A bipedal cat runs through town, his face turned towards the viewer in a permanent, mask-like grin; bottles, tins, rocks, bricks and earth are hurled at him by a hostile public. This is his job. When he stops for lunch, so do his persecutors. At the end of the working day, he longs to sit down in front of the telly. But before he can watch his favourite shows – all classics (Rawhide, Whirlybirds, The Avengers, Adam Adamant Lives!) – he is subjected to endless advertisements for Skweeky Weets, the breakfast cereal whose “skweek is weety and the weet is skweeky, so skweek up your weet right away”.
All cartoon cats suffer, either from torment or repetition; but Calculus Cat seems to suffer more from both than most. (Gilbert Shelton’s Fat Freddy’s Cat, who tends to be in control of the situation most of the time, is an exception, but even he has indignities to endure. Shelton, incidentally, is one of 30-odd cartoonists who have drawn tributes to Calculus Cat in the final pages of this book.) He is all too aware of his own condition. Unlike Krazy Kat, George Herriman’s creation (a century old, and still the greatest of them all; Calculus Cat’s sufferings are a homage to Herriman’s genius), who interprets the bricks thrown at him as affirmations of Ignatz Mouse’s undeclared love, Calculus is under no illusions as to what the missiles thrown at him betoken. They show an inchoate hostility; the indignity of labour reduced to its painful and humiliating essence.
But that is the least of his worries. I doubt Hunt Emerson would accept the proposition that his strip represents an explicit repudiation of the capitalist system, but when a hero’s work is ghastly and his leisure polluted by hours of inane marketing, you have to wonder.
The mise-en-scène may be rigid and bare, but the insults and dialogue that fly between TV and cat are richly varied. The effect Emerson is aiming for, he says in his introduction, is along the lines of Ray Galton and Alan Simpson’s scripts for Tony Hancock and Steptoe and Son. So changes in register provide occasional relief. TV and cat even manage to have a civilised and illuminating discussion about children’s telly (“In Tiswas one saw something of a Dionysian epiphany in children’s viewing … as opposed to the profoundly subversive Five O’Clock Club!”) before the TV – represented on screen by a smooth-looking male announcer – says it’s “back to business”: the selling of Skweeky Weets.
Initially, Emerson’s drawings seem like straightforward blocks of black and white. However, they burst with detail; backgrounds change wildly from frame to frame, another nod to Herriman, but also cumulatively provide the dizzying effect of a Tex Avery animation. Cartoon animals are meant to have elastic bodies and features, but Emerson’s are barely in control, and the same goes for the fixtures and fittings of Calculus’s world. Emerson’s visual imagination is so hard to contain that he can draw a face as a couple of splots of paint and get away with it.
Calculus Cat has been around since 1979, appearing sporadically as enlightened editors have asked to see further adventures. This second collection supersedes the first, adding a 2014 strip and the tributes mentioned above. Here we see our own world and our slavery within it: from the inanities of hucksterism, to the slugs that inhabit our kitchens in the still of the night – in Emerson’s vision, as large as cats. Real cats, that is – cartoon cats are larger than life.
• Calculus Cat is published by Knockabout (£9.99).
