- "And this is Krosp. He's Agatha's cat."
- "KING!"
- "...I think that explains that."
- Zeetha and Krosp[1]
Krosp I, Emperor of All Cats, or usually just Krosp, is a Construct who tags along with Agatha on many of her adventures.
Attributes[]
Krosp is a large white cat (identified as a "Moldovian Puff" by at least two different individuals; who also describe the breed as untrustworthy and heathenish) enhanced to genius-human-level intelligence, along with a few physical modifications, since though naturally-occurring opposable "thumbs" are not unheard of in cats, they don't tend to walk on two legs for extended periods of time as Krosp does[2]. He also displays a talent for intrigue, strategy and tactics.
At heart, he is still a cat, not a small, furry human. He's often seen preparing to snack on mice, goldfish, or mimmoths, usually in a sneaky and clandestine fashion, and has commented on more than one occasion on his awareness of his lack of human ethics, while in one side story Agatha demonstrates ✣ to his shame that he still has automatic cat-like reactions to certain external stimuli. Krosp does mimic some human characteristics remarkably well, because of his spark-influenced intellect or due to being a cat is difficult to say.
History with the New Recruit[]
Agatha first encounters ✣ him in the Dormitory on board Castle Wulfenbach, where he's helping himself to some food that she's left sitting around. Krosp watches Agatha for a while, sees how she treats his creator "Dr. Dim" and learns some things about Agatha that even she is not yet aware of. Only after helping Agatha sort out ✣ a desperate Moloch von Zinzer does he finally reveal that he can talk and think and wants to help her. She responds to this discovery, and his tales of woe, by jokingly offering ✣ him her fealty. Not so jokingly, he accepts, and subsequently helps her escape from the airship. This makes him not that dissimilar from any other feline, and creates an enduring dynamic between the two that can reasonably be described as "ambivalent."
I'm the one who's disappointed.
As Krosp views Agatha as one of his loyal subjects (and, as a cat, his territory), he does not take kindly ✣ to Gil and states that he believes Gil is simply using Agatha "as a pawn in some inferior plot to overthrow [the Baron] and take over the world." After stating that Gil was encroaching upon the Emperor's territory, he then proceeded to threaten Gil's shoes, with no specific details (although, given the penchant for annoyed cats to leave...feline by-products in their owners' shoes, those details are probably best left to the imagination).
Krosp is the emperor of cats - that whole idea worked just fine -- but as he points out, the monkey wrench in the works is that cats are utterly incapable of effectively serving an emperor. Making him an interesting case of superb execution of a really bad idea. (Though, see below.) However, he has other skills that come in useful from time to time. For example, he reveals ✣ that he knows how to fly an airship, which turns out to be very useful indeed during the aforementioned escape from Castle Wulfenbach. More generally, he speaks as the cynical voice of reason when Agatha and those around her propose preposterous schemes. Of course, he's usually ignored. One more than one occasion, he demonstrates that he is also very good at covertly gathering intelligence. ✣
During the time that he and Agatha spend with Master Payne's Circus of Adventure, he comes to the attention of the Circus' animal trainer, Professor Moonsock. The relationship gets off on a less than cordial footing when he tries to relieve his wilderness-induced hunger by snacking on a few of the good Professor's trained mimmoths. After the Circus overcomes its initial reluctance and let Agatha and Krosp travel with them, he has to find some way to contribute to the show, so he grudgingly ✣ starts working with Moonsock to learn to do something entertaining. The problem is that, while he can sing and dance, he's not very good at either; in fact, he's downright awful. He's also just as untrainable as any other cat. This results in his being put on shoveling duty among the circus's horses. More impressively, during the confrontation with Jenka in Zumzum, he saves ✣ Agatha from the attentions of Jenka's bear, Füst.
When he first appears, he's naked as a jaybird, or, well, as a cat. (No "The Emperor has no clothes" jokes, please.) This lapse in decorum is remedied when he inherits ✣ a mini-uniform that Balthazar has outgrown, a marvel of pomp and bad taste that he doesn't like very much at first, but seems to eventually take a liking to. (Agatha thinks it brings out his natural leadership qualities, or at least that's what she tells him, just to twist the knife a bit.) When the action reaches Mechanicsburg, The obvious lack of an accompanying hat is remedied ✣ , if only briefly.
Following the Siege of Mechanicsburg, he inadvertently accompanies Agatha through the Monolith portal, thus missing the two-and-a-half year Timeskip.
Krosp's Creator[]
Krosp was (evidently) created on board Castle Wulfenbach by the major-league Spark Dr. Dimitri Vapnoople and refers to him as "papa". Krosp himself gives the story of his creation, as he knows it, here ✣ . A few excerpts straight from the horse's cat's mouth:
- "I was declared a failure and 'scheduled to be terminated.'"
- "I'm the Emperor of All Cats. Think about it. Cats can go anywhere ... Imagine if you could use them as spies, messengers, saboteurs."
- "Sometimes I think I was supposed to be killed because I was too embarrassing to live." (Agatha commiserates.)
In the comic Krosp's attachment to subsequent brain-coring victim "Dr. Dim" isn't initially brought into the spotlight, while the novel Agatha H. and the Airship City features an additional scene where Krosp and Agatha hunt down Dr. Dim a second time as they flee the Castle, as Krosp wishes to take his creator with them. Vapnoople refuses to leave, citing his on-going janitorial duties. Krosp is pretty broken up with this, while Dr. Dim rather casually promises to save him a fish before they part for what could quite possibly be the last time.
Much later, in the comic's second act, it is revealed ✣ to both the audience and to Krosp that his true purpose is to lead the formidable bear-construct army which Vapnoople managed to create and hide before being captured by Baron Wulfenbach. He is also referred to by the bears' acting leader König and Vapnoople's former apprentice Martellus von Blitzengaard as being Vapnoople's "masterpiece."
Following the heroes' halting of The Beast's rampage inside the Corbettite Depot-Fortress of St. Szpac and subsequent escape from the attentions of both Martellus and Klaus-possessed Gil, Krosp leaves a few of the bears to help Agatha as she travels towards Paris, but takes the bulk of his new army and decamps for parts unknown. Agatha proceeds to have an eventful few days in The City of Lightning and then hops an airship to England, whereupon she receives second-hand word via Ardsley Wooster of an incursion aboard Castle Wulfenbach involving a group of constructs. Said group proceeds to commandeer a smaller Wulfenbach airship and make a beeline for Albia's sinking kingdom as well, demanding to be met by Agatha. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they are revealed to be (some of?) the bears and Krosp, who have successfully extracted Vapnoople from Castle Wulfenbach, and brought him to England to request asylum for the scientist. (Krosp also hopes that even in his current condition, Vapnoople may be a source of useful scientific information.) Albia grants this request, and Krosp rejoins Agatha as she settles into her new digs at the Queen's Society.
Eventually, Krosp lets slip ✣ that he was created after the Baron had already started to experiment on Vapnoople's brain. This calls into question Krosp's role as a "cat king." Can he really be Vapnoople's masterpiece if created with only half of Vapnoople's brain? (And also, how do the bears recognize Krosp as their leader if they were created before he was? He must smell different from other cats.) But the true importance of this revelation becomes clear only after Krosp, Vapnoople, and "Karl Thotep" find their separate paths to the temple under the Society dome, where Snacky is calling a higher-dimensional being to appear in normal space. Karl sees the confusion in Vapnoople's mind and repairs his brain, undoing the Baron's coring of his brain. He then becomes the Vapnoople of old, an evil, powerful spark.
Krosp, who loves Vapnoople as his father, is dismayed by this transformation. Since Krosp was created after Vapnoople was partly cored, the former knows only the gentle, peaceful version of the latter. The evil Vapnoople is a surprise to Krosp, and not a pleasant one. And finally, when Vapnoople attempts to drag his unwilling new "apprentice" (and Krosp's subject) Agatha along with him to (presumably) Karl's home dimension to do a spot of monster-controlling, Krosp finally rebels, biting Vapnoople. Karl then drags both Agatha and Krosp out of range, and the dimensional gate closes, with Vapnoople on the far side vowing to return and deal with his traitorous creation. Krosp is left wondering how he was able to violate the loyalty protocols that Vapnoople ingrained so deeply in him. Not that he feels bad about doing it, of course; Vapnoople was "nuts!"
Moving On[]
Following all this, Our Heroes are all forced to flee the self-destructing dome. On board one of the escape submarines, Krosp confronts former Vapnoople apprentice Martellus von Blitzengaard and demands that he hand over "the Shiny Thing", the large coin-shaped object that signifies control of the bears. Tweedle does so, and offers up some advice that forces Krosp to acknowledge the man's expertise when it comes to animal constructs. While this is happening, Krosp is being annoyed by the amorous attention of the submarine's resident cat. Tweedle notes this, and glomps onto the cat after Krosp leaves; it turns out that he elevates her intellect in a manner similar to Krosp. His stated intention in doing this is to use her in the same way that Agatha uses her Wasp-Eater: as a substitute for the chemical dependency Tweedle has created between himself and Agatha. However, it's pretty likely he has further plans for his new creation and Krosp. Be that as it may, when Krosp and Prrriti finally end up ✣ in the same room together, they both display instant covert attraction towards each other. Being cats, however, when they actually come face to face, the result is a hissing match which in turn leads to Krosp desperately interrupting ✣ Agatha's special moment with Gil to loudly announce the new cat's presence. Before anything more can come of this, the female cat departs for the Continent with Tweedle, and Krosp joins Agatha in her investigation of Big Rat Island. After landing, he is able to trick the island's Horrible Rats into fleeing via a broadcast of his amplified voice.
Following the Big Rat Island expedition, Krosp and Agatha (and the usual collection of unimportant idiots) return to the Continent to deal with the latest Polar Ice Lord invasion. Arriving in Mechanicsburg, Krosp meets Knight of the Hunt Norville, and they get along like, well, cats and dogs, even though Krosp doesn't immediately learn that Norville is a Knight. Their squabbling leads them to blunder into the maw of a device created by Othar and Kjarl, which teleports them off on an Incredible Journey... to a nearby cold-storage room where they bond over a feast of sandwiches. Krosp is the one to officially greet Tweedle when he arrives on the scene, and Prrriti agrees to accompany Krosp when he collects needed materials for more sandwiches. They still aren't exactly friends, but they've stopped hissing at each other.
The Future, Maybe[]
Various short side-stories have appeared as "filler" over the run of the comic, showing snippets of Agatha's ongoing adventures after the conclusion of the Other War. (Or at least how such adventures are depicted in Europa's popular culture...) In most of these, Krosp accompanies Agatha with no sign of any of the bears. These stories include The Electric Coffin, Minor Heroes, and Revenge of the Weasel Queen.
He does not appear in person in the (evidently) more-officially-canon after-the-War story The Mechanicsburg Guild of Monsters, but a careful study of one scene set in a Mechanicsburg tourist shop shows what appears to be a bit of paper currency which features his portrait.
There have been a couple of possible-future pics showing Krosp and Prrriti as an official couple.
The Novels[]
Along with the material already mentioned above, the print-novels have dropped a couple of additional bits of information about Krosp; he learned to pilot airships by swiping an instruction manual onboard Castle Wulfenbach, and cobbling together a mockup of the controls to practice on; Agatha comes across both while wandering lost in the Castle's more abandoned sections. Additionally, his construction evidently included at least a part of an actual human brain.
The Works[]
The original version of The Works includes three distinct cards depicting Krosp, Krosp 1, Krosp 2, and Krosp 3. On the first he strikes a regal pose; on the second he anxiously clings by one paw to a line of some sort; and on the third he appears to be dancing, singing, and playing a concertina, which recalls Moonsock's training attempt ✣ . The cards' "Details" are Hero and Construct.
Possibly relevant outside information[]
Krosp is a lone non-human (or semi-human: a cat with human intellect) among a party of humans (except when da Boyz are around) who excels in logical thought and takes pride in his super-human abilities while resenting the limitations of his “lower” self. The name "Krosp" is a near-anagram of “Spock”.
On the other hand, "Krosp" is an exact anagram of “spork”, sometimes referred to as a runcible, a hybrid utensil of limited utility - rather like an emperor whose nominal subjects are too lazy to serve him.
Portrait by Sir Edward Pearse, in Second Life
Krosp has been spotted in that otherdimensional realm called "Second Life" — but then apparently cats can walk through walls, so we should probably not be surprised where he turns up.
Krosp has also appeared in rerun pages of What's New with Phil and Dixie, predating his role in Girl Genius.