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.

 

 

George Herriman's Secret by Chris Ware

George Herriman (circa 1940)

To Walk in Beauty

by Chris Ware

For one of the most prolific and highly-praised cartoonists who ever lived, George Herriman, the creator of Krazy Kat (1913-1944), didn’t like talking about himself. Recoiling from photographers and brushing off personal questions with elliptical answers and even occasional fabrications, George or “Garge” or “The Greek” always preferred the focus to be on the multivalent, multifarious, and multicultural characters who populated the inner world he made every day with the scratchings of his pen. A direct throughline of thought-to-gesture in black ink on white paper, George Herriman’s drawings come alive before the reader’s eye with a vital, persuasive complexity previously unknown in the history of art. Krazy Kat lived on the page - but he - or she - had a secret. And so did George Herriman.

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. Tisserand confirms what for years was hiding in plain sight in the tangled brush of Coconino County, Arizona, where Krazy Kat is supposedly set: Herriman, of mixed African-American ancestry, spent his entire adult life passing as white. He had been born in the African-American neighborhood of racially mixed, culturally polyglot 1880s New Orleans, but within a decade Herriman’s parents moved George and his three siblings to the small but growing town of Los Angeles to escape the increasing bigotry and racial animosity of postbellum Louisiana. The Herrimans melted into California life, and it was there that George, with brief professional spates in New York, would remain for the rest of his life.

But imagine knowing something about yourself that’s considered so damning, so dire, so disgusting, that you must, at all cost, never tell anyone. Imagine leaving behind a life to which you cannot claim allegiance or affection. Imagine suddenly gaining advantages and opportunity while you see others like you, who have not followed in the footsteps of your deception, suffering. Herriman, once he was considered white, didn’t even have a way of voicing this identity. Until he started drawing Krazy Kat.

I may be in the minority here, but I really think that most if not all readers of Krazy Kat during Herriman’s lifetime would have had a hard time thinking of Krazy as anything but African-American. Krazy’s patois, social status, stereotypical “happy-go-lucky despite it all” disposition all funnel into a rather pointed African-American identity. And Herriman, confoundingly, was not above using racial and even racist imagery himself, his early work especially filled with eye-popping stereotypes and blackface caricatures. At the turn of the century, when Herriman was just starting his career, the nineteenth-century cultural phenomenon of blackface minstrelsy, while admittedly in the early process of passing into nostalgia, was still prevalent. Large orchestral shows of dozens of performers like Haverly’s and Christy’s Minstrels, grotesquely metastasized from the already ghastly four-person troupes, filled vaudeville halls and theaters; blackface performances, in a cruel twist of cultural fairness, were the first places for African-American performers to find a foothold. (W. C. Fields called Bert Williams, probably still the best known African-American entertainer from this era, “the saddest man I ever knew.”)

At the same time, a reader alive in the early part of the twentieth century probably didn’t really have to think about these associations any more specifically than we think the “Minions” sound vaguely Latino, or why Felix the Cat or Mickey and his minstrel mouse gloves were so funny. Of course Krazy Kat was black. A funny black cat. Just the right amount of slippage and shift in Krazy’s animus, helped along by a tradition of children’s animal stories, was all that was necessary for him/her to be two things - and nothing - all at once.

Nevertheless, one detail in Herriman’s strip that would have absolutely cemented this identity in the minds of contemporary readers has since passed into obscurity: Krazy Kat’s banjo. Through received clichés and shifts of poverty and culture in America, the banjo has come to be thought of as an instrument of poor whites, but at the turn of the century, it was as emblematic as a watermelon as part of the African-American stereotype. In fact, the banjo has a solemn origin: descended from the West African akonting, xalam, and ngoni instruments, played as an accompaniment to storytelling by Wolof griots in Senegal or the Jola in Gambia, early instruments like what became the American banjo were recreated by American slaves from whatever plantation materials were at hand - gourds, turtle shells, coconuts, animal skins - to try to hold on to a memory of life and culture torn from their grasp.

To the modern reader, the banjo in Krazy Kat might seem a lighthearted accessory, but when Krazy picks it up to sing “There is a Heppy Land Fur, Fur Away”, the meaning, to thoughtful readers of the 1920s to the 1940s, would have been clear. Even more astonishingly, Krazy never plays a “proper” banjo, but plays the gourd or coconut banjo, the origins of which by the time of the strip’s appearance would indeed have been obscure. Herriman knew what he was doing, and it’s not insignificant that the very last strip he left unfinished on his drawing table showed Krazy playing a gourd banjo. The earliest representation known of such an instrument appears in the watercolor The Old Plantation, painted by South Carolina slaveholder John Rose in the late eighteenth century.

What do these racial and cultural connections mean for how we see Herriman’s work? From their dimming over the years compared with Krazy Kat’s increasing artistic incandescence, they are clearly not necessary to an appreciation of the strip. But put yourself in Herriman’s shoes, and then reread Krazy Kat with this knowledge rewoven into the tapestry of his work. Think of pink Ignatz, the mouse who is Krazy’s constant tormentor. Think of the brick. Think of what W.E.B. DuBois called the “dual consciousness” of African-Americans, think of the brick hitting Krazy, over and over and over again. (Tisserand shrewdly notes that a July 30, 1866, New Orleans race riot, which Herriman’s father may have witnessed, started when a white boy threatened to throw a brick at African-American soldiers parading through the town.) Think of what recasting that gesture of hate as one of love actually means to its recipient. Think of the lynchings of the 1910s, the race riots of the 1960s, the American police shootings of 2016, the iPhone videos that continually show the treatment of African-Americans as property. Think of Barack Obama, half Scotch-Irish, half African.

George Herriman saw the history of America and its future and wrote it in ink as a dream on paper, and it is a dream that is still coming true. In December, disparate Native-American tribes and activists who had gathered in North Dakota for months staved off an oil pipeline that would have cut through ancestral Sioux burial lands; Herriman began visiting the Diné or Navajo nation and befriending its citizens before some western states were even twenty-five years old. Navajo rug patterns and the folklore of Monument Valley came to define the very cosmos of Krazy Kat. (A wonderful detail in Tisserand’s book recalls Herriman, who had Hollywood friends, setting up a private screening of older western movies with actual Navajo supporting actors for a Navajo audience, solely because the actors had said insulting things in their native language that only the Native audience could understand.)

And our most recent election involved debates about the equality of transgender teens, of those trapped inside a body by which they feel betrayed. Krazy Kat’s self-defining gender-switching - “I don’t know if I should take a husband or a wife,” Krazy once remarks - couldn’t be more timely, more oracular. Nor, sadly, could Ignatz’s seemingly implacable hatred. Even sadder, in that same American election, Ignatz won.

Everyone “passes” in some way or another; everyone has something they’d rather not discuss, something of their history they’re trying to downplay or hide, some story that doesn’t jibe with the vision and identity they’d prefer to have. This is the essence of fiction. Every one of us nightly, daily, hourly—every minute—reviews, sorts, discards, rewrites details that allow us to somehow get on with our lives, unrecorded acts of revision tantamount to what a writer commits professionally on a page. Do it well, and you’re mentally healthy. Do it badly, and you’re crazy. Fundamentally, we understand others only as refractions through the optic of ourselves, and fiction not only offers an alternative construct, but in its finest form allows the reader to inhabit, and most importantly, to empathize with another consciousness. (Or in Herriman’s case, with a cartoon cat.) So is kaleidoscopic Krazy really the crazy one, whom Ignatz can only understand through the reducing lens of his narrow, white mind?

Lately, I’ve been wondering if Herriman knew that one day his secret-in-plain-sight would be uncovered, that America would change, adapt and grow up enough as a people to understand Krazy Kat in all of its psychological and poetic depth. I’m not sure if we’ve yet reached that point, but what myself and other cartoonists already knew - that the strip was already the greatest ever drawn - is now magnified, multiplied and maximized. Krazy Kat is not just one of the greatest comic strips, it’s one of the strangest, most inventive, emotional, and personal works of art of the twentieth century. In their admiration for Herriman, Philip Guston, Willem de Kooning, and Jack Kerouac sensed something in his line and voice that was endemically American, deeply felt. Herriman should now take his rightful place as one of the most original African-American voices of the early twentieth century, contemporary with, if not predating, Richard Wright and Zora Neale Hurston as one of the first writers to understand the racial animus of America and to try to fix the essence of black consciousness on paper. That Herriman made it come alive, sing, dance and suffer in an art form barely fifty years old is all the more astonishing. For decades, we’ve all been reading and laughing and, most of all, feeling for Krazy Kat, who passed right under our eyes as a living drawing on a page. But what we were really feeling came straight from the heart. It was the very soul of George Herriman himself.

Adapted from an essay that appeared in the catalog of an exhibition on George Herriman at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain, in 2017.

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