Ladies from Hell and Krazy Kats
- art58koen
- 7h
- 3 min read
Let’s travel back in time, to 1966, late February, location: Nieuw Loosdrecht, Netherlands.
I’m 7 years old and eagerly awaiting the delivery of the local newspaper: De Gooi en Eemlander.
Not because I’m interested in the news, but because of the comics which include my favorite heroes, Suske & Wiske.
In the English speaking part of the world these two are known as follows: UK: "Bob & Bobette" or "Spike and Suzy", but in the US as "Willy and Wanda"
A new adventure has just started, entitled De Dulle Griet (Dull Gret or Mad Meg) and it looks very promising!
In brief Professor Barabas visits Wiske and shows her a fragment of the well-known painting "De Dulle Griet" (Dull Gret / Mad Meg) by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. (*)
He wants to focus on one particular person from the painting with his new invention, the Teletransfor, a machine which can do something amazing
The idea is to take a photo of the Dull Gret from Bruegel the Elder’s painting, bring her to life and interview her…
Reason is that Dull Gret is seen as a symbol of war and our friends want to know the reasons for it!
Keep in mind that this particular story was made during the height of the Vietnam War and there are several comments about this conflict…
As usual it took 110(!) daily episodes/newspapers to bring this exciting story to a satisfying end. (**)
Although the last picture had a very clear reference to the war, very different from the usual stories!
Fast forward to 2025, while searching for subject materials for my Art For Art’s Sake series I stumbled on Bruegel the Elder’s painting which brought back a lot of memories!
As I wasn’t sure yet how to use it I filed it away and moved on to other artistic materials to use & abuse.
Another comic I learned to appreciate more and more over the years is George Herriman’s Krazy Kat.
Last year I bought “Krazy Kat & the Art of George Herriman: A Celebration”, a wonderful 2011 hardback with plenty of examples of Herriman’s work. (***)
A bit odd is the introduction by Calvin & Hobbes’ Bill Watterson as that was originally published way earlier, in 1990 for another Krazy Kat collection!
This very surrealistic comic about Krazy Kat, Ignatz Mouse, and Offissa Pupp is still rightly considered iconic.
Besides well reproduced full color Sunday strips, the book also features other work; (political) cartoons, photos, and several essays about Herriman’s life.
My previous Art For Art’s Sake post was about how I like to make use of pictures in which something is painted. (****)
Therefore last week I was pleasantly surprised to find a Krazy Kat comic which lacked the usual phonetic spelled text soup of various languages but instead focussed on Ignatz as a painter!
I have mashed up Krazy Kat before (and probably will again some day) but this was too good an opportunity to let go to waste!
How to use the paintings spaces wasn’t immediately clear to me though.
A few days later while browsing at random Dull Gret popped up again!
Although the influence of the earlier painter Heronimus Bosch is obvious, the painting contains plenty of surreal imaginary too and therefore seemed like a 'propah' mash-up candidate.
After that it was just matter of some careful photoshopping and the combined result can be seen here, hope you like it as much as I do.
