Kokopelli & Company - Characters

Characters

The New Muses are, in no particular order:

• Feather: the Muse of Plants. A genial but often slow-witted birdlike creature, he was born in Assyria and resembles the part-human, part-bird figures shown pollinating plants in Assyrian sculptures. He loves jelly doughnuts.

• Pwt: the Muse of Animals. An Egyptian figure who was once of indeterminate gender (much like Herriman's Krazy Kat in this respect), Pwt is usually seen trying to catch Crraw in a net. Pwt has no vowels, thanks to the nature of Egyptian hieroglyphics. (You pronounce it "pwit", according to a letter someone wrote in to Muse.) The magazine writers tried to keep Pwt's gender indeterminate, but slipped up a couple times. The magazine writers have now confirmed Pwt is male, although some Muse readers still believe that Pwt is female. .

• Chad: the Muse of Hardware, born in Mali. His invention of "Intelligent Air" is what enables the Muses to watch human beings from afar and whisper suggestions, which the self-centered humans take to be their own "inner voice". He has a twin brother named Frad.

• Aeiou: the Muse of Software, born in Ulan Bator, she speaks only by waving her sleeves in a sort of semaphore, which fellow muse Crraw can interpret. She coded the software which controls Intelligent Air. She, like Chad, has an identical twin named Bcdtghjklmnpqrs.

• Bo: A cow from Abkhazia, Bo is the Muse of Factoids, miscellaneous facts with no ulterior organization. She spends most of her time chewing and staring into space.

• Crraw: the Muse of Bad Poetry, Crraw is a crow from Chicago. When not interpreting Aeiou's messages, he usually speaks in rhyme.

• Mimi: Muse of Getting Along with People, Mimi is friendlier towards humans than the other Muses tend to be (in person, that is—save for Kokopelli, they all tend to be helpful via Intelligent Air). Born in the Australian Outback, she is angular and tall, with elongated spikes emerging from her head which not even other Muses can quite idenitify: "was it hair? feathers? a bizarre hat?" . Because she enjoys personal human company more than the other Muses, she was less eager to make Kokonino County a human-free zone, which occasionally leads her to quarrel with her fellow Muses.

• Urania: the Athenian Muse of Astronomy, she is the only one of the original Greek Muses to continue working with the new group. She is often the target for Kokopelli's pies.

• Kokopelli: Hailing from Arizona and now the Muse of Tunes and Tricks, Kokopelli is a flute-playing, Puck-like figure with a silhouette body and wiry hair. His general form is patterned on the kokopelli seen in Native American petroglyphs. When he is not inspiring humans to play tricks upon one another, he is setting up elaborate practical jokes, which often culminate in pie-throwing. He appears to be the most popular with readers of the comic strip.