I recently got into Krazy Kat, big time. I bought one of the new Fantagraphics anthologies* in mid-August, and quickly recognized it as the work of genius it is. But since I’m such a recent convert, I’m not at all an expert, so I’m sure other Dopers will cheerfully continue the enlightenment.
But in a nutshell:
[list=1][li]The Language. You say “the way the characters talk doesn’t help.” Many fans, by contrast, say Herriman’s playful language prefigures the work of no less a luminary than James Joyce, among others. Here’s the introductory text for the Sunday strip of 12/7/19: “Ships that pass in the night, whence do they come, and whither do they go? And so, ‘kuriosity’ is born on the palpitating bosom of ‘Krazy Kat,’ ‘kuriosity’ unrequited, and unsatisfied as the objects of his inquisitiveness lie in an element forbidden to kats — quantities of ocean, multitudes of water.” The sheer unbridled joy of the writing, I find, is infectious.[/li]
[li]The Artwork. And yet Herriman isn’t limited to wild syntactical gyrations for his effects; this isn’t Kevin Smith with stick figures. See the Sunday strip on 9/3/16 for an entirely wordless sequence, for example. Herriman wields his pen with boundless confidence and effortless grace, giving us characters who are hugely expressive despite their deceptively simple design. Ignatz Mouse is a teardrop on a teardrop, with a pokey nose, circles for ears, stick arms and legs, and only dots for eyes with a single eyebrow; and yet with virtually nothing to work with, Herriman endows the character with a universe of emotion, with only a few well-chosen strokes.[/li]
Add to that the wildly imaginative whimsy that suffuses the world of Coconino county, as shown by the randomly shifting backgrounds, for example. On 3/27/26, Ignatz begins by walking down a path with a “brick.” Behind him is a pair of trees, basically thick trunks with what look like shaggy blonde heavy-metal hairdos, plus some low hills off to the side along the horizon. In the next frame, Officer Pupp accosts Ignatz from behind another tree; the first two have disappeared, and now we have one that looks like a thumbless hand topped with black steel wool, and a side branch that holds a next with a ducklike bird covered by a small umbrella; the low hills have been replaced by big, dark mountains. In the third frame, Pupp has taken away Ignatz’s brick; the tree is gone, and in the background we have a low ranch-style house with a tall weather vane or antenna of some sort, next to a new pair of trees, which resemble ice-cream cones with pushbrooms stuck in the tops. And neither hills nor mountains mar the horizon line.
Again, it’s just the sheer ecstasy of unfettered creation. Herriman doesn’t feel the need to be restricted to a “realistic” setting, since he’s telling a story about a mouse attacking a cat and a dog who tries to keep the peace, so he just draws whatever strikes his fancy and whatever he thinks we might be interested in looking at. Would that other artists would learn this lesson; next to Krazy Kat, something like, say, Tumbleweeds, as stylized as it is, just looks joyless, literal, and ugly.
[li]The Layouts. Except during the period in which he was restricted by syndication concerns to a particular format, Herriman fills his full-page space in a myriad of ways. Sometimes it’s a conventional series of frames (3/16/19); sometimes it’s wide open (7/16/22). Sometimes he tells a story that requires a thoroughly idiosyncratic division of space (see page 161 of The Comic Art of George Herriman). In all cases, there is pleasure to be had simply looking at the page as a whole, and basking in the overall design. See 9/7/19, in which the story is relegated to tiny borders at top and bottom while the center of the page is dominated by a huge cheese wheel; or 12/27/42, where the top two trapezoidal frames are balanced visually with a large semicircle at the bottom. Basically, everything that people love about the last few years of Calvin and Hobbes, wherein Watterson finally got control over his Sunday rectangle and is able to fully manage the flow of his stories, was anticipated by Herriman’s work decades earlier.[/li]
And speaking of which:
[li]The Story. It took a few years of intuitive work before the triangle emerged, but when it did, the strip finally reached its pinnacle, where it would stay until it ended. Krazy Kat is in love with Ignatz Mouse. Ignatz Mouse hates Krazy Kat and wants nothing more than to bean the Kat with a brick. Officer Pupp loves the Kat and seeks to prevent the Mouse from throwing his bricks. Pupp is either obliviously or deliberately unaware that the Kat misinterprets the bricks as signs of Ignatz’s love, and when Pupp hauls the Mouse off to jail, the Kat sees them as merely playing. It is an entanglement of confusion, irony piled upon irony.[/li]
And here’s the genius part: While it may seem somewhat static, Herriman produces an infinitude of angles and permutations exploring the scenario. 2/3/18: A brick is missing from the wall of the jail; the authorities investigate, and eventually come upon Ignatz flinging said brick at the Kat. 11/21/17: Ignatz tosses his brick at Krazy, but misses, losing the brick in the lake; we follow the brick’s “Sub Aqueous Journey,” including a parallel interlude in which a muskrat receives the brick and tosses it at Krazy Katfish. 2/5/22 (another beautifully laid out page): Krazy pines for Ignatz, while Ignatz seeks Krazy for bonking; upon learning of one another’s location, each rushes to find the other, only to learn at the destination that their targets have gone back the other way. And so on, and so on. In the hands of a lesser writer, this would quickly grow tiresome; but Herriman produces variation upon variation, seemingly drawing upon a bottomless well of imagination.
And the ambiguities are playful as well. Is Krazy male or female? Ignatz is evidently male, as occasionally a wife and children make appearances, but what of the Kat? I find strips in which Krazy is referred to as both “he” and “she,” and in fact Herriman himself, in correspondence, once wrote that it doesn’t really matter. The characters simply are who they are, and want what they want, and relate to each other the way they do. It’s a work of sheer fantasy, and yet, paradoxically, the more it takes flight into its invented world, the more we identify with it, with the Kat’s never-to-be-requited love for the Mouse, and Officer Pupp’s position on the triangle, which he occupies either from oblivious ignorance or obstinate denial of the true feelings of Kat for Mouse.
In his famous 1924 essay on the comic, art critic Gilbert Seldes writes the following: “The theme is greater than the plot. John Alden carpenter has pointed out in the brilliant little foreword to his ballet that Krazy Kat is a combination of Parsifal and Don Quixote, the perfect fool and the perfect knight. Ignatz is Sancho Panza and, I should say, Lucifer. He loathes the sentimental excursions, the philosophic ramblings of Krazy; he interrupts with a well-directed brick the romantic excesses of his companion. … But Mr. Herriman, who is a great ironist, understands pity. It is the destiny of Ignatz never to know what his brick means to Krazy.”
Seldes concludes: “Such is the work which America can pride itself on having produced, and can hastily set about to appreciate. It is rich with something we have too little of — fantasy. It is wise with pitying irony; it has delicacy, sensitiveness, and an unearthly beauty. The strange, unnerving, distorted trees, the language inhuman, un-animal, the events to logical, so wild, are all magic carpets and faery foam — all charged with unreality. Through them wanders Krazy, the most foolish of creatures, a gentle monster of our new mythology.”[/list=1]To be fair, Krazy Kat is not to be idly read; it was never hugely popular even in its day. Its rewards come with immersion, with dedication. When I got my first collection, I spent the first third or so of the book in a state of mystification, trying to puzzle out all the various things that were going on, getting a sense of the rhythm, of the idiosyncratic language. And then it began to dawn on me, or maybe I just got used to it, and the strip opened up. As soon as I finished that volume, I turned back to page one and read it again, immediately. Then I went and got the other two Fantagraphics volumes and the Herriman biography, and I’ve simply fallen in love.
But I’ll concede, it’s taken a lot of time, because the strip is not instantly accessible. Its charm is unearthly, otherworldly; you have to trust it, absorb it, internalize it, before it can work its magic on you. If you dip into it only briefly, I think, you’ll miss what makes it great.
And of course, like everything else, it may simply not be to your taste. We get regular threads along the lines of, “Please tell me why Monty Python is funny,” where someone who just doesn’t get it appeals to the cognoscenti for illumination, but no matter how much the material is pulled apart and reassembled, the original questioner still doesn’t laugh at the Ministry of Silly Walks or I’m A Lumberjack or the People’s Front of Judea or any of the rest of it. The long discourse above is part of why I think Krazy Kat is a work of transcendant genius (actually, I feel like I’ve just scratched the surface); but I readily acknowledge that none of that may appeal to you in the slightest.
Basically, if you want to give it a chance, give it a real chance. Dive in. Luxuriate in the nonsense. (Pay careful attention to the introductions involving Bum Bill Bee, for example.) Study the whimsical artwork, and the Arizona-influenced backgrounds (with their occasional Navaho and Mexican motifs). Say the words out loud and taste the flowery verbosity.
And then if you still don’t like it, well, it’s not a failing; it’s just a matter of taste, really. I wish you could get the same enjoyment out of it that I do, but I can’t force you to love it.
*Note to Krazy Kat fans who weren’t already aware of this: The Eclipse books collecting Sunday full-page strips went up to 1924 before the publisher ran out of money. Fantagraphics has picked up exactly where Eclipse left off, and has published three volumes, collecting two years of Sunday strips in each, basically continuing the Eclipse series up through 1930. Here’s the first. They’re gorgeous, with high-quality paper and excellent layout and design by Chris Ware. Fantagraphics has every intention of publishing additional volumes through the end of the strip (1944, IIRC), and depending on sales figures, they may go back to the beginning and replicate the Eclipse line. And in a dream world of rediscovery of Herriman’s genius, they may even give us as many of the dailies as can still be found.
