Here Comes Kitty: A Comic Opera

by Danielle Dutton (Contributor), Richard Kraft (Illustrations)

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stories, the 1960s English football annual "Scorcher, " underground porn comics like "Cherry," images from art history, outdated encyclopedias and more).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.

64 pages, Hardcover

First published March 31, 2015

About the author

Danielle Dutton's fiction has appeared in magazines such as The New Yorker, Harper's, BOMB, The Paris Review, The White Review, Conjunctions, Guernica, and NOON. She is the author of Attempts at a Life, which Daniel Handler in Entertainment Weekly called "indescribably beautiful"; SPRAWL, a finalist for the Believer Book Award in 2011, reprinted by Wave Books with an Afterword by Renee Gladman in 2018; Here Comes Kitty: A Comic Opera, a book of collages by Richard Kraft; and the novel Margaret the First. In 2010, Dutton co-founded the feminist press Dorothy, a publishing project, named for her great aunt Dorothy, a librarian who drove a bookmobile through the back hills of southern California. Over the past decade, the press has published the work of Renee Gladman, Leonora Carrington, Cristina Rivera Garza, Barbara Comyns, Jen George, Amina Cain, Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, Sabrina Orah Mark, Nathalie Leger, and other innovative writers.

Reviews

[Paul Dembina · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really didn't get on with this at all. A series of collages that look like a graphic novel but tell no story, interspersed with text that also had (apparently) semi-random sentences
The Q&A at the end of the book didn't really shed any light on this for me
Gave it 2* rather than 1 just because I suspect I just didn't get it

[Noah · Rating 5 out of 5]

There's The Antifa Comic Book: 100 Years of Fascism & Antifa Movements, an eminently readable, historical survey of fascism and resistance, and then there's this: a baffling, rollicking, riotous tour de farce of so-called "degenerate art" (Entartete Kunst). "What's the point?" The point is that's exactly what a Nazi would say before banning this book and burning it. The creator of anything so artfully calculated to offend fascist snowflakes deserves 5 stars, a sewing machine, an umbrella, a dissecting table, and a round of drinks on me. Recommended for the titular lobo of La Casa Lobo and Ms. Censordoll. Do yourself a favor and fritter away an hour or so in utter, abject confusion punctuated by unexpected gales of laughter.

[Audrey Dubois · Rating 4 out of 5]

AUDREY'S ONE-SENTENCE BOOK REVIEWS

this book is like a workout for visual-literary-philosophical comprehension. My brain has muscular fatigue.

"Your world [...] move[s] among different realms of experience, all of them somehow in the 'foreground,' none of them prioritized. It's all just always-already there. Or is it here? The real question now becomes quite urgent; how do we know which or what among these diverse ideas and images are significant, important, relevant? How do we form judgments, like the Old Testament God, within a matrix of everything all the time?" (58)

[DEBORAH · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is an interesting pre-cursor to the " graphic " novels of today. This is definately a post-modern of art work. Its cool and interesting to understand that Dutton did this by collage work . I'd love to read any of his other stuff. I will add that this is an adult book, and not for kids.

[Teya Z · Rating 2 out of 5]

Too confusing. Cool collages and liked the text interludes but I still couldn’t tell you what this was about.

[javadiva · Rating 2 out of 5]

Total mind f*ck. I think I'm going to have nightmares tonight.