by George Herriman
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:
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