Alphabooksbeasts: K is for Katalpa Kwakk-Wakk, Kolin Kelly, Kiskidee Kuku, and Krazy Kat

My other belated "K" entry for Alphabooks takes us away to the desert Southwest, to the precinct of Kokonino, in the same neck of the woods as Monument Valley and the Elephant's Legs (or Feet).

Once I got it into my head to draw a character from Krazy Kat for the letter K, I couldn't limit myself to just one. For the record, the busybody duck, Mrs. Katalpa Kwakk-Wakk, was the first to occur to me, but she's not the only Kokonino denizen to sport those initials. There's also the brickmaker Kolin Kelly, and of course Krazy him/herself, and his/her erstwhile love interest, the sensational character find of 1930, Kiskidee Kuku. (He's a poodle.)

Kiskidee Kuku's appearance in Kokonino unsettles the natural order of things. Offissa Pupp and Ignatz Mouse are on the outs with Krazy, no bricks get tossed, the jail remains untenanted, and eventually pretty much everyone just up and leaves town. Over the span of several Sundays, things go wobbly, then (of course) everything settles back down again.

Anyway, there's a picture of the problem jauntily trotting into Kokonino.

I tried to keep the colors in my drawing close to a duotone print, because I don't really think of Krazy as happening in color, despite the splendor of Southwestern geology and the fact that the Sunday Krazys were in color for years.

I "get" Herriman's doodles about as well as I get Trondheim's character designs (I can fake Herriman's backgrounds all right, and I can do a passable Ignatz from memory), though I wasn't sure about replicating them with a brush instead of a nib. And let's face it: drawing Krazy Kat is like forging someone's signature. Herriman drew all of these characters as doodles, really, and if you draw the same doodle several times a day for decades, it's going to pick up some personal idiosyncrasy.

I hope I have at least rendered Krazy &c recognizably. Please let me know what you think.

Now, if you are a purist and don't consider Krazy and her compeers to be "characters from a book," I have two things to say to you:

First, although they were designed for a more ephemeral medium, I know them from books. It's true that I saw Krazy in the local free weekly, or maybe the Daily Texan, while I was an undergrad, but I knew her/him first from the collection edited my Patrick McDonnell and others and from the weird novel by Jay Cantor. And my love for Krazy has only been extenuated and enriched by the Fantagraphics collections.

Second, I have a post that will "count" anyway. So there.

Next week: a couple of Pet Avengers.

Alphabooksbeasts: A is for archy

Okay, first of all, I officially retract that image of Aslan that I posted late Sunday night. I'm going to need to draw from Narnia later in my Alphabooks alphabet, and I wasn't too happy with the way Aslan turned out anyway.

 Actually, as it turns out, A is for archy, the free-verse poet reincarnated as a cockroach who cavorted on the keyboard of Don Marquis starting in 1916 (about seven years before e. e. cummings's first book, if you're keeping track of poets with odd typographical habits).

Maybe you've never heard of this poetical cockroach, but I first encountered him when I was a mere tyke, in a Time-Life book about insects and spiders that excerpted "archy declares war." (archy never uses capital letters, because while he is jumping around the typewriter he is unable to push down the shift key at the same time as a letter key. Kids, ask your grandparents about the medieval technology I'm talking about.)

I don't still have that book, and I haven't been able to determine for sure, but I think that same poem may have given me my first glimpse of the cartooning of George Herriman.

(I'm pretty sure this particular image did not appear in the book I had; I borrowed it from this blog post.)

You can get archy with Herriman cartoons here.

When I finally did see Krazy Kat during my undergrad days, maybe archy had to some extent made me ready for what I was going to see. For that, I thank the Time-Life company, I suppose.

I didn't want to try to ape Herriman for this drawing, though, in part because I'm planning to visit him later in the alphabet, but mainly because I know enough entomology (and have spent enough time with cockroaches) that I wanted to aim for a little more fidelity to the actual critter form. Here are some preliminary doodles.

I gave him boots in one drawing because I figured he'd need a little extra weight to get those typewriter keys to budge. They looked silly, though, so I gave him some leather shoes instead. The next doodle was pretty close to what I wound up with for pencils. In some ways, as usual, I like the sketch better than the finished inks: more energy, and a sort of scruffy quality that seems right for a cockroach.

If you're wondering what rules led me to pick and then reject Aslan, here are my personal guidelines for the AlphaBooks project:

1. I'm planning to do two alphabets this time, one of which will consist entirely of Donjon characters. 

2. For my other alphabet, as with Alphabeasts, I'm going to draw twenty-six characters from twenty-six different sources. 

3. None of my characters will be human beings. (Mostly they're animals. This is because I have been enjoying drawing creatures for the first two alphabet projects, and because my skills as a caricaturist are really still too minimal to be honed by a project like this.) 

4. That said, they'll all still be characters—that is, they'll have personalities that go beyond their natural animal qualities. (There may be an automaton or two in the list, but even they will be distinctive individuals.)

I've got the alphabet all planned out now (at last!), and I'm psyched to get drawing. Next week, we'll meet a little chimp, and not the one who spent time with the fortieth president.