About the Redesign and Accessibility: Matchstick Cats used to look like this until progressive sight loss from Retinitis Pigmentosa got in the way. In my case RP causes severe intolerance of white backdrops, bright images and the first 416 episodes of Matchstick Cats. Also sunlight, sunglasses, artificial light, darkness and cyclists. In fact I stopped using my PC entirely for almost four years. Don’t worry, the rest of this page is fun. Also your mom. I hope to futher enhance the cats’ accessibility in the future, but give me a while.
About Matchstick Cats
For 20 years Irish born amateur humourist, sage, semi-hermetic racanteur, socially awkward cat obsessive, energy drinks misuser and husband Neal O’Carroll has honed the art of starting comedic ramblings with no idea how the first sentence will end, never mind what he will say.
From an early age (27) O’Carroll was starting sentences with “Two Cats walk into a Bar” more frequently than the average man,
Starting in 2004 with nonsense humour column Neal’s Belch on the original NewsBurp.com* humour site, he soon adapted the method to writing simple, dialogue-heavy stick figure webcomics to accompany his writings. Originally with the short-lived Matchstick Meditations, consisting of a matchstick man talking nonsense to the camera.
By the end of the year this had evolved into Matchstick Cats, And the rest is equally uninteresting. I mean history. The rest is history.
By 2006, Neal was using the same method to create improvised comedy molologues on his Into Your Head podcast, which has since clocked up eight hundred episodes. Meanwhile, he made an apparenlty disposable solemn promise to himself fnever to write his own “About” page about in the third person.
In 2020, having not used a computer in almost four years, O’Carroll returned with a reboot of Matchstick Cats, among other things converting the cats from their origianal black outlines on a white “page” to white outlines on a black backdrop, so that he could see the frigging thing.
Matchstick Cats’ comeback inspired O’Carroll’s subsequent revival of comedy podcast Into Your Head in November 2023.
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Contact Neal | Matchstick Cats the webcomic |
| Into Your Head – Irish comedy podcast |
About Into Your head | Subscribe (free) to Into Your Head |
NealOCarroll.ie – for all your Neal O’Carroll needs | Matchstick Cats on Irish Comics Wiki | Into YourHead on IMDB | Neal O’Carroll on IMDB | Matchstick Cats on Facebook
*No connection to Newsburp podcast, a different Irish comedy podcast which later used that domain.Matchstick Cats’ comeback inspired a revival of O’Carroll’s comedy podcast Into Your Head in November 2023.