Some eighty-five years ago, American composer John Alden Carpenter staked his reputation on adapting an obscure daily comic strip into a two-hour ballet. Despite the absurdity of his idea, Carpenter ultimately escaped with a career intact and a modicum of critical success. It is a testament to the almost supernatural brilliance of the original work—George Herriman’s idiosyncratic comic strip Krazy Kat—that it was able to buoy a foundering spectacle from imminent failure.From its 1913 debut to its 1944 coda, Krazy Kat enchanted audiences worldwide and elevated the nascent medium of comics to still-unmatched heights of artistic and verbal acuity. In addition to inspiring such pop culture behemoths as Walt Disney, Herriman’s work endeared itself to the artistic elite. During its run, Krazy Kat won the admiration of Picasso, de Kooning, Kerouac, Cummings and countless more.
Many modern cartoonists, such as Calvin and Hobbes creator Bill Watterson, trace their lineage back to Herriman’s pioneering work. Unfortunately, little of Krazy Kat’s inventiveness, wit, and sophisticated subject matter have survived in the comics of today. For this, the cartoonists can share only a portion of the blame: greater competition for less space has ensured the survival of only the blandest and longest-established strips, discouraging artistic experimentation. Now little more than a cherished fossil, Krazy Kat belongs to a lost age of cartooning that handsomely pays revisiting.
Serendipity and the opportunist
The strip’s genesis coincided with the birth of comic strips as a new American art form. Initially appearing as supplemental weekly features each Sunday, early comics such as Richard Felton Outcault’s The Yellow Kid (1896) and Rudolph Dirks’ Katzenjammer Kids (1897) dramatically boosted newspaper sales, leading to the creation of a new market for fast-working, wry illustrators. A student and sometime baker in Los Angeles, George Herriman perceived this need and moved to New York in 1900 to make his mark on the burgeoning genre. He first cut his teeth on ‘one-shot’ cartoons in the Pulitzer papers, then moved into longer strips based on throwaway characters such as E. Pluribus Dingbat, Cincho Pansy, and Major Ozone. While still derivative in spirit and stylistically conventional, these early efforts hinted at Herriman’s gift for surreal humor and augured his more mature style in Krazy Kat.
It was in 1910 that Herriman unwittingly spawned the basic premise of Krazy Kat. In the white space beneath his comic The Dingbat Family (from which the pejorative meaning of “dingbat” derives), Herriman sketched the incidental gag of a mouse pelting a hapless cat’s head with a rock. This basic dynamic developed over the years into an entire subplot of The Dingbat Family. The mouse started using bricks, then acquired a name—Ignatz—while the cat mutated into a creature called Krazy Kat.
As Herriman continued chiseling out the dimensions of Krazy and Ignatz’s relationship (which revolved around Krazy misinterpreting the brick as a symbol of Ignatz’s unspoken love), he saw the opportunity for a spin-off focused on the more obscure material. In 1913, Krazy Kat appeared in the Hearst newspapers as an independent strip.
Punch and Judy, meet Krazy
Krazy Kat retained the skeletal plot from 1910, but altered its dimensions. The comic’s narrative axis is a love triangle based on reversed anthropomorphic clichés: dog (Offissa Pup) loves cat (Krazy) loves mouse (Ignatz). Herriman tangled things further by creating an antagonistic relationship between Offissa Pup, bombastic arm of the law, and Ignatz, ne’er do well and tormentor of Krazy. The smitten constable keeps constant watch over Ignatz to prevent any harm from befalling his beloved “dear Kat,” who is unaware and unappreciative of Offissa Pup’s efforts. Despite his vigilance, Ignatz always makes good on his yen to “krease that Kat’s bean with a brick.” And at the center of it all, contemplative Krazy misinterprets both their motives and becomes forlorn when Ignatz’s ineluctable brick (or in Krazy’s eyes, “missil of love, and iffection”) fails to arrive. This is shown clearly in one early strip where Ignatz is temporarily blinded and accidentally hits Offissa Pup with a brick, causing Krazy to moan “Ah, there him is—playing tag with ‘Offissa Pup’—just like the boom companions wot they is.” Not content to leave things simply as a cycle of romantic misadventures, Herriman then gave each character a distinctive philosophy and verbal style.
Krazy remains, of course, the most enigmatic of the bunch. His speech is a mongrel dialect of Victorian English, Yiddish, and patois rounded out with solecisms of indeterminate origin. To the uninitiated reader, the aesthetics of Krazy’s idiom often obscure his intended meaning. Thus on the topic of his identity, Krazy can explain himself no more clearly than “I ain’t a Kat, and I ain’t Krazy. It’s wot’s behind me that I am. It’s the idea behind me, Ignatz, and that’s wot I am.” Yet there is an ember of truth behind the bouncy, musical prose, for Krazy Kat is nothing if not the incarnation of pure love and innocence. What other sort of being harbors a dream of “my Kosmis” where “there will be no feeva of discord…all my immotions will function in hominy and kind feelings?”
Fitting with his otherworldly innocence is Krazy’s lack of clear gender. Neither male nor female, heterosexual nor homosexual, Krazy permanently resides in the ambiguous territory of childhood. Nevertheless, his love for Ignatz is profound, if bewildering.
Herriman explained Krazy’s infatuation in one legendary Sunday comic as an outgrowth of the Kats’ “racial history.” He was referring, of course, to “Kleo Kat…Siren of the Nile,” lover of “Marcantonni Maus,” her Roman slave. One day Marcantonni attempted to woo the Queen with a poem chiseled on a brick, but hit her with it inadvertently in the delivery. Thus a feeling of love came to be permanently associated with the deadly projectile. Back in the present, the brick serves to highlight the comic strip’s central conceit, the ideological split between oneiric Krazy and hard-nosed Ignatz. The mouse has a home, a family, and a realistic distaste for pie-in-the-sky thinking; Krazy philosophizes, swoons, and has the naive ability to see through real life foolishness. Their relationship descends directly from Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, educating the reader on the nature of his own beliefs by engaging him in their conflict.
The chickenscratch that Picasso loved
Derided by some as unusual or careless, the art of Krazy Kat can be as expressive as the dialogue and demands a similarly acquired taste. Herriman set the comic in his beloved Arizona desert and labored to create a surreal and dynamic landscape appropriate to the content of the strip. The vistas he produced are so vivid and alive that they behave like an additional character. From panel to panel, the backdrop changes from trees to mesas to churches to interiors, then to rock formations, geometric patterns and even outer space. The settings provide a manic counterpoint to the actions and musings of Krazy, Ignatz, and the other denizens of “Kokonino Kounty, Arizona.”
The layout of the comic is as brilliant as it is counterintuitive. Herriman took the page allotted him for Sunday strips and orchestrated the flow of space to complement the narrative. Indeed, in many cases Herriman’s arrangement of a strip lends it a sense of timing which brings the humor, the poignancy, or the “correct” interpretation of ambiguous events. For example, in 1919 Herriman used eight long, vertical panels to reveal Ignatz hoisting a brick up a tall building, past the windows of commenting characters, until reaching Offissa Pup, who cut the rope, only to drop the brick on Krazy’s head as he entered the scene at ground level. On top of all this, Herriman’s scratchy, epileptic draftsmanship could burden a flick of the tail with so much emotional weight that many strips (among them his most revealing) contained no dialogue.
Though Herriman seemed to admire Krazy’s obliviousness to the harsh realities of life, he did on occasion use Krazy Kat to tackle political issues. He introduced the subject of Women’s Suffrage into the colloquium of Coconinans, and he quietly satirized monarchy as all pomp and posture. But Herriman overwhelmingly preferred metaphysical subject matter, particularly that dealing with the nature of cartooning. Krazy and Ignatz play with the horizon line, use pencils to draw bricks or erase them around Offissa Pup, and occasionally flee back to the comfort of Herriman’s “Ink Bottle.” In one strikingly existential strip, Ignatz negotiates with Offissa Pup to “call off your ‘Jail’ – and I will drop my pet ‘Brick.’” The officer complies, as does Ignatz, who then realizes, “A ‘Mouse’ without a ‘Brick’ – how futile” and disappears. Krazy walks on, sees no brick, no jail, no mouse, and vanishes, causing Pup to disappear. These creatures of simple purpose depend on each other to justify and perpetuate their existence.
In a similar way, George Herriman depended on Krazy Kat to relate with the world and make sense of it. The humble cartoonist resembled his creation in a surprising number of ways: he was of biracial ancestry, private and dreamy, with a gentle disposition, and misplaced in a thrumming, frenetic society. Arizona brought Herriman physical escape, and his comic satisfied him spiritually. Speaking explicitly of Krazy, whose name he always encased in quotation marks, and therefore also of himself, George Herriman appealed to his readers and the judgment of future generations, “Yet be not harsh with ‘Krazy.’ He is but a shadow himself, caught in this mortal skein…Forgive him, for you will understand him no better than we who linger on this side of the pale.” To Herriman and his creation, history has been so kind.
Benjamin Carlson B’07 is ready to leave 01 behind him.
