Here Comes Kitty

Book excerpt: In this wildly irreverent collage narrative, Los Angeles artist Richard Kraft reassembles a pre-perestroika era comic about a Polish spy infiltrating the Nazis, orchestrating a multiplicity of voices into joyous cacophony. Like an Indian miniature painting, each comic book page is densely layered, collapsing foreground and background, breaking the frame and merging time. An enormous cast of characters emerges as Kraft appropriates images and texts from an extraordinary variety of sources (the Amar Chitra Katha comics of Hindu mythology, Jimmy Swaggart's Old and New Testament stories, the 1960s English football annual Scorcher, underground porn comics like Cherry, images from art history, outdated encyclopedias and more). Kraft constructs a world constantly in flux, rich with dark humor and revelatory nonsense. Writer Danielle Dutton's set of 16 interpolations punctuate the book using similar strategies of appropriation and juxtaposition to create texts that sing in the same arresting register as Kraft's collages. Here Comes Kitty also includes a conversation between poet Ann Lauterbach and artist Richard Kraft.