In this wildly irreverent collage narrative, artist Richard Kraft reassembles a Cold War comic about a Polish spy infiltrating the Nazis to orchestrate 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 unlikely and 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the 1960s English football annual Scorcher, and underground porn comics like Cherry as well as images from art history, outdated encyclopedias, and more).

Proceeding from Thoreau’s observation, “Yes and No are lies. A true answer will not aim to establish anything, but rather to set all well afloat,” Kraft subverts all certainty to reconstruct a world constantly in flux, rich with dark humor and its own revelatory nonsense. Author Danielle Dutton’s set of sixteen 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 wide-ranging conversation between Kraft and poet Ann Lauterbach. - Siglio Press