of my time and energy and I was happy to give it. I was in a vulnerable moment, so I welcomed any friends I could get. It’s not easy for me to make friends. I have trust issues. I’m an artsy weirdo. I’m not that good with people. I grew up in a household where we ignored and handwaved abusive behavior. So I made friends with the Cat Con Stalker completely noseblind to the crazy I was standing in. I noticed this person was a little strange, but this is comics. We all float down here. I wrote off her strange behaviors as her quirky personality. I didn’t realize I was in danger.
We were cool when I first moved back to LA in 2016. I was a pathetic, torn down woman rebuilding my smashed up career at that point. But the longer I lived in LA, the more jobs and opportunities I got. Hello. I have to pay rent. I couldn’t afford to sit around and get depressed. I’m not a trust fund kid with rich parents. I had to fend for myself. I went after work because work wasn’t going to come after me. I went after opportunities and leveled up my career while CCS kinda stayed in her own professional limbo. CCS asked me to put in a good word for her at my gigs, and I tried. But my bosses chose other artists over her angry sketchy scribbles. Corporate doesn’t do angry or scribbly. Sorry.
I created artwork that was commercially viable. She didn’t. The tension between us grew.
I won’t bore you with the details about how she got really controlling with money towards the end of our friendship. Suffice to say she was ruthless. Even if you owed her less than $5, she was going to findom the sanity out of you until she got her money. Friendship with her came with no grace. She was exacting on collecting her debts and frankly it was annoying as shit. Our friendship began to sour when I started getting fed up with her controlling behavior.
And that brings us to the namesake Cat Con story.
Cat Con Stalker and I had decided to go to Cat Con together in 2019. Cat Con is a local cat convention in Pasadena where you can see people making cat art pieces, dressing as cats, and celebrating cats. It’s a fun show. CCS and I were friends, so why wouldn’t I want to go with the to a show about cats? But that findomming reared its ugly head again. CCS tried to manipulate me to paying her yet another trivial sum of money just to be controlling. And worse than that, on the phone call planning for the show, she dictated the terms of everything. When I would arrive at her house (because I always had to drive to her…and park IN GLENDALE). When we would go to the show. How long would we stay together during the day. As she’s rattling off her orders to me like I’m some idiot henchman, I was sitting there wondering why I’m letting this person tell me what to do. And if we’re going to be so for real, I didn’t want to spend the entire day with her. I had plans for the evening. Plans that did not involve catering to a grown woman with no boundaries.
So I got fed up. I interrupted the phone call and said “forget it. I’m not going with you to Cat Con.” And with those words, I hung up.
That’s it. That’s what I did to bring a whole stalker campaign on my forehead. I told a person no to Cat Con. After that, she threw me out of her life. Our friendship was definitely over. She blocked me on all socials and told me not to contact her ever again via email. Months later, I would hear she had a big surgery, so I tried to say hello at a local comics show to see if I could patch things up. At least if I could offer sympathy for her surgery, maybe there could be the chance for recovering our friendship, but she wasn’t having it. She gave me the cold shoulder and I walked away. I figured we were just tiffing. Friends Tiff. Yes, I lost my temper hanging up the phone. But her instant resolve to throw me out of her life and never want to make peace with me was jarring. This was not stuff normal people do. But if someone tells me not to contact them again, I don’t have to be told twice. She asked me to leave her alone, so I did.
Although I’m leaving out a crucial piece here. After she threw me out of her life, I made a single webcomic about the situation. I was really hurt. My so-called friend threw me out of her life. I process my feelings through art. Have you met me? But I’ll admit this much: in the comic, I said flat out I was cuter than her and I get more jobs than her. Is that rude to say? Yes. Was it my truth at the time? Also, yes. I know a jealous gaze when I feel it, so once again I lost my temper and said some things. If I had known she had already started stalking my every move despite blocking me, I wouldn’t have released such a comic. Who the hell blocks someone and then maintains watching everything they do afterwards?
Here’s how the harassment worked. Cat Con Stalker’s entire webcomic is a smear campaign platform. Every person she’s “making fun of” in her work is a person she stalks online. I was her friend for years. I saw the pattern. She would get up early every morning and immediately begin looking at the pages of her targets. 7 AM sharp, I could expect to see some photo of one of her targets. Some hateful remarks about said photo and target. I tried to be supportive and go “Yeah, that person sucks” to validate her feelings. But after a while I got sick of the hate parade. Every day it was always something. “Look at this thing she posted. Look how gross she looks.” Every. Single. Day. I put up with this because I was an unhealed person. I had family trauma issues that lead me to this very place, being the soundboard for a terrible person because I was socialized my whole life to put up with terrible people and not chuck them into space. She would make cartoons based on the photos she took from her targets’ socials. They weren’t all that funny. Not very well drawn. Barely made any sense. I thought I was being a good friend, but I wasn’t being a good person. Being a supportive friend to CCS meant being recruited into her hate campaign network. Of course she would encourage me to follow her targets and give her information. Yes, I would do it (I’m not proud of that). At the time, I thought I was doing something for my friend who truly felt victimized.
Until she decided it was time to victimize me.
Cat Con Stalker earned her name because she would follow my social platforms relentlessly, after a break up over a damn cat show. She’d follow me or get someone else to do it. She would seek out private photos of mine in my darkest moments and make hateful comics about them. Kicking me while I was down. She copied my personal, friends-only photos on social to make her comics. Really fucked up stuff. And of course these stupid comics always found their way back to me. Comics isn’t a small pond. It’s a puddle.
Now, as artists, we’re all entitled to creative freedom. I was willing to let her comics about me go. Let her be. If that’s how she gets her jollies, whatever. But pirating my personal photos? Relentlessly? What’s the line between creative freedom and hate speech? What’s the line between researching your subject and straight up stalking?
Also, let’s talk about the psychological harm you inflict on someone by making them never feel safe. Especially not safe enough to seek out community and help online. Deputizing members of their own community against them. Always making them feel under siege. Always making them feel vulnerable. Always making them feel watched. It’s psychological warfare and she knew exactly what she was doing.
Here’s the kicker. I wasn’t even her biggest target. That was Mike Wellman.
Mike Wellman is actually the first person named in CAPS’ statement to the people. Mike suffered horribly at the hands of the Cat Con Stalker. She colluded with Mike’s detractors to not only destroy his career, but his whole life. She intended to take him out with her emotional terrorism. And when I say “take him out” I don’t mean out of comics. I mean off this earth. He’s not the first person she’s targeted that way. Mike’s story is way too long to tell here, but suffice to say it’s similar to mine. Mike and Cat Con Stalker were friends. Cat Con Stalker became demanding on the friendship. Mike got sick of the demands and told her no. Then she embarked on a years long campaign against him. And what CCS did to him is ten times worse than anything she did to me.
Cat Con Stalker had attempted to get me fired from my syndicate the first chance she got. She claimed I had threatened and harassed her. I’m glad my syndicate had my back in that situation and understood that no, actually she was the one who had been harassing me. For YEARS. I could provide my personal photos and the corresponding comics that went with the photos she drew about me. I agreed to stay quiet about the situation going forward on socials and that was that.
But that wasn’t that. Cat Con Stalker’s harassment campaign continued. A year and change after the syndicate incident, she wrote a very lengthy, very disconcerting letter criticizing me to a publisher I didn’t even work for. I was just promoting one of the publisher’s books I liked on Twitter. That’s all I did. I wasn’t working for them as an artist. I was just a fan on Twitter retweeting about a neat book I found, yet that publisher got an earful why I was such a terrible, awful person and why the book I was promoting was a blatant copy of her work. (It was not). Cat Con Stalker continues her campaign of hateful comics to this day.
But we’re all allowed free speech, right?
I wanted her to stop, but she never did. Never does. If I don’t talk about her, it gets worse. If I do talk about her, it definitely gets worse. I stopped posting personal photos on social. The harassment still got worse yet. I couldn’t be invisible enough to make her stop her hate campaign. She was never going to stop no matter what I did.
So I decided to stand up to her and fight back.
Mike Wellman wanted justice for what the Cat Con Stalker did to him. It was a horror show. And I agreed Mike deserved his justice. What happened to him wasn’t right. Comics shouldn’t be such an unsafe space that saying “no” to the wrong person over stupid shit gets you Baby Reindeer’d to oblivion. I supported every effort he took to get the word out on CCS. I may have restrictions on what I can say about this person publicly, but he never did. I supported Mike as he told his story to the community and especially after news broke out internally of the Cat Con Stalker’s grand embezzlement. I offered words of validation and encouragement, while staying in my lane working on my own artwork.
Now that the word is out and we all can see who the Cat Con Stalker really is. Now we all can see what kind of crap I’ve been putting up with for the last few years. Now I can tell my side of the story. Now it is known. Good.
And did I post a vacation photo on social specifically to rattle her? You betcha. If you insist on watching my every move, I’m gonna give you something to look at. But I didn’t expect she would announce her departure from CAPS the next day. Clearly, posting photos of myself being happy in a tropical paradise is ocular napalm to my haters.
Take note, fellow targets.
I’m just glad the word is out and the comics community knows what’s up. I’m tired. I don’t want my life to be about grappling with haters anymore. I’d rather put my energy into my new animation project, Hurricane Vendetta. Teen surfer girl revenge whale story. Cli Fi. I’ve got several scenes storyboarded so far. I’ve also been populating animations of my Love, Joolz comics on Youtube. I’m very excited about it. I don’t care about comics beef. I just want to make cartoons and surf.
As for Cat Con Stalker, I hope she gets mental wellness help. The things she does are not rational, but her fate isn’t up to me. That’s for the Burbank Police Department to sort out.
And as for CAPS, I will be happy to support any rebuilding efforts they make to the organization. I don’t believe it has to die. Anything can be reborn if you just believe and try.
Thanks everyone for listening and reading. I hope this clears up a very strange story, that shows us harassment in comics may look a lot differently than how most folks think. And, hey, look! We made Women’s History! Hooray for the First Official Female Stalker in Comics. Support women’s rights and women’s wrongs.
-Love, Joolz.