What is that weird high desert Krazy Kat inhabits? Monument Valley, of course, in a sense. That’s what we understand inspires it, or permits it. But that’s not exactly it. It has to do, I think, with the idea of the empty page laid flat. The simplest possible description of illusory space, illusory ground upon which and above which the primordial facts—your geological marvels, heavenly bodies, trees and rocks and bricks and fundamental passions—all present themselves in marvelous instability, moving about and shifting shape one frame to the next. It’s like the world before the moment of creation settled down. With everything a mere enclosure for its animating spirit. Everything a sort of joke, a sort of costume with a sort of god inside.
When archaeologists in 1904 discovered, in the ruins of a temple at Palaikastro on the eastern coast of Crete, a fragmentary hymn to Zeus inscribed on a broken slab of stone, it gave a glimpse into an earlier understanding of the god, and gods in general, than had any ritual text before. It took a while to get the implications, drag the meaning out from under the weight of well-established notions. Jane Harrison’s Themis, her famous study of religion, starts with it—shows how, though the stone itself is not so old, third century maybe, the inscription revives something much more ancient even than the already ancient text: beneath the mountain, or as if beneath the mountain, where the oldest stories place his birth, a pre-Olympian god not importuned but summoned, brought into the dance to leap—that word is used again and again—to leap, to overcome the weight of earth and death and animate the vital possibilities. What must the world have seemed like then—unsettled. In all aspects clearly, vastly, starkly animate.
Krazy Kat, full page, December 18, 1918
Here sits Ignatz Mouse upon a log, his head in hand in thoughtful, vocal confirmation of his disbelief in Santa Claus, as Krazy, from behind a nearby tree, observes and listens. “Oh-ho,” Krazy says, “so ‘Ignatz Mice’ you is a li’l infiddle, heh?” Then off he scampers catlike on all fours—a capability he will lose as the years go by but here he’s captured in mid-bound, clear space between him and his exclamation mark–shaped shadow, dashing over the hill so fast, so urgently he overshoots a bit into the following unruled moment, streaks between the discontinuous frames of reference straight into a costume shop (Have we seen this before?) that’s built like a keep, a mausoleum. Stone-walled. Dark. What sort of costumes, what sort of whimsy do they hold in storage here? Then out he steps, as slow and ponderous in his Santa suit, as mythic and inevitable as before he was mercurial—nothing more than chance and impulse. “Gollix,” he exclaims, “you got no ida how this outfit makes me feel Yule-tidish….” And there is a massive authenticity about him that suggests, perhaps, a deeper iconography: the heavy lace-up boots, the stiff white bell-shaped Sufic cap. An unaccommodating Santa like the golem treading forth out of the ages. Meanwhile Ignatz ponders, “Yezza, it’s the bunk…I’d just as soon believe the moon is made of cheese.”
It’s noon. That cartoon default noon that seems to carry equal clarity and risk. One thinks of the heated noontime visions of the early Desert Fathers so monastically exposed like Ignatz out there in the flatlands on his log. The doubt that summons what it fears. Perverted longing. Why would he say these things out loud and then just sit there? Do you think he knows what’s coming? We can imagine, between the frames, the way it happens. Ignatz silent, turned to squint way down the road at something coming in the distance, just a fluctuating smudge at first like that famous scene in Lawrence of Arabia, the terrible, slow mirage of Omar Sharif, like death, approaching on his camel across the sand. It’s Santa coming down the road. Can he believe it? In broad daylight? Does the realization gradually coil about him till at last released to spring his eyes wide open, as we see, and shoot him straight up into the air at the epiphany, its finger lifted: “Ignatz Mice!! Behold!!! I am Senta Klaws.” Whereupon poor Ignatz falls to the ground, repentant, face in the dust before the apparition, which forgives him, bids him rise and turns to go. And that would be that—Ignatz admonished and enlightened, Santa returned to that dark costume shop—were it not for Krazy’s tail zigzagging out from under his coat and trailing behind. A brick’s to hand and Ignatz flings it. “Pow.” And Santa bursts into constituent particles—boots and beard and cap—the whole constructed Santa flies apart as Krazy, simple once again, protonic, floating at the center of disintegrated myth, receives the gesture in the usual positive way. The final scene repeats the first. “I don’t believe in Santa Claus, I’m too broad-minded, and advanced for such nonsense,” Ignatz for the second time declares. Yet from his brow a single drop of consternation falls. The scenery has shifted, lighting changed. The mood is not what it was. The tree behind him now looks blasted, branches curling like burnt matchsticks. From the east (whence Santa came—let’s call it east) the sky is darkening. Dark and ragged clouds move in. A storm is coming. What has he done? What’s happened here?
Koko’s Earth Control, animated, 1928
On a global walking tour, while passing through deserted regions, Koko the Clown and his dog come upon the control room of the world. It’s simply there at the ends of the earth, a neoclassical funhouse. Standing open. It’s amazing. Koko’s hat flies off. The little dog’s ears shoot up. They walk right in. The dog goes wandering off as Koko stops to contemplate an array of rotary switches by a window. There’s an irising-in on Koko’s hand about to pull a lever labeled “RAIN” and then he’s looking out the window (which is blank until phenomena are summoned) at the shower. He’s delighted and he turns to us and gestures with his thumb at what he’s done. Now it’s the lever labeled “DAY AND NIGHT” and the spangled dark descends beyond the window like a shade; night comes down and goes back up. But even stranger is this ordinary window in this place—and look how carefully it’s drawn, unlike the zany and perfunctory controls, to be an ordinary window. Simple double-sashed and properly framed and silled, the raisable lower sash with a thumb latch where it should be there on top. This is the window that we look out every day. And maybe that’s why it’s left blank. What can it mean? Well, while all this is going on the little dog, whose name is Fitz I think, has found the master lever. It emerges huge and phallic from the wall like the erection on a herm. And why not? Kept like that, upthrusting, it maintains the vital principle. But throw it, pull it down…don’t even think about it. Read the sign. And here’s the really crazy part: Fitz does. He reads the sign. And not only reads it, fastens on it with another of those irislike vignettes where all you see is what he sees, and that’s the sign. And as if that were not enough he climbs his own little dotted line of sight to get a closer look: “DANGER BEWARE. DO NOT TOUCH EARTH CONTROL. IF THIS HANDLE IS PULLED THE WORLD WILL COME TO AN END.” How to explain what happens next? He’s going to pull it. And it’s not some mindless reflex. He is straining for the handle on the lever, just a little out of reach, that ends the world. As if at long last here it is—what he’s been waiting for. There’s no internal conflict. There’s no pause to let the diabolical impulse rise within him, overcome his better nature. This is it—the very thing he most completely wants to do. When Koko shows up Fitz is dangling from the handle, and there ensues a terrible struggle. Even Koko—small of head and vast of feet—knows better than that. He comprehends, at once, the consequences. Reels before the prospect. Snatches Fitz from the handle, flings him down, admonishes, then gives him a paddling with a suddenly huge and phallic admonishing finger (I’ll show you the end of the world. Right here’s the end of the world) and finally tries to restrain him but it’s no use. It’s beyond all that. What part do you think Fitz fails to understand? Is it the part about the world or about the end? Are those two things, in him, so far apart, those two ideas, they cannot be syntactically related? What do you think has been communicated then? We see his actions are as purposeful, as happy, wide-eyed, frantic as had the sign above the lever promised pork chops. Can it be that everything he’s ever wanted is confused somehow with its annihilation? Is it because, as anthropomorphic as he is, he’s just a dog? He’s just an animal? And at last it’s inescapable. Fitz slips from Koko’s grasp and sort of vanishes under his shadow. Under that permanent pool of black at Koko’s feet. How perfect is that? He disappears beneath the shadow of the clown to emerge behind him, shove him away, and pull the lever. There’s a little puff of steam or smoke, a valve released. An ancient piston moving. Fitz just stands there, paws to his face. He’s done it now. And there’s no format to what happens. There’s no theme, no clear idea about the end. One’s fears come tumbling out like multiple mistranslations of apocalyptic texts. The air is rent with lightning flashes, positive-negative, white then black, the whole world flickering like that, night and day confused. The heavenly bodies, loosed from their circuits, all go crazy and mean-spirited in a self-destructive frenzy. We see Koko on his knees in prayer, eyes heavenward, in the middle of a vast plain ringed with lunar-looking mountains. It is night but the light is shining on him. Where in the world is this? It is the circus at the end of the world, I guess. Back where he started in the spotlight in the center ring but oh how bleak, how ruined it is now. What gags are left? A couple maybe but not good ones—strange ones, ones to make the children want to leave. He scoops a hole and plunges his head in the ground like an ostrich but it’s just as bad down there. Up pop two heads—his own (from a new hole, stretch-necked, terrified) and another one, a monstrous one with horns and fangs. The infernal regions—what a terrible thought—just under the surface. But the big joke’s still to come. An incredible mix-up. Koko loses his head in the sand and, in attempting to retrieve it, grabs the wrong one. Look at him now. He is a monster. For a second he just stands there with the wrong head, with the monster’s head, his white-gloved fingers spread like claws and question marks arranged in the air around him. Who is this, then? Kali? Gorgon? The Devil himself? It’s the sort of formulaic pose you see on ancient coins—a running gorgon turns at the waist to face us just like this on a silver coin of Etruria. Very much the same schematic horror. Just for a second he’s this monster. We couldn’t stand it any longer. Then he tosses away the horrible head, regains his own, and wanders out of the scene.
More lightning flashes. Cosmic circuits shorting out. Now Fitz in inexplicable combat with a tree as the earth cracks open. Koko passing among some ruins. What are these ruins—realistic, sad, historical-looking ruins so absurdly in the shadow of a silly, cigar-puffing, anthropomorphic volcano? It’s all crazy. It’s completely nuts that the world should end like this, with no consistency at all. It all breaks down. The way we see it all breaks down. More cosmic flickering as bewildered, terrified, disembodied heads of Fitz and Koko loom and vanish. Now as if from space we see them jumping up and down at the top of the writhing, detonating world somewhere near Greenland. Then it goes. It just blows up. That’s it, we think. But no, that’s only one world down. There’s more to come. See—he’s just tumbled into regular, giant three-dimensional space. Plop, onto an ordinary windowsill. Whose windowsill we wonder, several stories over Broadway or whatever street that is down there with actual, panicked, three-dimensional people racing around and trying to hang on as the earth (the camera) tilts this way and that. Now he’s inside, the window closed. We see him pressed against the glass. Outside the skyscrapers are falling. It’s that window, isn’t it. Same as the one before—proportions, framing, sill, and even the little thumb latch. Here we are back in the studio of course, where all this started. Don’t you suspect, when drawing Koko in the control room, the cartoonist thought, Hey, wait a minute—how’s he going to see the effects outside without a window? So he looked around and simply copied that one. Stuck it in. We look out that one, one last time. A steady view across the city—no more herky-jerky camera—toward the river maybe. Smaller buildings. Curl of smoke from a factory in the distance. What an odd, reflective moment—only a couple of seconds really, just this long sad shot of the city, sad and dingy and resigned enough to make you think the end of the world might not need special effects, might be like this—a long slow evening, red sun setting over the Lower East Side. Look at this now for a second, which is all you’ve got unless you push the Pause button, as I’ve done. It’s as if they’d paused, themselves, the makers of this film, and caught a real glimpse of the end. Have you ever read Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep? I’ve read about it and I pick it up every couple of years or so and think I really ought to read it but I don’t think I could stand it. Just the last page and the title and the cover—which this moment where I’ve paused reminds me of—is enough. The thought of that, like that of Koko as a monster, is enough. The red sun going down on the Lower East Side and all that guilt. The idea of that is enough.
And then they do a funny thing. They gradually superimpose the ocean over the city. What is intended, I suppose, is inundation. What you get, though, is equivalence. One scene merges into the other. Horizontals correspond—the rows of buildings, lines of breakers. It’s the city or the ocean. As the ocean. It’s the same. And it’s so gentle, which I guess is what’s so sad. But enough of that. We’re not allowed to pause and sigh for very long. The studio’s shaking. Fitz and Koko—ah, there’s Fitz—are running around on the drawing table as it tosses back and forth. They’re trying to keep from falling off. Is this it, finally? Where’s the inkwell? They should jump back into the inkwell. That would stop it. That would make it all a dream. That’s how it works. So, is the inkwell like the ocean? Where’s the inkwell? There’s no inkwell. There’s no sunset. There’s no sad, sweet consummation. It’s all crazy. It goes on. Now Fitz and Koko turn into ink—a little puddle on the blotter sloshing back and forth and soon to be absorbed into the ever-expanding consequences. End without end, we’re finally left to imagine, to consider from the window that we look out every day.
Uncle Scrooge Comics #6, 1954
The most perverse and philosophically ambitious of the Uncle Scrooge adventures sets the mechanisms of greed upon what seems to represent a spiritual quest. It’s got the customary image on the cover—Uncle Scrooge in his devotion to his money (taken together, all the covers from the fifties, there’s a quality of allegory; I can imagine a series of Holbein wood engravings of Uncle Scrooge in his miserly observances, repetitious and inevitable as the famous Dance of Death)—but anyway, here’s Scrooge with a wooden tub and a washboard actually laundering his money. Behind him, bills hung up to dry.
On the inside cover is the usual six- or seven-frame vignette, which further demonstrates Uncle Scrooge’s profound skinflintiness in a form intermediate between the emblematic and the extended narrative to follow. The joke in this case—and it’s always a simple joke—is Scrooge’s impatient determination to wait for the library and its free reading room to open rather than shell out five cents for a newspaper proclaiming his own big oil strike.
Now, on the facing page the real adventure starts, as many do, with Scrooge in his money bin among the piles of money, hills and valleys, shifting dunes and wadis of money, gently undulating, semiarid vistas—coins primarily, with sheaves of bills here and there like weeds or clumps of drought-resistant grasses poking through at the hint of spring. Who knows what’s in the mind that finds fulfillment here? It’s hard to tell what’s going on. Of course we’ve seen how he disports himself, loves rolling in it, diving among the piles. And yet there’s evidence of husbandry, a strenuous sort of protocol involved. A bucket of coins in the foreground with a dollar sign on its side. A money bucket. Left there for some reason on a little knoll of money like a bucket of sand on a sandy beach. In the distance, visible just beyond a low moraine, a wheelbarrow loaded down with a single massive, sagging money bag. And sometimes there is even heavy equipment, as in #11, for example (on whose cover Scrooge is ironing wrinkled bills): a bulldozer, idle in the talus of a distant mound with Donald Duck, who’s visiting with his nephews, perched aboard, hands on the controls as if imagining how it feels to live and toil in a world of money—in his silly sailor suit, if he would have the heavy touch, the raw delight to do what needs to be done, to manage it, to not be overwhelmed, to hold, no matter what, the thought as crude and clear as thoughts of ancient ducks perhaps, of mythic ducks back when the real world must have seemed as bright and graspable as this, when ducks were ducks and maybe—who knows?—just emerging into wide-eyed anthropomorphism.
Right off the bat, though, something’s wrong. Scrooge dashes, trailing anxiety droplets, from the money bin. He’s flung aside his shovel. Have we nearly caught a glimpse of operations? What in the world could he have been doing? What improvements involving labor of that kind suggest themselves? And so compelling that he seeks refuge in them, apparently, from the practical requirements, all the business, all the daily, wild, exaggerated urgencies commensurate with his fortune and toward which he’s being summoned by his harried, desperate, semihuman underlings.
A word about the underlings. The seldom-seen accounting staff and file clerks. Like those more or less realistically rendered creatures—squirrels and birds and bugs and such—maintained in the unevolved state to provide a natural background, they belong to a sort of peripheral population. Not so much default, I’m beginning to think, as reserve. They’re generally pink and pretty much human but for round, black animal noses and, occasionally, floppy ears. But just that much is enough to keep that world closed in, prevent it from opening onto ours the way the world of Warner Brothers comics does—I’ve got a 1953 Bugs Bunny here and, sure enough, it’s just a cartoon-human-populated world with cartoon animal characters in it. We’re the background population for the most part, fully, uniformly schematized—no rudimentary animal characteristics—and invited to imagine Bugs just popping out of his hole into our midst without apology or excuse because he can, because as soon as we allow that cartoon gesture (like a rumor, like a dream) all bets are off. So what’s with Duckburg? All those people not quite people? We’re invited to imagine, it would seem (and this is what my wife once told me made her anxious, even queasy, as a child when given Uncle Scrooge or Donald Duck to read), that we are implicated, drawn into it under certain conditions, forced to compromise, to take odd jobs, ignore the slight disfigurement.
But anyway, let’s see. It looks like Uncle Scrooge has more than he can handle—third-world despots wanting bribes, absurd demands from every quarter, wheedling letters piled as high as piles of money. It’s no better on the street. They spot him: fat lady bearing down with child in tow (it flaps behind her like a rag doll, little round nose still pink) for whom she seeks career advice; immense top-hatted, swallowtail-coated, spatted rich man blocking the sidewalk to remind Scrooge of a speaking obligation as, between his legs, Scrooge scampers to be grabbed about the neck by a screaming, bearded, rat-faced anarchist wanting a billion toward the abolition of wealth. This last requires an extra frame to set up the joke—and look what’s happened. Look at the anarchist, bearing in mind that it’s only 1954. He’s drawn from the intellectual school—a shirt and tie beneath his sweater. And his rat face, though still pink, shows marked development, with its giant ears and pointy snout and chisel-like incisors, from the range of nonspecific background types. He’s on his way to a full-blown character. “Rat-faced Anarchist”—one can only imagine how that might have played in the early fifties. It’s as if the not-quite-people and the more-or-less-realistic-background-animals felt an impulse toward each other, needing only a little dramatic provocation to combine.
But this is crazy. Scrooge can’t stand it. Back at work he flings the phone across the room. He kicks his money. He goes nuts. He heads for the park and takes up residence in a hollow tree. He wants to revert, wants to live the simple life of a squirrel, whose hoarding instinct he already shares, of course. No good can come of this.
At last his nephew, Donald Duck, shows up to take him to the doctor but before he can he has to coax Scrooge down out of the tree, which makes for a curious scene at one point. Donald stands on the other side of the low brick wall that surrounds the park and rests his arms on top as he reasons with his uncle. Scrooge has emerged from the tree and begun to descend. He’s lost his top hat but still wears his spats and purple Dickensian frock coat or whatever you call that thing he always wears. He speaks, responds. His eyes are clear, not goofy spirals. He looks fine. Except he comes down like a squirrel—headfirst, his hands and feet spread wide to grab the trunk the way a squirrel would do. What seems so odd about it—even spooky in a way—is that his reason has returned. So his behavior isn’t crazy, merely thoughtless. He forgets himself. Or forgets to regain himself quite all the way for just a second, just a frame—he’s fully recovered in the next, perched on the wall, upright and ranting to his nephew. It’s disturbing, I think in this case, to discover ourselves disturbed. That such a silly, oddly conflated figure as Scrooge (a sailor suit at least makes a kind of thematic sense) should seem enough himself to lose himself significantly. What sort of mordant stabilizes Uncle Scrooge? That we should catch our breath a little at his shift and sense this momentary transformation anything at all like Dracula’s, say—that passage early in the book when Jonathan Harker, gazing out upon the moonlight from his prospect high in the castle, sees the Count emerge from a window just below and slither headfirst down the wall. Or, looking even further back to Pleistoanax, young king of Sparta during the Periclean Age, who, according to A. R. Burn, impeached for the venality of his commanders and “fined a sum which he could not pay,” fled like a beast to haunted Arcadia to live for nineteen years in a house built half inside and half outside “the grim sanctuary of Apollo the Wolf-God”—imagine a sort of park—“where it was said that human flesh was mixed with the sacrifices, that he who ate it became a wolf, and that no beast cast a shadow.”
Well, on the next page we find Uncle Scrooge in the hospital much subdued, with Donald, Huey, Dewey, and Louie in attendance as the doctor, bag in hand, preparing to leave, recalls having heard of a legendary valley hidden somewhere high in the Himalaya Mountains and inhabited by a people with no concept of wealth. That does it for Scrooge. His pince-nez flies off his nose. He leaps from his bed. It’s off to India. Off on the same old mad, obsessive expedition. There’s no difference in the style—the continent-hopping, mountain-climbing, Junior Woodchucks’ Guide–consulting race to secure the heart’s desire wherever it is. And it’s where it almost always is, at the ends of the earth in regions so exotic and remote the cartoon gesture itself is strained, a documentary sort of accuracy seems to leak in so you get these photographic panoramas: here are the five of them emerged upon the Himalayan foothills, gazing up. You wonder how Uncle Scrooge can maintain his focus in all this and his desire not simply vanish, steam away in the thin, cold air of actual mountains, stupas, great-mustachioed Sikhs with human noses. Yet, if anything, they seem to gain in clarity, the cartoon ducks, against this marvelous National Geographic sort of background. It’s the outline of the world that looks uncertain all of a sudden—uncartoonlike, sketchy, deferent to reality. Standing there on the steps of a temple, all in a row, they’re clear as bells, as clear and strange as zoomorphic Hindu deities. They can do whatever they want. They can’t be stopped. God, how I loved this part as a child. It hardly matters what they’re after. They’re not likely to get to keep it. Hopes and fears will cancel out and they’ll return to life between the quarterly issues—Donald Duck to a house like ours and Scrooge to his money bin, the sweet ennui, the old dissatisfaction.
But for now they’re really after it. They hire a plane to find the valley, which is hidden below the clouds. No place to land. They have to parachute. It’s at this point (thirty years before the lives of Bushmen are identically disrupted in the film The Gods Must Be Crazy—maybe somewhere there’s a common source, some folktale) that there occurs the thing that seeds the tragic irony to follow. Uncle Scrooge, to summon his courage (not to jump but to pay the pilot), pops a bottle of his nerve tonic. Out the little open window flies the bottle cap. A separate frame observes its fall—receding plane above, the shrouded mountain peaks below. Then off they go. The plane swoops down beneath the clouds, ejects supplies, and then the ducks into what really ought to be an allegorical summing up, the last adventure, Scrooge having overreached this time, beyond desiring particular treasure, seeking finally to address the central problem, to idealize possession—here, as far from his actual money and its distractions as he can get, here at the antipodes of desire, he might at last assume a perfect form of ownership, become, as it were, completely self-possessed. And so he seems to bring himself to the verge of wisdom. Only a philosophical step or two away. “Here I shall be able to rest!” he proclaims, arms wide as he dangles from his parachute, “Here among people that have no desire for my wealth!” It goes no further. There’s no mystical leap. His money bin, the untranscendent fact, like Dracula’s box of native soil, is all that’s really in his thoughts and, in effect, as we shall see, he’s brought it with him.
Down they float into the funnel of the world. For a page and a half, ten frames, descending panoramically into what must be an immense volcanic remnant—glorious, vast Gustave Doré–like walls and buttresses of rock from among whose snowy ledges countless arcing waterfalls tumble and mist into the valley far below. They’re only ducks but they might be angels. It’s that serious. Look what’s happening. You can see it before they do, though you need a loupe. You see that little swirl of something in the middle of the lake that’s in the middle of the green and terraced valley in the middle of all this. That’s where they’re going. That’s the focus. By the bottom of the next page it’s apparent they’re descending into a whirlpool. Well, that’s it, you think. It had to happen. There goes Uncle Scrooge with Donald and Huey and Dewey and Louie along for the ride. No more new issues to go with your bowl of Thompson Seedless grapes and your orange juice when you’re playing sick at home. You’re left with the allegorical necessity, the lesson that desire extends not to but past your longings and that happiness, boys and girls, is an inattentive, accidental sort of thing like a clog in the drain.
I suppose we could have lived with that. But wait. A safety net. They’re jerked right out of the center of this Dantean schematic, this admonitory vision (which is how we’re left to think of it)—“Sprong!”—hauled in like fish and welcomed among the happy, duck-billed, but otherwise human locals, where, for a while, they share the work and the peace of mind. “Until one day” a shiny object is recovered from a rice paddy and all hell breaks loose. The bottle cap, of course. That’s all it takes. Before long, they’ve spotted others capping Scrooge’s remaining bottles and that’s it. They’re after him. Anything for a bottle cap—two hundred pigs, a brick factory. To restore the equilibrium, Scrooge sends Donald over the mountains to arrange for a series of airdrops. For a moment it seems to work as economics takes effect, reducing the bottle cap to something like the German mark of 1923. But it’s too much. The planes keep coming. Donald, parachuting in, beams to announce the rest of the airlift on its way—one plane an hour every day for the next six weeks. They head for the hills. It’s raining bottle caps. The paddies start to choke. The pastures fill. He might as well have never come. It’s just the same. How strange, the shovels and the baskets filled like money buckets. “Don’t you know it’s useless, Uncle Scrooge?” we want to cry although we love it and we know that’s not the point.