Whitney's character design is directly based on my wife (whom I had just started dating at the time) and was put together using her input. Here she's shown for the first time shown in color, though this was not her final color scheme.
Originally Whitney was supposed to be a Russian Blue with a sort of dark gray-ish color tone with darker hair, but this color scheme didn't translate as well to grayscale as I had hoped (and actually looked terrible in print). After awhile Whitney and I decided to give her character a makeover and changed her into the lighter purple cat that she is today in the comic and animated series.
For the printed versions of these comics in Of Cats and Crushes, I went back and recolored her using her modern purple scheme. I'm keeping these online comics in her original Russian Blue theme just to preserve the history a bit.
