Bill Watterson: A Few Thoughts on Krazy Kat

BILL WATERSON:

(from"The Komplete Kolor Krazy Kat", Kitchen Sink Press, 1990)

As a cartoonist, I read Krazy Kat with awe and wonder. Krazy Kat is such a pure and completely realized personal vision that the strip's inner mechanism is ultimately as unknowable as George Herriman. Nevertheless, I marvel at how this fanciful world could be so forcefully imagined and brought to paper with such immediacy. THIS is how good a comic strip can be.

Interestingly, Krazy Kat gains its momentum less from the personalities of its characters than from their obsessions. Ignatz Mouse demonstrates his contempt for Krazy by throwing bricks at her; Krazy reinterprets the bricks as signs of love; and Offissa Pupp is obliged by duty (and regard for Krazy) to thwart and punish Ignatz's "sin," thereby interfering with a process that's satisfying to everyone for all the wrong reasons. Some 30 years of strips were wrung out of that amalgam of cross-purposes. The action can be read as a metaphor for love or politics, or just enjoyed for its lunatic inner logic and physical comedy.

Despite the predictability of the characters' proclivities, the strip never sinks into formula or routine. Often the actual brick tossing is only anticipated. The simple plot is endlessly renewed through constant innovation, pace manipulations, unexpected results, and most of all, the quiet charm of each story's presentation. The magic of the strip is not so much in what it says, but in how it says it. It's a more subtle kind of cartooning than we have today.

To the bewilderment of many readers, there are few endings in Krazy Kat that qualify as "punchlines." Instead, it's the temperament of the writing and drawing throughout the strip that is the joke. If you don't think it's funny that a strip should have an intermission drawing, or that a character would refer to his tail as a "caudal appendage," you're reading the wrong strip, and it's your loss.

Quirky, individual, and uncompromised, Krazy Kat is one of the very few comic strips that takes full advantage of its medium. There are some things a comic strip can do that no other medium, not even animation, can touch, and Krazy Kat is a virtual essay on comic strip essence.

In their headlong rush for the "gag", most cartoonists run right past the countless treasures Herriman uncovered simply by taking his time to explore the freedom of his medium. The self-consciously baroque narrations and monologues ("From the kwaint konfines of the kalabozo del kondado de Kokonino -- Officer 'Pup' gives answer") show that words can be funny in themselves, just as drawings can. The sky turns from black to white to zigzags and plaids simply because, in a comic strip, it CAN. No other cartoonist ever approached his blank sheet of paper with so much affection for all its possibilities.

The scratchy drawings delight me no end. They have the honesty and directness of sketches. So many of today's strips are slick and polished, the inevitable result of assistants trying to develop a mechanical style that can be continued indefinitely. The drawings in Krazy Kat are whimsical, idiosyncratic, and filled with personality. The bold design of the Sunday strips neatly compliments the flat expanses of color or black, and the wonderful hatching brings character to the otherwise posterish approach.

Nothing in Krazy Kat had a supporting role, least of all the Arizona desert setting. Mountains are striped. Mesas are spotted. Trees grow in pots. The horizon is a low wall that characters climb over. Panels are framed by theater curtains and stage spotlights. Monument Valley monoliths are drawn to look more like their names. The moon is a melon wedge, suspended upside down. And virtually every panel features a different landscape, even if the characters don't move. The land is more than a backdrop. It is a character in the story, and the strip is "about" that landscape as much as it is about the animals who populate it.

As the artwork is poetic, so is the writing. With the possible exception of Pogo, no other strip derives so much of its charm from its verbiage. Krazy Kat's unique "texture" comes in large part through the conglomeration of peculiar spellings and punctuations, dialects, interminglings of Spanish, phonetic renderings, and alliterations. Krazy Kat's Coconino County not only had a look; it had a sound as well. Slightly foreign, but uncontrived, it was an extraordinary and full world.

Darn few comic strips challenge their readers anymore. The comics have become big business, and they play it safe. They shamelessly pander to the results of reader surveys, and are produced by virtual factories, ready-made for the inevitable t-shirts, dolls, greeting cards, and television specials. Licensing is where the money is, and we seem to have forgotten that a comic strip can be something more than a launchpad for a glut of derivative products. When the comic strip is not exploited, the medium can be a vehicle for beautiful artwork and serious, intelligent expression.

Krazy Kat was drawn well over half a century ago, and yet it's a much more sophisticated use of the comic strip medium than anything we cartoonists are doing today. Of course, a 1930s Sunday Krazy filled the entire newspaper page, whereas editors today usually cram at least four strips in the same amount of space. This reduction of size greatly limits what can be drawn and written and still remain legible, and it goes a long way toward explaining the comics' devolution.

Even so, the whiteness of paper is still vast, uncharted territory, ripe for exploration. There are plenty of exotic lands for a cartoonist to map, if he or she will leave the well-worn paths and strike off for the wilds of the imagination. Krazy Kat is like no other comic strip before or after it. We are richer for Herriman's integrity and vision.

Krazy Kat was not very successful as a commercial venture, but it was something better. It was art.

Bill Watterson is a cartoonist and created Calvin & Hobbes. Fantagraphics Books have reprinted George Herriman's complete Krazy Kat Sunday pages (1916-1944), which belong in any serious comics reader's collection.

 

 

Calvin & Hobbes by Bill Watterson (No. 36)

Calvin & Hobbes (1985-196)

by Bill Watterson

REVIEW BY GENE KANNENBERG:

(from The 100 Best Comics of the Century! in The Comics Journal #210, 1999)

"Funny kid" comic strips have been a mainstay in newspapers for over a century, and Calvin & Hobbes was one of the best. As Gary Trudeau wrote, "[Bill Watterson delineated] childhood as it actually is, with its constantly shifting frames of reference". Calvin the uncontrollable dreamer, Hobbes the romantic, occasionally pragmatic, predator-cum-stuffed tiger: Such was the stuff of dreams. Calvin's personality, like his vocabulary, benefited from an adult perspective which exaggerated ideas in order to explore them. Flights of fancy walked side by side with willful manipulation, brutal honesty, and manic energy.

The artwork, too, had energy, especially the physical characterisations; the words gave us punch lines, but the pictures sold the jokes. Calvin & Hobbes also easily brought its comic and narrative timing into longer, multi-week story arcs without endless repetition or plodding action. We admired Calvin's broad imagination, but it was Watterson's artwork which made that imagination real.

Watterson's temperament also marks his work as significant. His refusal to merchandise the strip was probably financially foolish but artistically admirable. After his first (gasp!) sabbatical, he successfully campaigned to alter drastically the format of the Sunday strips. Today, many cartoonists thank Watterson for having an open (if often small) canvas on which to produce comics which won't undergo editorial reformatting. Few, however, have used this space as productively or imaginatively as did Watterson himself. The final Sunday strip, a paean to the joys of childhood winter excursions, utilised chiaroscuro and abundant negative space to convey that it is, indeed, a magical world.

Intelligent, charming, uncompromising, and beautifully rendered, Calvin & Hobbes remains a benchmark by which humour strips should be judged.

REVIEW BY FRANK MILLER:

(from an interview in The Comics Journal #209, December 1998)

...this is going to sound simplistic, but I think it's one of the essentials of what makes comics work, and one of the reasons they translate so poorly into film, is the sheer joy of seeing good cartooning. A perfect example of that is Calvin & Hobbes, by Bill Watterson. I can't imagine that in any other form, because even more than the humanity or humor in the strip, the drawing is such a joy to behold. It charms my eye enough to make me slow down and really pay attention. I feel a stream of pleasure from looking at drawings like that...

FURTHER READING:

Bill Watterson at Andrews McMeel Publishing

The Calvin & Hobbes Wiki

Pogo by Walt Kelly (No. 3)

Pogo (1949-1973)

by Walt Kelly 

REVIEW BY R.C. HARVEY:

(from The 100 Best Comics of the Century! in The Comics Journal #210, 1999)

When Walt Kelly (1913-1973) was good, he was the best there was. And he was often good. But the pinnacle of his achievement as a cartoonist was his attack on McCarthyism in the early 1950s. Kelly's career included both animation (1936-1941 at Disney Studios) and comic books (1942-1948) before embracing the newspaper comic strip form, and by the time he had finished with it, Kelly had elevated the form to high art in Pogo. 

The eponymous possum had first appeared as one of several anthropomorphic spear-carriers in the first issue of Animal Comics (December 1942 - January 1943). And when Kelly became art director of the short-lived by much mourned New York Star in 1948, he reincarnated his animal ensemble as a comic strip on October 8. After the Star's demise, Pogo went into national syndication, May 16, 1949.

Pogo transcended the "talking funny animal" tradition of its origins. At its core, the strip was a reincarnation of vaudeville, and its routines were often laced with humour that derived from pure slapstick. To that, Kelly added the remarkably fanciful and inventive language of his characters - a "southern fried" dialect that lent itself readily to his characters propensity to take things literally and permitted an unblinking delight in puns. The cast was perfectly content being animals, but sometimes for their own amusement they'd undertake the enterprises of people, adopting the right jargon and costumes but not quite understanding the purpose behind the human endeavours they mimicked. Adrift in misunderstood figures of speech, mistaken identities, and double entendres going off in all directions at once, Kelly's characters usually wandered further and further from what appeared to have been their original intentions. And this was the trick of Kelly's satire: readers couldn't help but glimpse themselves in this menage, looking just as silly as they often were. The animals - "natures screechers" - were blissfully unaware of their satirical function. They, after all, didn't take life as seriously as people did: "It ain't nohow permanent", as Porky the porcupine was won't to say.

Kelly added overt political commentary to his social satire in 1952 when some of Pogo's well meaning friends entered him in the Presidential race, and the strip was never quite the same again. The double meaning of the puns took on political as well as social implications, and the vaudeville routines frequently looked suspiciously like animals imitating officials high in government. Over the years, Kelly underscored his satirical  intent with caricature: his animals had plastic features that seemed to change before the reader's very eyes until they resembled those at whom the satire was directed. And the species suggested something about Kelly's opinions of his targets. Soviet boss Nikita Khrushchev showed up one time as a piratical pig; Cuba's Fidel Castro as a goat; the tenacious J. Edgar Hoover as a bulldog.

Kelly's first foray into the jungle of politics with caricature as his machete was in the spring of 1953, when he introduced an unprincipled and purely ruthless operative in his swamp, a wild cat named Simple J. Malarkey. As if the syllabic rhythm of his name weren't give away enough, Kelly made the wild cat look remarkably like Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, the country's self-proclaimed crusader against communist spies, a master of the smear and innuendo with a gift for the self-promotion and an utter disregard for the truth. To create a narrative metaphor for McCarthy's commie hunt, Kelly turned to the swamp's Bird Watcher's Club, and in power plays evocative of McCarthy's manoeuvres, Malarkey intimidates the members of the club into letting him take charge. With his guidance, the Club dedicates itself to ridding the swamp of all migratory birds, and when Malarkey is faced with a number of swamp creatures who claim they aren't birds (because, in fact, they aren't), he proposes to make them all birds with "a little judicious application" of tar and feathers. At one satiric stroke, Kelly equated McCarthyism with an appropriately belittling analogue, tar-and-feathering - a primitive method of ostracising, universally held in low repute. In a delicious finale, a member of the Club shoves Malarkey into the kettle of tar, demonstrating with an unforgettable flourish that those who seek to smear others are likely to be tarred with their own brush.

It was as neat a piece of satire as had ever been attempted on the comics page or anywhere. And the success of it depended upon Kelly's plumbing the potential of his medium to its utmost. Word and picture are perfectly, inseparably, wedded, the very emblem of excellence in the art of the comic strip: neither meant much when taken by itself, but when blended, the verbal and the visual achieved allegorical impact and powerful satiric thrust. High art indeed. At its best, Pogo was a masterpiece of comic strip art, an Aesopian tour de force - humour at each of two levels, one vaudeville, the other satirical - and it opened to a greater extent than ever the possibilities for political and social satire in the medium of the newspaper comic strip.

REVIEW BY NEIL GAIMAN:

In these uncertain times, Pogo feels necessary, feels relevant, feels ever-more-right.

REVIEW BY SERGIO ARAGONES:

Walt Kelly accompanied me from the first moment I saw his work and began to understand not about drawing but about cartooning. He filled me with a sense of what constituted excellence in my chosen field.

REVIEW BY BILL WATTERSON:

(from 'Some Thoughts On Pogo' in The Comics Journal, #140, February 1991)

Pogo celebrated conversation and dialogue for their own sake. The strip rarely had a punchline per se. I can't imagine people cutting out one day's strip and putting it on the refrigerator; it wasn't that kind of strip with a snappy saying in the last panel that makes Mom think of little Junior. Instead, it was a strip where characters talked and talked, inevitably misunderstood each other, and argued. It was a wonderful, rich parody of what passes for communication between human beings. The word balloons were filled with puns, obscure references, inside jokes, utter nonsense, and, once in a while, quiet wisdom. If the drawings in Pogo get better with each re-reading, so do the words.

FURTHER READING:

Walt Kelly at Fantagraphics Books

Krazy Kat by George Herriman (No. 1)

Krazy Kat (1913-1944)

by George Herriman

REVIEW BY TOM SPURGEON:
(from The Best 100 Comics of the Century! in The Comics Journal #210, 1999)

Krazy Kat has been the acknowledged greatest comic for so long, by so many esteemed critics, that it becomes tempting to knock it from its throne. At a casual glance, George Herriman's long-running strip seems quaint and antiquated, full of half-realised characters, and Herriman's art may be a half-step behind the visual bravado of Feininger's or McCay's.

But to immerse yourself in Krazy Kat, to yield to Herriman's looping verbal rhythms and lovely-depicted desert backgrounds, to experience his perfectly realised triptych of unspoken and unconsummated love, yields a very, very different result. Herriman's creation is not only great comics, with a wonderful command of the medium's possibilities and strengths, but it is also great art - an affecting exploration of some of life's most basic issues in a way that enlightens and thrills. Every cartoonist who turns to comics as a medium of personal expression follows in Herriman's path, and that is why his is the greatest comic of the 20th Century.

Krazy Kat was the work of a veteran cartoonist in the prime of his career. Born in 1880, Herriman was doing newspaper strip illustration by 1897 and selling stand-alone one-page strips by 1901. Herriman spent most of the first decade travelling from town to town, newspaper to newspaper in much the same manner as a medieval journeyman would do. Along the way, he worked with some of the finest cartoonists in America (the art room at the New York American in 1904 included Frederick Opper, James Swinnerton, and the great sports cartoonist Tad Dorgan), and created several short-lived strips full of vaudevillian humour: Home Sweet Home, Bubblespikers, and the wonderfully titled Mazor Ozone's Fresh Air Crusade. He also created three animal-oriented strips that perhaps more directly presage Krazy Kat: Goosebury Spring, Alexander The Cat and Daniel Pansy.

The characters that would become Krazy Kat and Ignatz the mouse got their start as incidentals in a strip called The Dingbat Family. Ignatz first beaned Krazy in a 1910 strip. Their evolution was extremely organic. They next appeared in their own little strip accompanying that same strip, now re-named The Family Upstairs. They finally graduated to their own strip in 1913. Printed vertically, it presaged what would become one of the hallmarks of Krazy Kat's history: a variety of formats and layouts. From 1925 to 1929 the Sunday strip lost its standard full-page format in favour of a combination of strips and stand-alone illustration that papers could print in one of two ways. And it wasn't until 1935 that Herriman was able to use colour. 

Looking at Krazy Kat with fresh eyes, it is clear how much it benefited from its specific developmental path. Nailing down standard newspaper styles allowed Herriman the freedom to develop his own idiosyncratic approach, and many of the strips - not just the animal-based ones - served as dry runs for areas of Herriman's interest. Similarly, the change in styles kept Herriman at his most inventive, and allowed certain strengths to evolve at their own pace. As noted in Krazy Kat: The Comics Art of George Herriman by Patrick McDonnell, Georgia Riley de Havenon and Karen O'Connell (to which this essay owes the vast majority of its factual information, and a not insignificant portion of its shared insight), the strip developed from slapstick to verbal-based vaudevillian humour as the format changed; similarly, Herriman's use of slightly surreal desert landscapes were dramatically altered by the introduction of colour.

One can also track developments in the relationships between the characters. Although the physical relationship of cat and mouse was the basis of the strip at its origin, its thematic possibilities were not established until the very late '20s. Krazy Kat in its prime focused on the relationship between three characters. Krazy Kat adored Ignatz mouse. Ignatz mouse hated Krazy Kat, the expression of which was in throwing bricks at Krazy's head. Offisa Pup loved Krazy and sought to protect her (Herriman actually believed Krazy to be neither male nor female), mostly by throwing Ignatz in jail. Each of the characters was ignorant of the other's true motivations.

This simple structure allowed Herriman to build entire worlds of meaning into the actions. Most famously, Krazy interpreted the brick in the head as an expression of love from Ignatz. But there were more nuanced readings to be had: Ignatz's brick as an expression of art or as a necessary curb on Krazy's flights of fancy; Offisa Pup's enforcement of his role as studies in how personal feelings affected vocation or how the world reacts to art and artists. It is that thematic depth to which the critics like Gilbert Seldes and the editors of Vanity Fair reacted to in the early 1920s - even in its initial conception, the role of Krazy and Ignatz as romantic and realist were hard to resist. The fact that Herriman was able to build on these themes, making them deeper and more fully realised, is an amazing achievement given that usually took hold of even the greatest strips.

In Krazy Kat, theme reigns over all other factors. Not that Krazy Kat didn't work as humour, or serial comedy, or even as rollicking adventure. A score of funny, interesting characters inhabited the strip's "Coconino County" in addition to the leads. And Herriman's best-known episode, 1936's Tiger Tea serial, stands with any of his contemporaries' long-running stories in terms of its narrative inventiveness. But because Krazy Kat was so well-anchored, all of these elements only served to further our understanding of the core relationships. Herriman's idiosyncratic use of language, all creative spelling and eloquent babble, delineated Krazy's dreaming, Ignatz's harsh denunciations, and Offisa Pups recriminations in equal stead. Even the great landscapes - beginning in formal play in the strip's early years and continuing through the colour-period - are best known as an expressionistic background for the central drama.

Krazy Kat reminds us that art is achieved from the inside out. Herriman was right: love clumsily expressed is funny and beautiful and fascinating enough to hold our interest for another hundred years.

REVIEW BY CHRIS WARE:
(from the essay 'To Walk In Beauty', 2017)
Krazy Kat has been described as a parable of love, a metaphor for democracy, a “surrealistic” poem, unfolding over years and years. It is all of these, but so much more: it is a portrait of America, a self-portrait of Herriman, and, I believe, the first attempt to paint the full range of human consciousness in the language of the comic strip. Like the America it portrays, Herriman’s identity has been poised for a revision for many decades now. Michael Tisserand’s new biography Krazy does just that, clearing the shifting sands and shadows of Herriman’s ancestry, the discovery in the early 1970s of a birth certificate which described Herriman as “colored” sending up a flag among comics researchers and aficionados.

REVIEW BY ART SPIEGELMAN:
The Poet Laureate of comics, of course, was George Herriman (1880–1944) - or more accurately the Comics Laureate. Krazy Kat wasn't much like anything that ever happened in any other medium... Herriman worked variations on a deceptively simple theme for over thirty years. In one of literature's more peculiar love triangles, Krazy Kat's love with Ignatz Mouse who, loving no one but himself, finds no greater pleasure than 'kreasing that kat's bean with a brick.' Though intended as an act of aggression Krazy receives the brick as a sign of love. Offissa Pup is in love with Krazy (who loves everyone) and quite naturally hates Ignatz, who he regularly incarcerates in a jail made of... bricks... Herriman's genius allowed him to give his theme the weight of a poetic symbol. For some it is a strip about Democracy, for others about Love and Sex, for others still about Heaven and Hell. For all, it is about a cat getting hit with a brick.

REVIEW BY BILL WATTERSON:
Despite the predictability of the characters' proclivities, the strip never sinks into formula or routine. Often the actual brick tossing is only anticipated. The simple plot is endlessly renewed through constant innovation, pace manipulations, unexpected results, and most of all, the quiet charm of each story's presentation. The magic of the strip is not so much in what it says, but in how it says it. It's a more subtle kind of cartooning than we have today... Krazy Kat was not very successful as a commercial venture, but it was something better. It was art.

FURTHER READING:

Herriman at Fantagraphics Books
Herriman at Sunday Press Books

Krazy: George Herriman, A Life in Black & White by Michael Tisserand

The Recommended Reading List

Comic-creators recommend their favourite comics!
This list is a work-in-progress and will be updated regularly.

CHESTER BROWN:
A Contract With God by Will Eisner
Frank by Jim Woodring
Little Orphan Annie by Harold Gray

EDDIE CAMPBELL:
Ethel & Ernest by Raymond Briggs
Palestine by Joe Sacco
Prince Valiant by Harold Foster
The Strange Death of Alex Raymond by Dave Sim & Carson Grubaugh

DAN CLOWES:
Barnaby by Crockett Johnson
Dirty Plotte by Julie Doucet
MAD edited by Harvey Kurtzman

ROBERT CRUMB:
American Splendor by Harvey Pekar
Binky Brown Meets The Holy Virgin Mary by Justin Green
Dirty Plotte by Julie Doucet
Harvey Kurtzman's Jungle Book by Harvey Kurtzman
MAD edited by Harvey Kurtzman
The Autobiographical Comics of Spain Rodriguez
The Buddy Bradley Stories by Peter Bagge

WILL EISNER:
Madman's Drum by Lynd Ward
The Cartoon History of the Universe by Larry Gonick
Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud

NEIL GAIMAN:
Alec by Eddie Campbell
Cages by Dave McKean
Frank by Jim Woodring
Master Race by Bernard Krigstein & Al Feldstein
Pogo by Walt Kelly
Tantrum by Jules Feiffer
Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud
Watchmen by Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons

SCOTT McCLOUD:
A Contract With God by Will Eisner
Frank by Jim Woodring
The Spirit by Will Eisner

MIKE MIGNOLA:
Murky World by Richard Corben

FRANK MILLER:
A Contract With God by Will Eisner
Calvin & Hobbes by Bill Watterson
EC War Comics by Harvey Kurtzman & Others

ALAN MOORE:
Alec by Eddie Campbell
American Splendor by Harvey Pekar
Arcade: The Comics Revue edited by Art Spiegelman & Bill Griffith
Dark Knight by Frank Miller
Grendel: Devil By The Deed by Matt Wagner
Hellboy by Mike Mignola
Love & Rockets by Jaime Hernandez
Luther Arkwright by Bryan Talbot
MAD edited by Harvey Kurtzman
Maus by Art Spiegelman
Palestine by Joe Sacco
Tales of Telguuth by Steve Moore
The Book of Jim by Jim Woodring
The Loneliness of a Long-Distance Cartoonist by Adrian Tomine
The Sketchbooks of Robert Crumb
The Spirit by Will Eisner
The Suttons by Phil Elliott
Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud

CHARLES M. SCHULZ:
Barnaby by Crockett Johnson
Thimble Theatre by E.C. Segar

SETH:
Peanuts by Charles M. Schulz
The Autobiographical Stories in Yummy Fur by Chester Brown

DAVE SIM:
A Contract With God by Will Eisner
Fourth World Comics by Jack Kirby
Master Race by Bernard Krigstein & Al Feldstein
The Autobiographical Stories in Yummy Fur by Chester Brown
The Willie & Joe Cartoons of Bill Mauldin

ART SPIEGELMAN:
Binky Brown Meets The Holy Virgin Mary by Justin Green
City of Glass by Paul Karasik & David Mazzucchelli
Harvey Kurtzman's Jungle Book
Krazy Kat by George Herriman
Little Nemo in Slumberland by Winsor McKay
Little Orphan Annie by Harold Gray
Madman's Drum by Lynd Ward
Master Race by Bernard Krigstein & Al Feldstein
Peanuts by Charles M. Schulz
Plastic Man by Jack Cole
The Autobiographical Comics of Spain Rodriguez
The Bungle Family by George Tuthill
The Mishkin Saga by Kim Deitch with Simon Deitch
Thimble Theatre by E.C. Segar
Uncle Scrooge by Carl Barks
Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud
Watchmen by Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons

ALEX TOTH:
Wash Tubbs / Captain Easy by Roy Crane

CHRIS WARE:
Binky Brown Meets The Holy Virgin Mary by Justin Green
Gasoline Alley by Frank King
Krazy Kat by George Herriman
Peanuts by Charles M. Schulz
Zap Comix by Robert Crumb & Others

BILL WATTERSON:
Krazy Kat by George Herriman
Pogo by Walt Kelly