Krazy Kat


Krazy Kat is an American newspaper comic strip, created by cartoonist George Herriman, which ran from 1913 to 1944. It first appeared in the New York Evening Journal, whose owner, William Randolph Hearst, was a major booster for the strip throughout its run. The characters had been introduced previously in a side strip with Herriman's earlier creation, The Dingbat Family, after earlier appearances in the Herriman comic strip Baron Bean. The phrase "Krazy Kat" originated there, said by the mouse by way of describing the cat. Set in a dreamlike portrayal of Herriman's vacation home of Coconino County, Arizona, Krazy mixture of offbeat surrealism, innocent playfulness and poetic, idiosyncratic language has made it a favorite of comics aficionados and art critics for more than 80 years.
The strip focuses on the curious relationship between a guileless, carefree, simple-minded cat named Krazy and a short-tempered mouse named Ignatz. Krazy nurses an unrequited love for the mouse, but Ignatz despises Krazy and constantly schemes to throw bricks at Krazy's head, which Krazy interprets as a sign of affection, uttering grateful replies such as "Li'l dollink, allus f'etful", or "Li'l ainjil". A third principal character, Officer Bull Pupp, often appears and tries to "protect" Krazy by thwarting Ignatz' attempts and imprisoning him. Later on, Officer Pupp falls in love with Krazy.
Despite the slapstick simplicity of the general premise, the detailed characterization, combined with Herriman's visual and verbal creativity, made Krazy Kat one of the first comics to be widely praised by intellectuals and treated as "serious" art. Art critic Gilbert Seldes wrote a lengthy panegyric to the strip in 1924, calling it "the most amusing and fantastic and satisfactory work of art produced in America today". Poet E. E. Cummings, another Herriman admirer, wrote the introduction to the first collection of the strip in book form. These critical appraisals by Seldes and Cummings were influential in establishing Krazy Kats reputation as a work of genius. Though Krazy Kat was only a modest success during its initial run, in more recent years, many modern cartoonists have cited the strip as a major influence.

Overview

Krazy Kat takes place in a heavily stylized version of Coconino County, Arizona, with Herriman filling the page with caricatured flora and fauna, and rock formation landscapes typical of the Painted Desert. These backgrounds tend to change dramatically between panels, even while the characters remain stationary. While the local geography is fluid, certain sites were stable—and featured so often in the strip as to become iconic. These latter included Officer Pupp's jailhouse and Kolin Kelly's brickyard. A Southwestern visual style is evident throughout, with clay-shingled rooftops, trees planted in pots with designs imitating Navajo art, along with references to Mexican-American culture. The strip also occasionally features incongruous trappings borrowed from the stage, with curtains, backdrops, theatrical placards, and sometimes even floor lights framing the panel borders.
The descriptive passages mix whimsical, often alliterative language with phonetically-spelled dialogue and a strong poetic sensibility. Herriman was also fond of experimenting with unconventional page layouts in his Sunday strips, including panels of various shapes and sizes, arranged in whatever fashion he thought would best tell the story.
Though the basic concept of the strip is simple, Herriman always found ways to tweak the formula. Ignatz's plans to surreptitiously lob a brick at Krazy's head sometimes succeed; other times Officer Pupp outsmarts Ignatz and imprisons him. The interventions of Coconino County's other anthropomorphic animal residents, and even forces of nature, occasionally change the dynamic in unexpected ways. Other strips have Krazy's imbecilic or gnomic pronouncements irritating the mouse so much that he goes to seek out a brick in the final panel. Even self-referential humor is evident—in one strip, Officer Pupp, having arrested Ignatz, berates Herriman for not having finished drawing the jailhouse.
Public reaction at the time was mixed; many were puzzled by its iconoclastic refusal to conform to linear comic strip conventions and straightforward gags, but publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst loved Krazy Kat, and it continued to appear in his papers throughout its run, sometimes only by his direct order.

Cast of characters

Krazy Kat

Simple-minded, curious, mindlessly happy and perpetually innocent, the strip's title character drifts through life in Coconino County without a care. Krazy's dialogue is a highly stylized argot phonetically evoking a mixture of English, French, Spanish, Yiddish and other dialects, often identified as George Herriman's own native New Orleans dialect, Yat. Often singing and dancing to express the Kat's eternal joy, Krazy is hopelessly in love with Ignatz and thinks that the mouse's brick-tossing is his way of returning that love. Krazy is also completely unaware of the bitter rivalry between Ignatz and "Offissa" Pupp and mistakes the dog's frequent imprisonment of the mouse for an innocent game of tag. On those occasions when Ignatz is caught before he can launch his brick, Krazy is left pining for the "l'il ainjil" and wonders where the beloved mouse has gone.
Krazy's own gender is never made clear and appears to be fluid, varying from strip to strip. Most authors post-Herriman have mistakenly referred to Krazy only as female, but Krazy's creator was more ambiguous and even published several strips poking fun at this uncertainty. When filmmaker Frank Capra, a fan of the strip, asked Herriman to straightforwardly define the character's sex, the cartoonist admitted that Krazy was "something like a sprite, an elf. They have no sex. So that Kat can't be a he or a she. The Kat's a spirit—a pixie—free to butt into anything". Most characters inside the strip use "he" and "him" to refer to Krazy. Once Ignatz asks Krazy "What's your real name?" and Krazy says "Wilhelmina..."

Ignatz Mouse

Ignatz is driven to distraction by Krazy Kat's naïveté, and generally reacts by throwing bricks at Krazy's head. To shield his plans from Officer Pupp, Ignatz hides his bricks, disguises himself, or enlists the aid of willing Coconino County denizens. Easing Ignatz's task is Krazy Kat's willingness to meet him anywhere at any appointed time, eager to receive a token of affection in the form of a brick to the head. Ignatz is married with three children, though they are rarely seen.
Ironically, although Ignatz seems to generally have contempt for Krazy, one strip shows his ancestor, Mark Antony Mouse, fall in love with Krazy's ancestor, an Egyptian cat princess, and pay a sculptor to carve a brick with a love message. When he throws it at her, he is arrested, but she announces her love for him, and from that day on, he throws bricks at her to show his love for her. In another strip, Krazy kisses a sleeping Ignatz, and hearts appear above the mouse's head.
In the last five years of the strip, Ignatz's feelings of animosity for Krazy were noticeably downplayed. While earlier, one got the sense of his taking advantage of Krazy's willingness to be "bricked", now one gets the sense of Ignatz and Krazy as chummy co-conspirators against Pupp, with Ignatz at times quite aware of the positive way Krazy interprets his missiles.

Officer Bull Pupp

A police dog who loves Krazy, and always tries to thwart Ignatz's desires to pelt Krazy Kat with bricks. Officer Pupp and Ignatz often try to get the better of each other even when Krazy is not directly involved, as they both enjoy seeing the other played for a fool. He is a firm believer in justice and frequently describes his surroundings in the form of poetry.

Secondary characters

Beyond these three, Coconino County is populated with an assortment of incidental, recurring characters:
  • Joe Stork: the "purveyor of progeny to prince & proletarian", often makes unwanted baby deliveries to various characters. In one strip, Ignatz tries to trick him into dropping a brick onto Krazy's head from above. The character debuted in Gooseberry Sprig as the titular character's "Prime Minister".
  • Kolin Kelly: a dog, a brickmaker by trade who bakes his wares in a kiln. He is often unknowingly Ignatz's source for projectiles, although he distrusts the mouse.
  • Mrs. Kwakk Wakk: a duck in a pillbox hat, a scold and busybody who frequently notices Ignatz in the course of his plotting and informs Officer Pupp. She is a social climber, attempting in one strip continuity to replace Pupp as police chief.
Other characters who make semi-frequent appearances are:
  • Mimi: a French poodle schoolteacher who is the object of the residents' affection
  • Walter Cephus Austridge: a nondescript ostrich
  • Bum Bill Bee: a transient, bearded insect
  • Don Kiyote: an inconsequential heterodox Mexican coyote
  • Mock Duck: a clairvoyant fowl of Chinese descent who operates a cleaning establishment.
  • Gooseberry Sprig: the Duck Duke, who briefly starred in his own strip before Krazy Kat was created.
  • Also: Krazy's Aunt Tabby and Uncle Tom; and his aerial and aquatic cousins, respectively: Krazy Katbird and Krazy Katfish.
  • Ignatz also has relations; his family of look-alike mice includes his frustrated wife, Mathilda and a trio of equally unruly sons named Milton, Marshall and Irving.

    History

Krazy Kat evolved from an earlier comic strip of Herriman's, The Dingbat Family, which started in June 1910 and was later renamed The Family Upstairs. This comic chronicled the Dingbats' attempts to avoid the mischief of the mysterious unseen family living in the apartment above theirs and to unmask that family. Herriman would complete the daily comics about the Dingbats, and finding himself with time left over in his 8-hour work day, filled the bottom of the strip with slapstick drawings of the upstairs family's mouse preying upon the Dingbats' cat.
This "basement strip" grew into something much larger than the original cartoon. Krazy Kat first appeared as its own daily comic strip in 1911, and then again in the summer of 1912, although only temporarily at the time. It again became a daily comic strip in October 1913, and was thereafter to remain in syndication for more than thirty years. A black and white, full-page Krazy Kat Sunday comic was launched on April 23, 1916. Possibly due to the objections of editors, who did not think it was suitable for the comics sections, Krazy Kat originally appeared in the Hearst papers' art and drama sections. It has been claimed that Hearst himself, however, enjoyed the strip so much that he gave Herriman a lifetime contract and guaranteed the cartoonist complete creative freedom, although according to Michael Tisserand's biography on Herriman, there exists no proof that this alleged lifetime contract was ever made or signed.
Despite its relatively low popularity among the general public, Krazy Kat gained a wide following among intellectuals. In 1922, a jazz ballet based on the comic was produced and scored by John Alden Carpenter; though the performance played to sold-out crowds on two nights and was given positive reviews in The New York Times and The New Republic, it failed to boost the strip's popularity as Hearst had hoped. In addition to Seldes and Cummings, contemporary admirers of Krazy Kat included T. S. Eliot, Willem de Kooning, H. L. Mencken, P. G. Wodehouse, Jack Kerouac, Robert Benchley, Carl Sandburg, and artist Paul Nash. In 1931, Nash wrote that "no country has produced, in the narrow limits of this medium, a fantastic philosopher such as George Herriman". Reportedly, president Woodrow Wilson also read the strip regularly. More recent scholars and authors have seen the strip as reflecting the Dada movement and prefiguring postmodernism.
In the summer of 1934, the Krazy Kat Sunday page was temporarily shelved, although the daily strip continued as before. Beginning in June 1935, Krazy Kat's Sunday page returned, and was thereafter published in full color. Though the number of newspapers carrying it dwindled in its last decade, Herriman continued to draw Krazy Kat, creating roughly 3,000 comics in total, until his death in April 1944. Hearst promptly canceled the strip after the artist died, because, contrary to the common practice of the time, he did not want to see a new cartoonist take over.