All right, get out a pencil and a sheet of paper. Draw a simple cube in black ink on a blank background and scribble a horizontal 3 (round edges down) on the front side. Flank it with dots to the upper left and right. You should have something resembling a face. Now add a hat, maybe a beret or a nipple-like chapeau, and sit back and smile at your art. You’ve just drawn Tofu Baby, a comic character created by Missy Kulik that’s equal parts Hello Kitty and Ed Emberley’s “Drawing Book of Animals.”

Hold up, you’re not finished. Now, it’s time for dialogue. Give Tofu Baby something clever to say, and do it with a childish lisp. Try “Be my fwiend” or “Go cwimb a twee.”

What do you think of your work? Cute? Detestable?

Whether or not Tofu Baby’s your thing, this cartoon, in its four-panelled, four-line-rhyme comic form, has split its hometown into love-it or hate-it camps.

Since the comic began running in Flagpole in 2006, the magazine has received letters that called the cartoon an “insult to readers, the other contributing cartoonists and humanity at large.” Anti-Tofu Baby posters and mocking knock-offs were plastered on kiosks around town. But supporters also wrote in to thank Kulik for creating a comic that wasn’t another “dissertation with illustrations.”

While that’s a good bit of fervor over some fermented soy, Tofu Baby isn’t the first time that Kulik’s comics have irritated readers who the artist says “just don’t get it.” Kulik’s work is well received in the alternative comics world, with glowing reviews from Giant Robot and online sites like Comics Reporter; although winning over Athens readers has proven a bit more difficult. But Kulik isn’t letting the criticism get her down. If she has things her way, Tofu Baby will be as culturally inescapable as the Chik-fil-A cows.

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Kulik, a 33-year-old graphic designer, began drawing comics for Flagpole in 2004, joining the newly organized comics page in the back of the magazine. Kulik and fellow Flagpole cartoonist T. Edward Bak had been meeting weekly to draw, but with differing methods and results. Bak started his panels with a traditional blue outline that he would later fill in and finish with ink. Kulik drew hers “straight ink to paper,” sometimes leaving in mistakes and leaving out elements such as backgrounds in order to produce “quantity over quality.”

Her goal was to use the comics as daily journals - as a way to “take note of things that happened and things that people forget happen” - and due to time constraints, she needed to draw as many of them as possible in one sitting. “I would finish all my seven days before Todd would even finish his first panel,” Kulik says.

These early strips chronicled conversations, walks around town and random thoughts noted throughout an unspecified day. And although mainstream comics “Garfield” and “Cathy” informed the work, audiences didn’t quite get it. “Comics, number one, are supposed to be funny, and they think it’s like a gag,” Kulik says. “Sunday morning cartoons have a conflict, a gag and then a punch line. Traditionally, people are looking for a joke, and mine just don’t have that.”

Readers weren’t used to her whimsical, reflective approach to comics, she says, mostly because a different type of comic artist - such as friend and collaborator John Porcellino, who self-publishes the zine “King Cat” - had influenced her drawings. “When you tell people you’re a cartoonist, usually they immediately think of either superheroes, or newspaper strips, the Sunday funnies,” Porcellino says via email. “When you tell people you’re a cartoonist who draws poetic slice-of-life stories about their everyday existence, they’re surprised to hear such a thing exists.”

“There are certain people who are looking for escapism in comics - which is totally fine, totally valid,” Porcellino says. “Then there are people who are more, or also, interested in actual life - people who read biographies, memoirs, other non-fiction. I think those people would really appreciate this kind of approach to comics.”

The first of Kulik’s comics to attract a mass of negative reviews concerned a rain cloud: three panels of a billowy nimbus followed by a fourth panel in which rain finally poured down. That’s it. Another involved an early character called Fawn Baby, a little deer with a knack for adventure. These pre-Tofu Baby comics annoyed a group of Flagpole readers so much that they started a “Stop Missy Kulik” Myspace page.

Kulik’s work was contentious even among her fellow artists. Aaron Fu, creator of “The Land of Monsters,” a comic that has shared Flagpole space with Tofu Baby, was a staunch detractor of Kulik’s comics when they first appeared.

“It was mostly clouds and deer,” he says, speaking about the content that “rubbed him the wrong way.” 

Kulik’s drawings didn’t fit into Fu’s conception of what a comic should be, and he felt they was taking a quarter of Flagpole’s comic space but delivering only 5 percent of the content. But Fu became an appreciator once the Tofu Baby hate mail/support mail started pouring in, mainly because of the comic’s polarizing, attention-demanding qualities.

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This ingenuous, romanticized version of life is on display in the home that Kulik shares with boyfriend Raoul de la Cruz. Clothesline whites and vibrant greens wash out their living space. A collection of Blythe dolls, the doe-eyed ’70s cult figurines, line a built-in shelf in the couple’s kitchen, and Japanese pop images are prevalent throughout. Then there’s a white-haired cat named Nilla - the quintessential feather duster with legs - who flaunts her ownership of the place. It seems you can’t hang out with Missy Kulik without her cat’s supervision.

When asked where the idea for Tofu Baby came from, Kulik disappears into her craft room and returns with a keychain toy, a memento from a coworker’s trip to Hong Kong. It’s some kind of Sanrio character, she says, but most likely it’s a knockoff. She and de la Cruz weren’t sure what the toy actually was, but the couple, both vegetarians, assumed it to be a block of tofu. The pink hat on Tofu Baby’s head has been thought to be a nipple by some and a beret by others, but as far as Kulik’s concerned, it’s the mouth shield and handle of your everyday pacifier. Grab Tofu Baby by her head and stuff her in some crying baby’s mouth. Brilliant.

Kulik and de la Cruz were brainstorming ideas for new Flagpole comics one day when they decided to bring the toy to life in ink. Kulik voiced the character to de la Cruz in the now (in)famous twee lisp and an icon was born, or, depending on how you see things, a demon was unleashed.

Like all the best cartoons, Tofu Baby’s permutations are many. She becomes enormously fat when she overeats and sweats off the calories with a little jump-rope or Wii fit. She can transform like the Hulk when she gets angry. And, as many denizens of college towns are apt to do, she’s taken up yoga and wished "namaste" upon the world. Even these tidings from Eastern religions - just a nice thing to do, according to Kulik - outraged readers.

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Kulik has a lifelong history of crafting, and on top of Tofu Baby dolls, she and de la Cruz maintain a sizable and varied stock of saleable crafts, so large that it takes up entire rooms of their house. They make notepads, ties, pins, wooden charms, felt animals, felt foods and sock monkeys. The two sell their wares at four to five craft fairs a year, mostly close to home.

The comics and crafts both, without a doubt, have a youthful appeal, not just to kids but also to adults with Peter Pan syndrome. A review of Kulik’s “I Heart New York” comic on the Optical Sloth website called it a good “gateway” comic, saying that it’s great for getting your young ones into indie cartoons, but also perfect if you need “something to feel good about for a few minutes.”

But Kulik says that isn’t on purpose. “This is just what I like,” she says.

So, is Kulik’s youthful nature part of the problem when transmitting Tofu Baby to a wide audience? Maybe, she says. “For me, Tofu Baby is funny, really funny. But you may have to be under a certain age to find her really, really funny.”

It’s pretty clear that Tofu Baby is not too weird for Athens. The Flagpole comic page can certainly be described as “alternative,” and Kulik says her contributions to it marked the first time she’s gotten bad reviews.

T. Edward Bak has no idea why Kulik’s comics could annoy so many readers, but he’s pretty certain it doesn’t have anything to do with a “mainstream vs. alternative” argument. “People appreciate different things about different works for so many different reasons, and I think that’s good,” Bak says via email.

In combing through the hate mail, Bak’s thoughts are given credence: the only overarching theme found in detractors’ letters is anti-adorability. Apparently, Tofu Baby is just too cute for some people. But that’s perfectly respectable, Bak says. “I feel like the more diversity of work available to readers is always a positive thing, which sounds pedantic and obvious, but I think there is a lot of lip service to that concept and not necessarily much practice.”

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Now that Tofu Baby is a few years old and the public hubbub has simmered, Kulik admits to having found her stride. She pays little attention to the scornful comments that still get posted on the Flagpole website, and has decided to embrace the pop icon potential of Tofu Baby.

During last summer’s Athens Music Awards, the plush Tofu Baby presented a few trophies with Flagpole publisher Pete McCommons while Kulik voiced her creation’s lisp through a microphone backstage. Tofu Baby has sung along to Flo Rida’s rap megahit “Low,” and she took to democracy this election season by voting for Obama. (Even if she didn’t admire the new president, John McCain’s name wouldn’t have sounded as good with Tofu Baby’s lisp.) This past fall, Kulik unveiled a line of Tofu Baby gear: tote bags and t-shirts to complement the one-inch buttons she’s made for some time.

Is it working? Will Tofu Baby soon dominate the world? 

Maybe, Kulik says, because Tofu Baby has seeped into the real world in strange ways. After being summoned and dismissed from jury duty recently, Kulik exited the courthouse with her discharged cohort, one of whom, recognizing her name from the comics section, shouted out to Kulik as the group walked down the courthouse steps to Washington Street: “Go Tofu Baby.”

Andre Gallant