Krazy Kat
Encyclopedia
Krazy Kat is an American
comic strip
created by cartoonist
George Herriman
, published daily in newspapers between 1913 and 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. 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 Kats 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 love triangle
between its title character, a guileless, carefree, simple-minded cat of indeterminate gender (referred to as both "he" and "she"); the obsessive antagonist Ignatz Mouse; and the protective police dog, Offissa Bull Pupp. Krazy nurses an unrequited love for the mouse. However, Ignatz despises Krazy and constantly schemes to throw bricks at Krazy's head, which Krazy misinterprets as a sign of affection, uttering grateful replies such as "Li'l dollink, allus f'etful". Offissa Pupp, as Coconino County's administrator of law and order, makes it his unwavering mission to interfere with Ignatz's brick-tossing plans and lock the mouse in the county jail.
Despite the slapstick simplicity of the general premise, it was the detailed characterization, combined with Herriman's visual and verbal creativity, that 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. Though only a modest success during its initial run, in more recent years, many modern cartoonists have cited Krazy Kat as a major influence.
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 Offissa 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 upstage floor lights framing the panel borders.
The descriptive passages mix whimsical, often alliterative
language with phonetically-spelled dialogue and a strong poetic sensibility ("Agathla, centuries aslumber, shivers in its sleep with splenetic splendor, and spreads abroad a seismic spasm with the supreme suavity of a vagabond volcano."). 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 Offissa 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, Offissa 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.
("A fowl konspirissy – is it pussible?") 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 Officer Pupp and mistakes the dog's frequent imprisonment of the mouse for an innocent game of tag
("Ever times I see them two playing games togedda, Ignatz seems to be It"). 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 (beginning with Cummings) 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, likely as a gender-neutral "he".
Ignatz is driven to distraction by Krazy's naïveté, and he throws bricks at Krazy Kat's head. To shield his plans from Offissa Pupp, Ignatz hides his bricks, disguises himself, or enlists the aid of willing Coconino County denizens (without making his intentions clear). 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 dislike Krazy, one strip shows his ancestor, Mark Antony Mouse, fall in love with Krazy's ancestor, an Egyptian cat princess (calling her his "Star of the Nile"), 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 (which would explain why Krazy believes that Ignatz throwing bricks is a sign of love). In another strip, Krazy kisses a sleeping Ignatz, and hearts appear above the mouse's head.
In the last five (or so) years of the strip, Ignatz's dislike for Krazy was 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.
Other characters who make semi-frequent appearances are:
This "basement strip" grew into something much larger than the original cartoon. It became a daily comic strip with a title (running vertically down the side of the page) on October 28, 1913 and a black and white full-page Sunday cartoon on April 23, 1916. Due to the objections of editors, who didn't think it was suitable for the comics sections, Krazy Kat originally appeared in the Hearst papers' art and drama sections. Hearst himself, however, enjoyed the strip so much that he gave Herriman a lifetime contract and guaranteed the cartoonist complete creative freedom.
Despite its 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 Willem de Kooning
, H. L. Mencken
, and Jack Kerouac
. More recent scholars and authors have seen the strip as reflecting the Dada
movement and prefiguring postmodernism
.
Beginning in 1935, Krazy Kat' s Sunday edition was 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 cartoons—until his death in April 1944 (the final page was published exactly two months later, on June 25). 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.
The comic strip was animated several times (see filmography below). The earliest Krazy Kat shorts were produced by Hearst in 1916. They were produced under Hearst-Vitagraph News Pictorial
and later the International Film Service
(IFS), though Herriman was not involved. In 1920, after a two-year hiatus, the John R. Bray studio
began producing a second series of Krazy Kat shorts. These cartoons hewed close to the comic strips, including Ignatz, Pupp and other standard supporting characters. Krazy's ambiguous gender and feelings for Ignatz were usually preserved; bricks were occasionally thrown.
In 1925, animation pioneer Bill Nolan
decided to bring Krazy to the screen again. Nolan intended to produce the series under Associated Animators, but when it dissolved, he sought distribution from Margaret J. Winkler
. Unlike earlier adaptations, Nolan did not base his shorts on the characters and setting of the Herriman comic strip. Instead, the feline in Nolan's cartoons was a male cat whose design and personality both reflected Felix the Cat
. This is probably due to the fact that Nolan himself was a former employee of the Pat Sullivan
studio. Other Herriman characters appeared in the Nolan cartoons at first, though similarly altered: Kwakk Wakk was at times Krazy's paramour, with Ignatz often the bully trying to break up the romance. Over time, Nolan's influence waned and new directors, Ben Harrison and Manny Gould, took over the series. By late 1927, they were solely in charge. One of their early innovations was to turn Ignatz from a white mouse into a black mouse.
Winkler's husband, Charles B. Mintz
, slowly began assuming control of the operation. Mintz and his studio began producing the cartoons in sound beginning with 1929's Ratskin
. In 1930, he moved the staff to California
and ultimately changed the design of Krazy Kat. The new character bore even less resemblance to the one in the newspapers. Mintz's Krazy Kat was, like many other early 1930s cartoon characters, imitative of Mickey Mouse
, and usually engaged in slapstick comic adventures with his look-alike girlfriend and loyal pet dog. In 1936, animator Isadore Klein, with the blessing of Mintz, set to work creating the short, Lil' Ainjil, the only Mintz work that was intended to reflect Herriman's comic strip. However, Klein was "terribly disappointed" with the resulting cartoon, and the Mickey-derivative Krazy returned. In 1939, Mintz became indebted to his distributor, Columbia Pictures
, and subsequently sold his studio to them. Under the name Screen Gems
, the studio produced only one more Krazy Kat cartoon, The Mouse Exterminator in 1940.
King Features produced 50 Krazy Kat cartoons from 1962–1964, most of which were created at Gene Deitch
's Rembrandt Films in Prague
, Czechoslovakia
(now the Czech Republic), whilst the rest were produced by Artransa Film Studios in Sydney, Australia. The cartoons were initially televised interspersed with Beetle Bailey
(some of which were also produced by Artransa) and Snuffy Smith cartoons to form a half-hour TV show. These cartoons helped to introduce Herriman's cat to the baby boom generation
. The King Features shorts were made for television and have a closer connection to the comic strip; the backgrounds are drawn in a similar style, and Ignatz and Offissa Pupp are both present. This incarnation of Krazy was made female; Penny Phillips voiced Krazy while Paul Frees voiced Ignatz and Offissa Pupp. Jay Livingston
and Ray Evans
did the music for most of the episodes. Most of the episodes are available on DVD.
, best known for his Little Lulu
comic books. While the general plot premise is reminiscent of Herriman's strip, the look and feel are entirely different: firmly in the visual and written style of 1950s "funny animal" strips for children. Krazy is male in this version of the strip. This "Krazy Kat" also made several one-shot appearances in Dell's "Four Color Comics" series, from 1953 through 1956 (#454, 504, 548, 619, 696,) and was reprinted in some Gold Key and Page Comics over the next decade.
s and comic strips. In 1995, the strip was one of 20 included in the Comic Strip Classics
series of commemorative
U.S. postage stamps.
While Chuck Jones
' Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner
shorts, set in a similar visual pastiche of the American Southwest, are among the most famous cartoons to draw upon Herriman's work, Krazy Kat has continued to inspire artists and cartoonists to the present day. Patrick McDonnell
, creator of the current strip Mutts
and co-author of Krazy Kat: The Comic Art of George Herriman, cites it as his "foremost influence." Bill Watterson
of Calvin and Hobbes
fame named Krazy Kat among his three major influences (along with Peanuts
and Pogo). Watterson would revive Herriman's practice of employing varied, unpredictable panel layouts in his Sunday strips. Charles M. Schulz
and Will Eisner
both said that they were drawn towards cartooning partly because of the impact Krazy Kat made on them in their formative years. Bobby London
's Dirty Duck
was styled after Krazy Kat.
Jules Feiffer
, Philip Guston
, and Hunt Emerson
have all had Krazy Kat' s imprint recognized in their work. Larry Gonick
's comic strip Kokopelli & Company
is set in "Kokonino County", an homage to Herriman's exotic locale. Chris Ware
admires the strip, and his frequent publisher, Fantagraphics, is currently reissuing its entire run in volumes designed by Ware (which also include reproduction of Herriman miscellanea, some of it donated by Ware) . In the 1980s, Sam Hurt' s syndicated strip Eyebeam
shows a clear Herriman influence, particularly in its continually morphing backgrounds. Among non-cartoonists, Jay Cantor
's 1987 novel Krazy Kat uses Herriman's characters to analyze humanity's reaction to nuclear weapon
s, while Michael Stipe
of the rock band R.E.M. has a tattoo
of Ignatz and Krazy. In one Garfield
comic strip, where it shows the Garfield logo, you can see Ignatz throwing a brick at Garfield. Also, in the Garfield TV special Garfield: His 9 Lives
, Garfield plays a stunt double for Krazy Kat.
& Co. in 1946, just two years after Herriman's death, gathered 200 selected strips. In Europe, the cartoons were first reprinted in 1965 by the Italian magazine Linus, and appeared in the pages of the French monthly Charlie Mensuel starting in 1970. In 1969, Grosset & Dunlap
produced a single hardcover collection of selected episodes and sequences spanning the entire length of the strip's run. The Netherlands' Real Free Press published five issues of "Krazy Kat Komix" in 1974-1976, containing a few hundred strips apiece; each of the issues' covers was designed by Joost Swarte
. However, owing to the difficulty of tracking down high-quality copies of the original newspapers, no plans for a comprehensive collection of Krazy Kat strips surfaced until the 1980s.
All of the Sunday strip
s from 1916 to 1924 were reprinted by Eclipse Comics
in cooperation with Turtle Island Press. The intent was to eventually reprint every Sunday Krazy Kat, but this planned series was aborted when Eclipse ceased business in 1992. Beginning in 2002, Fantagraphics resumed reprinting Sunday Krazy Kats where Eclipse left off; in 2008, their tenth release completed the run with 1944. Fantagraphics' future plans involve reissuing in the same format the strips previously printed in Eclipse's now out-of-print volumes. Both the Eclipse and Fantagraphics reprints include additional rarities such as older George Herriman cartoons predating Krazy Kat.
Kitchen Sink Press
, in association with Remco Worldservice Books, reprinted two volumes of color Sunday strips dating from 1935 to 1937; but like Eclipse, they collapsed before they could continue the series.
The daily strip
s for 1921 to 1923 were reprinted by Pacific Comics Club. The 1922 and 1923 books skipped a small number of strips, which have now been reprinted by Comics Revue
. Comics Revue
has also published all of the daily strips from September 8, 1930 through December 31, 1934. Fantagraphics come out with a one-shot reprint of daily strips from 1910s and 1920s in 2007, and plans a more complete reprinting of the daily strip in the future.
Scattered Sundays and dailies have appeared in several collections, including the Grosset & Dunlap
book reprinted by Nostalgia Press
, but the most readily available sampling of Sundays and dailies from throughout the strip's run is Krazy Kat: The Comic Art of George Herriman, published by Harry N. Abrams, Inc. in 1986. It includes a detailed biography of Herriman and was, for a long time, the only in-print book to republish Krazy Kat strips from after 1940. Although it contains over 200 strips, including many color Sundays, it is light on material from 1923 to 1937.
"Presents Krazy and Ignatz" (series) Four 3¼ x 4 inch volumes reproducing the 1921 strips in miniature.
, series editor. Chris Ware
, designer. The first five volumes are in B&W, as originally printed.)
(The following volumes, through 1944, are in color, reflecting the shift to color in the Sunday newspaper version.)
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
comic strip
Comic strip
A comic strip is a sequence of drawings arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often serialized, with text in balloons and captions....
created by cartoonist
Cartoonist
A cartoonist is a person who specializes in drawing cartoons. This work is usually humorous, mainly created for entertainment, political commentary or advertising...
George Herriman
George Herriman
George Joseph Herriman was an American cartoonist, best known for his classic comic strip Krazy Kat.-Early life:...
, published daily in newspapers between 1913 and 1944. It first appeared in the New York Evening Journal
New York Journal American
The New York Journal American was a newspaper published from 1937 to 1966. The Journal American was the product of a merger between two New York newspapers owned by William Randolph Hearst: The New York American , a morning paper, and the New York Evening Journal, an afternoon paper...
, whose owner, William Randolph Hearst
William Randolph Hearst
William Randolph Hearst was an American business magnate and leading newspaper publisher. Hearst entered the publishing business in 1887, after taking control of The San Francisco Examiner from his father...
, 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. 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
Coconino County, Arizona
-2010:Whereas according to the 2010 U.S. Census Bureau:*61.7% White*1.2% Black*27.3% Native American*1.4% Asian*0.1% Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander*3.1% Two or more races*5.2% Other races*13.5% Hispanic or Latino -2000:...
, Krazy Kats mixture of offbeat surrealism
Surrealism
Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members....
, 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 love triangle
Love triangle
A love triangle is usually a romantic relationship involving three people. While it can refer to two people independently romantically linked with a third, it usually implies that each of the three people has some kind of relationship to the other two...
between its title character, a guileless, carefree, simple-minded cat of indeterminate gender (referred to as both "he" and "she"); the obsessive antagonist Ignatz Mouse; and the protective police dog, Offissa Bull Pupp. Krazy nurses an unrequited love for the mouse. However, Ignatz despises Krazy and constantly schemes to throw bricks at Krazy's head, which Krazy misinterprets as a sign of affection, uttering grateful replies such as "Li'l dollink, allus f'etful". Offissa Pupp, as Coconino County's administrator of law and order, makes it his unwavering mission to interfere with Ignatz's brick-tossing plans and lock the mouse in the county jail.
Despite the slapstick simplicity of the general premise, it was the detailed characterization, combined with Herriman's visual and verbal creativity, that made Krazy Kat one of the first comics to be widely praised by intellectuals and treated as "serious" art. Art critic Gilbert Seldes
Gilbert Seldes
Gilbert Vivian Seldes was an American writer and cultural critic. He was editor and drama critic of The Dial. He also hosted the NBC television program The Subject is Jazz....
wrote a lengthy panegyric
Panegyric
A panegyric is a formal public speech, or written verse, delivered in high praise of a person or thing, a generally highly studied and discriminating eulogy, not expected to be critical. It is derived from the Greek πανηγυρικός meaning "a speech fit for a general assembly"...
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
E. E. Cummings
Edward Estlin Cummings , popularly known as E. E. Cummings, with the abbreviated form of his name often written by others in lowercase letters as e.e. cummings , was an American poet, painter, essayist, author, and playwright...
, another Herriman admirer, wrote the introduction to the first collection of the strip in book form. Though only a modest success during its initial run, in more recent years, many modern cartoonists have cited Krazy Kat as a major influence.
Overview
Coconino County, Arizona
-2010:Whereas according to the 2010 U.S. Census Bureau:*61.7% White*1.2% Black*27.3% Native American*1.4% Asian*0.1% Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander*3.1% Two or more races*5.2% Other races*13.5% Hispanic or Latino -2000:...
, with Herriman filling the page with caricatured flora and fauna, and rock formation landscapes typical of the Painted Desert
Painted Desert, Arizona
The Painted Desert is a area of badlands located in Northern Arizona in the United States. The Arizona desert stretches from the Grand Canyon National Park into the Petrified Forest National Park and runs roughly astride and just north of the Little Colorado and the Puerco Rivers...
. 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 Offissa 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
Navajo people
The Navajo of the Southwestern United States are the largest single federally recognized tribe of the United States of America. The Navajo Nation has 300,048 enrolled tribal members. The Navajo Nation constitutes an independent governmental body which manages the Navajo Indian reservation in the...
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 upstage floor lights framing the panel borders.
The descriptive passages mix whimsical, often alliterative
Alliteration
In language, alliteration refers to the repetition of a particular sound in the first syllables of Three or more words or phrases. Alliteration has historically developed largely through poetry, in which it more narrowly refers to the repetition of a consonant in any syllables that, according to...
language with phonetically-spelled dialogue and a strong poetic sensibility ("Agathla, centuries aslumber, shivers in its sleep with splenetic splendor, and spreads abroad a seismic spasm with the supreme suavity of a vagabond volcano."). 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 Offissa 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
Self-referential humor
Self-referential humor or self-reflexive humor is a type of comedic expression that—either directed toward some other subject, or openly directed toward itself—intentionally alludes to the very person who is expressing the humor in a comedic fashion, or to some specific aspect of that...
is evident — in one strip, Offissa 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
William Randolph Hearst
William Randolph Hearst was an American business magnate and leading newspaper publisher. Hearst entered the publishing business in 1887, after taking control of The San Francisco Examiner from his father...
loved Krazy Kat, and it continued to appear in his papers throughout its run, sometimes only by his direct order.
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 argotArgot
An Argot is a secret language used by various groups—including, but not limited to, thieves and other criminals—to prevent outsiders from understanding their conversations. The term argot is also used to refer to the informal specialized vocabulary from a particular field of study, hobby, job,...
("A fowl konspirissy – is it pussible?") phonetically evoking a mixture of English, French, Spanish, Yiddish
Yiddish language
Yiddish is a High German language of Ashkenazi Jewish origin, spoken throughout the world. It developed as a fusion of German dialects with Hebrew, Aramaic, Slavic languages and traces of Romance languages...
and other dialects, often identified as George Herriman's own native New Orleans
New Orleans, Louisiana
New Orleans is a major United States port and the largest city and metropolitan area in the state of Louisiana. The New Orleans metropolitan area has a population of 1,235,650 as of 2009, the 46th largest in the USA. The New Orleans – Metairie – Bogalusa combined statistical area has a population...
dialect, Yat
Yat (New Orleans)
Yat is a dialect of English spoken in the Greater New Orleans Area. The term refers to those people who speak with the Yat accent and dialect of New Orleanians throughout the city...
. 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 Officer Pupp and mistakes the dog's frequent imprisonment of the mouse for an innocent game of tag
Tag (game)
Tag is a playground game played worldwide that involves one or more players chasing other players in an attempt to tag or touch them, usually with their fingers. There are many variations...
("Ever times I see them two playing games togedda, Ignatz seems to be It"). 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 (beginning with Cummings) 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
Frank Capra
Frank Russell Capra was a Sicilian-born American film director. He emigrated to the U.S. when he was six, and eventually became a creative force behind major award-winning films during the 1930s and 1940s...
, 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, likely as a gender-neutral "he".
Ignatz Mouse
Ironically, although Ignatz seems to generally dislike Krazy, one strip shows his ancestor, Mark Antony Mouse, fall in love with Krazy's ancestor, an Egyptian cat princess (calling her his "Star of the Nile"), 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 (which would explain why Krazy believes that Ignatz throwing bricks is a sign of love). In another strip, Krazy kisses a sleeping Ignatz, and hearts appear above the mouse's head.
In the last five (or so) years of the strip, Ignatz's dislike for Krazy was 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.
Offissa Pupp
"Limb of Law and Arm of Order", Offissa Bull Pupp always tries—and sometimes succeeds—to thwart Ignatz's designs to pelt bricks at Krazy Kat. Offissa 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.Secondary characters
Beyond these three, Coconino County is populated with an assortment of incidental, recurring characters.- Kolin Kelly: a dog; a brickmaker by trade who bakes his wares in a kiln. Often Ignatz's source for projectiles, although he distrusts the mouse.
- Mrs. Kwakk Wakk: a duck in a pillbox hatPillbox hatA pillbox hat is a small woman's hat with a flat crown and straight, upright sides, and no brim.-History:Historically, the pillbox was also military headgear, often including a chin strap, and can still be seen on ceremonial occasions in some countries, especially former members of the Commonwealth...
, a scold and busybody who frequently notices Ignatz in the course of his plotting and informs Offissa Pupp. On her own, she is also a deadpan snarker and occasional social climber, attempting in one strip continuity to replace Pupp as police chief. - Joe StorkStorkStorks are large, long-legged, long-necked wading birds with long, stout bills. They belong to the family Ciconiidae. They are the only family in the biological order Ciconiiformes, which was once much larger and held a number of families....
: the "purveyor of progeny to prince & proletarianProletariatThe proletariat is a term used to identify a lower social class, usually the working class; a member of such a class is 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).
Other characters who make semi-frequent appearances are:
- Walter Cephus Austrige: a nondescript ostrichOstrichThe Ostrich is one or two species of large flightless birds native to Africa, the only living member of the genus Struthio. Some analyses indicate that the Somali Ostrich may be better considered a full species apart from the Common Ostrich, but most taxonomists consider it to be a...
- Bum Bill Bee: a transient, bearded insect
- Don Kiyote: a dignified and aristocratic Mexican coyoteCoyoteThe coyote , also known as the American jackal or the prairie wolf, is a species of canine found throughout North and Central America, ranging from Panama in the south, north through Mexico, the United States and Canada...
- Mock Duck: a clairvoyant fowl of ChineseChinese peopleThe term Chinese people may refer to any of the following:*People with Han Chinese ethnicity ....
descent who resembles a coolieCoolieHistorically, a coolie was a manual labourer or slave from Asia, particularly China, India, and the Phillipines during the 19th century and early 20th century...
and operates a cleaning establishment. - Gooseberry Sprig: the Duck Duke, who briefly starred in his own strip before Krazy Kat was created.
- Also: Krazy's cousins Krazy Katbird and Krazy Katfish. Ignatz also has relations; his family of look-alike mice includes his wife, Magnolia and a trio of equally-unruly sons named Milton, Marshall and Irving, respectively.
History
Krazy Kat evolved from an earlier comic strip of Herriman's, The Dingbat Family, which started in 1910 and would later be 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 cartoons 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.Despite its low popularity among the general public, Krazy Kat gained a wide following among intellectuals. In 1922, a jazz
Jazz
Jazz is a musical style that originated at the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States. It was born out of a mix of African and European music traditions. From its early development until the present, jazz has incorporated music from 19th and 20th...
ballet
Ballet
Ballet is a type of performance dance, that originated in the Italian Renaissance courts of the 15th century, and which was further developed in France and Russia as a concert dance form. The early portions preceded the invention of the proscenium stage and were presented in large chambers with...
based on the comic was produced and scored by John Alden Carpenter
John Alden Carpenter
John Alden Carpenter was an American composer.-Biography:Born in Park Ridge, Illinois, Carpenter was raised in a musical household. He was educated at Harvard University, where he studied under John Knowles Paine, and was president of the Glee Club and wrote music for the Hasty-Pudding Club...
; though the performance played to sold-out crowds on two nights and was given positive reviews in The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
and The New Republic
The New Republic
The magazine has also published two articles concerning income inequality, largely criticizing conservative economists for their attempts to deny the existence or negative effect increasing income inequality is having on the United States...
, it failed to boost the strip's popularity as Hearst had hoped. In addition to Seldes and cummings, contemporary admirers of Krazy Kat included Willem de Kooning
Willem de Kooning
Willem de Kooning was a Dutch American abstract expressionist artist who was born in Rotterdam, the Netherlands....
, H. L. Mencken
H. L. Mencken
Henry Louis "H. L." Mencken was an American journalist, essayist, magazine editor, satirist, acerbic critic of American life and culture, and a scholar of American English. Known as the "Sage of Baltimore", he is regarded as one of the most influential American writers and prose stylists of the...
, and Jack Kerouac
Jack Kerouac
Jean-Louis "Jack" Lebris de Kerouac was an American novelist and poet. He is considered a literary iconoclast and, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, a pioneer of the Beat Generation. Kerouac is recognized for his spontaneous method of writing, covering topics such as Catholic...
. More recent scholars and authors have seen the strip as reflecting the Dada
Dada
Dada or Dadaism is a cultural movement that began in Zurich, Switzerland, during World War I and peaked from 1916 to 1922. The movement primarily involved visual arts, literature—poetry, art manifestoes, art theory—theatre, and graphic design, and concentrated its anti-war politics through a...
movement and prefiguring postmodernism
Postmodernism
Postmodernism is a philosophical movement evolved in reaction to modernism, the tendency in contemporary culture to accept only objective truth and to be inherently suspicious towards a global cultural narrative or meta-narrative. Postmodernist thought is an intentional departure from the...
.
Beginning in 1935, Krazy Kat
Animated adaptations
Hearst-Vitagraph News Pictorial
The Hearst-Vitagraph News Pictorial was a short-lived company producing newsreels which were coupled with animated cartoons. It was established on 29 October 1915 by Vitagraph Studios and the Hearst Corporation, and produced its first reel in February 1916, but folded in 1916...
and later the International Film Service
International Film Service
International Film Service was an American animation studio created to exploit the popularity of the comic strips controlled by William Randolph Hearst.- History :...
(IFS), though Herriman was not involved. In 1920, after a two-year hiatus, the John R. Bray studio
Bray Productions
Bray Productions was the dominant animation studio based in the United States in the years before World War I.- History :The studio was founded in December 1914 by J. R. Bray, perhaps the first studio entirely devoted to animation, and series animation at that...
began producing a second series of Krazy Kat shorts. These cartoons hewed close to the comic strips, including Ignatz, Pupp and other standard supporting characters. Krazy's ambiguous gender and feelings for Ignatz were usually preserved; bricks were occasionally thrown.
In 1925, animation pioneer Bill Nolan
Bill Nolan (animator)
William "Bill" Nolan was an Irish-American animated cartoon writer, animator, director, and artist. He is best-known for creating and perfecting the rubber hose style of animation and for streamlining Felix the Cat. From 1925 to 1927, he worked on a loose animated adaptation of George Herriman's...
decided to bring Krazy to the screen again. Nolan intended to produce the series under Associated Animators, but when it dissolved, he sought distribution from Margaret J. Winkler
Margaret J. Winkler
Margaret J. Winkler was one of the key figures in silent animation history, having a crucial role to play in the histories of Max and Dave Fleischer, Pat Sullivan, Otto Messmer, and Walt Disney...
. Unlike earlier adaptations, Nolan did not base his shorts on the characters and setting of the Herriman comic strip. Instead, the feline in Nolan's cartoons was a male cat whose design and personality both reflected Felix the Cat
Felix the Cat
Felix the Cat is a cartoon character created in the silent film era. His black body, white eyes, and giant grin, coupled with the surrealism of the situations in which his cartoons place him, combine to make Felix one of the most recognized cartoon characters in film history...
. This is probably due to the fact that Nolan himself was a former employee of the Pat Sullivan
Pat Sullivan (film producer)
Patrick Sullivan was an Australian cartoonist, pioneer animator and film producer, best known for producing the first Felix the Cat silent cartoons. Sullivan arrived in the United States around 1910, after spending several months in London...
studio. Other Herriman characters appeared in the Nolan cartoons at first, though similarly altered: Kwakk Wakk was at times Krazy's paramour, with Ignatz often the bully trying to break up the romance. Over time, Nolan's influence waned and new directors, Ben Harrison and Manny Gould, took over the series. By late 1927, they were solely in charge. One of their early innovations was to turn Ignatz from a white mouse into a black mouse.
Winkler's husband, Charles B. Mintz
Charles B. Mintz
Charles B. Mintz was an American film producer and distributor, who took control over Margaret J. Winkler's Winkler Pictures after marrying her in 1924....
, slowly began assuming control of the operation. Mintz and his studio began producing the cartoons in sound beginning with 1929's Ratskin
Ratskin
Ratskin is a 1929 animated cartoon released by Columbia Pictures starring Krazy Kat. It is notable for being the first cartoon to be released by Columbia Pictures and the first Krazy Kat cartoonreleased with sound.-Plot:...
. In 1930, he moved the staff to California
California
California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...
and ultimately changed the design of Krazy Kat. The new character bore even less resemblance to the one in the newspapers. Mintz's Krazy Kat was, like many other early 1930s cartoon characters, imitative of Mickey Mouse
Mickey Mouse
Mickey Mouse is a cartoon character created in 1928 by Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks at The Walt Disney Studio. Mickey is an anthropomorphic black mouse and typically wears red shorts, large yellow shoes, and white gloves...
, and usually engaged in slapstick comic adventures with his look-alike girlfriend and loyal pet dog. In 1936, animator Isadore Klein, with the blessing of Mintz, set to work creating the short, Lil' Ainjil, the only Mintz work that was intended to reflect Herriman's comic strip. However, Klein was "terribly disappointed" with the resulting cartoon, and the Mickey-derivative Krazy returned. In 1939, Mintz became indebted to his distributor, Columbia Pictures
Columbia Pictures
Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. is an American film production and distribution company. Columbia Pictures now forms part of the Columbia TriStar Motion Picture Group, owned by Sony Pictures Entertainment, a subsidiary of the Japanese conglomerate Sony. It is one of the leading film companies...
, and subsequently sold his studio to them. Under the name Screen Gems
Screen Gems
Screen Gems is an American movie production company and subsidiary company of Sony Pictures Entertainment's Columbia TriStar Motion Picture Group that has served several different purposes for its parent companies over the decades since its incorporation....
, the studio produced only one more Krazy Kat cartoon, The Mouse Exterminator in 1940.
King Features produced 50 Krazy Kat cartoons from 1962–1964, most of which were created at Gene Deitch
Gene Deitch
Eugene Merril "Gene" Deitch is an American illustrator, animator and film director. He has been based in Prague, capital of Czechoslovakia and the present-day Czech Republic, since 1959. Since 1968, Deitch has been the leading animation director for the Connecticut organization Weston...
's Rembrandt Films in Prague
Prague
Prague is the capital and largest city of the Czech Republic. Situated in the north-west of the country on the Vltava river, the city is home to about 1.3 million people, while its metropolitan area is estimated to have a population of over 2.3 million...
, Czechoslovakia
Czechoslovakia
Czechoslovakia or Czecho-Slovakia was a sovereign state in Central Europe which existed from October 1918, when it declared its independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, until 1992...
(now the Czech Republic), whilst the rest were produced by Artransa Film Studios in Sydney, Australia. The cartoons were initially televised interspersed with Beetle Bailey
Beetle Bailey
Beetle Bailey is an American comic strip set in a fictional United States Army military post, created by cartoonist Mort Walker. It is among the oldest comic strips still being produced by the original creator...
(some of which were also produced by Artransa) and Snuffy Smith cartoons to form a half-hour TV show. These cartoons helped to introduce Herriman's cat to the baby boom generation
Post-World War II baby boom
The end of World War II brought a baby boom to many countries, especially Western ones. There is some disagreement as to the precise beginning and ending dates of the post-war baby boom, but it is most often agreed to begin in the years immediately after the war, ending more than a decade later;...
. The King Features shorts were made for television and have a closer connection to the comic strip; the backgrounds are drawn in a similar style, and Ignatz and Offissa Pupp are both present. This incarnation of Krazy was made female; Penny Phillips voiced Krazy while Paul Frees voiced Ignatz and Offissa Pupp. Jay Livingston
Jay Livingston
Jay Livingston was an American composer and singer best known as half of a songwriting duo with Ray Evans that specialized in songs composed for films. Livingston wrote the music and Evans the lyrics....
and Ray Evans
Ray Evans
Raymond Bernard Evans was an American songwriter. He was a partner in a composing and songwriting duo with Jay Livingston, known for the songs they composed for films...
did the music for most of the episodes. Most of the episodes are available on DVD.
A "Kounterfeit Krazy"
In 1951, Dell Publishing revived the characters for a run of comic books. All five issues were drawn by cartoonist John StanleyJohn Stanley (comics)
John Stanley was a comic book creator, best known for writing Little Lulu from 1945 to 1959. While mostly known for scripting, Stanley also was an accomplished artist who drew many of his stories, including the earliest Little Lulu issues. His specialty was humorous stories, both with licensed...
, best known for his Little Lulu
Little Lulu
"Little Lulu" is the nickname for Lulu Moppett, a comic strip character created in the mid-1930s by Marjorie Henderson Buell. The character debuted in The Saturday Evening Post on February 23, 1935 in a single panel, appearing as a flower girl at a wedding and strewing the aisle with banana peels...
comic books. While the general plot premise is reminiscent of Herriman's strip, the look and feel are entirely different: firmly in the visual and written style of 1950s "funny animal" strips for children. Krazy is male in this version of the strip. This "Krazy Kat" also made several one-shot appearances in Dell's "Four Color Comics" series, from 1953 through 1956 (#454, 504, 548, 619, 696,) and was reprinted in some Gold Key and Page Comics over the next decade.
Chronology of formats
The strip went through several format changes during its run, each of which impacted the artwork and the narratives that the form of the strip could accommodate. What follows are the landmarks, which can also help to date the era of a given strip.- July 26, 1910: First "beaning" of Kat by Mouse at bottom of The Dingbat Family. Strip is not sectioned off, but a detail at the bottom of the panels. Strip as a whole tended to run 4 inches × 13 inches. Soon the Kat and Mouse were a five-panel 1½ inch strip at the bottom of the cartoon.
- 1911: First brief run of Krazy and I. Mouse standalone strips (probably as a replacement to The Family Upstairs). Also, the characters briefly take over the strip for a couple of periods in 1912 (at least once, while the Dingbats are "on holiday" in July 1912.)
- October 28, 1913. Krazy Kat debuts as a five-panel daily vertical strip which runs down the side of a full comics page. This remains its daily format until sometime in 1920.
- April 23, 1916: First black & white full page Sunday strip.
- March 4, 1920–October 30, 1920: The "Panoramic Dailies" period, where Herriman is allowed to experiment wildly in an unbroken daily horizontal 3 × 13 inch space.
- November 1920 on: Herriman is constrained to a more conventional daily horizontal format containing three equal split sections, with the center section further split in two. This allows the strip to be run full page, half page or a third of a page, according to editorial whim. From September 13 to October 15, 1921, Herriman regains some control (no split center section) and resumes the previous years' format experiments.
- January 7, 1922–March 11, 1922: In the New York Journal, 10 weeks of Saturday full-page color strips, in addition to the ongoing Sunday full page black-and-white strips. (In other words, two original full-page strips every week). This is then canceled due to its lack of noticeable commercial success, compared to the new Saturday color sections in out-of-town Hearst papers which contained no Krazy Kat.
- August 1925 to September 1929: Sundays are confined to 3-row, split-middle-line format allowing some papers to reduce cartoon's size and reformat into two daily-sized rows.
- Summer 1934: Full page Sunday strips cease entirely, for roughly a year.
- June 1, 1935: Full page Sunday strips resume, now in color, until Herriman's death.
- December 11, 1938: "Optional" horizontal panel begins running on bottom of Sunday strips, as placeholder for potential advertising.
- June 25, 1944: Final Sunday strip published.
Legacy
In 1999, Krazy Kat was rated #1 in a Comics Journal list of the best American comics of the 20th century; the list included both comic bookComic book
A comic book or comicbook is a magazine made up of comics, narrative artwork in the form of separate panels that represent individual scenes, often accompanied by dialog as well as including...
s and comic strips. In 1995, the strip was one of 20 included in the Comic Strip Classics
Comic Strip Classics
The Comic Strip Classics series of commemorative postage stamps was issued by the US Postal Service in 1995 to honor the centennial of the newspaper comic strip....
series of commemorative
Commemorative stamp
A commemorative stamp is a postage stamp, often issued on a significant date such as an anniversary, to honor or commemorate a place, event or person. The subject of the commemorative stamp is usually spelled out in print, unlike definitive stamps which normally depict the subject along with the...
U.S. postage stamps.
While Chuck Jones
Chuck Jones
Charles Martin "Chuck" Jones was an American animator, cartoon artist, screenwriter, producer, and director of animated films, most memorably of Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies shorts for the Warner Bros. Cartoons studio...
' Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner
Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner
Wile E. Coyote and The Road Runner are a duo of cartoon characters from a series of Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons. The characters were created by animation director Chuck Jones in 1948 for Warner Bros., while the template for their adventures was the work of writer Michael Maltese...
shorts, set in a similar visual pastiche of the American Southwest, are among the most famous cartoons to draw upon Herriman's work, Krazy Kat has continued to inspire artists and cartoonists to the present day. Patrick McDonnell
Patrick McDonnell
Patrick McDonnell is the creator of the daily comic strip Mutts. He has also illustrated Russell Baker's Sunday Observer column in The New York Times magazine and created the monthly comic strip Bad Baby for Parents magazine...
, creator of the current strip Mutts
Mutts
Mutts is a daily comic strip created by Patrick McDonnell in 1994 based on the day-to-day adventures of two house pets: a dog named Earl and a cat named Mooch. Earl and Mooch interact with each other, their human owners and a large cast of neighborhood animals.Charles M...
and co-author of Krazy Kat: The Comic Art of George Herriman, cites it as his "foremost influence." Bill Watterson
Bill Watterson
William Boyd Watterson II , known as Bill Watterson, is an American cartoonist and the author of the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes...
of Calvin and Hobbes
Calvin and Hobbes
Calvin and Hobbes is a syndicated daily comic strip that was written and illustrated by American cartoonist Bill Watterson, and syndicated from November 18, 1985, to December 31, 1995. It follows the humorous antics of Calvin, a precocious and adventurous six-year-old boy, and Hobbes, his...
fame named Krazy Kat among his three major influences (along with Peanuts
Peanuts
Peanuts is a syndicated daily and Sunday American comic strip written and illustrated by Charles M. Schulz, which ran from October 2, 1950, to February 13, 2000, continuing in reruns afterward...
and Pogo). Watterson would revive Herriman's practice of employing varied, unpredictable panel layouts in his Sunday strips. Charles M. Schulz
Charles M. Schulz
Charles Monroe "Sparky" Schulz was an American cartoonist, whose comic strip Peanuts proved one of the most popular and influential in the history of the medium, and is still widely reprinted on a daily basis.-Early life and education:Born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Schulz grew up in Saint Paul...
and Will Eisner
Will Eisner
William Erwin "Will" Eisner was an American comics writer, artist and entrepreneur. He is considered one of the most important contributors to the development of the medium and is known for the cartooning studio he founded; for his highly influential series The Spirit; for his use of comics as an...
both said that they were drawn towards cartooning partly because of the impact Krazy Kat made on them in their formative years. Bobby London
Bobby London
Bobby London is an American underground comix and mainstream comics artist.-Biography:London created his underground newspaper comic strip Merton, in his native New York in 1969 and the raunchy Dirty Duck strip in 1971...
's Dirty Duck
Dirty Duck (comix character)
Dirty Duck is a fictional character created by underground comix artist Bobby London. He first appeared in an unsigned "basement" strip that ran underneath Dan O'Neill's syndicated Odd Bodkins strip in 1970, and later in Air Pirates Funnies #1 .-Publication history:London created the Dirty Duck...
was styled after Krazy Kat.
Jules Feiffer
Jules Feiffer
Jules Ralph Feiffer is an American syndicated cartoonist, most notable for his long-run comic strip titled Feiffer. He has created more than 35 books, plays and screenplays...
, Philip Guston
Philip Guston
Philip Guston was a notable painter and printmaker in the New York School, which included many of the Abstract expressionists, such as Jackson Pollock and Willem De Kooning...
, and Hunt Emerson
Hunt Emerson
Hunt Emerson is a cartoonist living and working in Birmingham, England. He was closely involved with the Birmingham Arts Lab of the mid-to-late 1970s, and with the British underground comics scene of the 1970s and 1980s...
have all had Krazy Kat
Larry Gonick
Larry Gonick is a cartoonist best known for The Cartoon History of the Universe, a history of the world in comic book form, which he has been publishing in installments since 1977...
's comic strip Kokopelli & Company
Kokopelli & Company
Kokopelli & Company is a comic strip drawn by science historian and cartoonist Larry Gonick, aimed generally at ten- to fifteen-year-olds. Appearing monthly in Muse magazine, the strip relates the adventures of the nine New Muses, talented but definitely eccentric personalities tasked with helping...
is set in "Kokonino County", an homage to Herriman's exotic locale. Chris Ware
Chris Ware
Franklin Christenson Ware , is an American comic book artist and cartoonist, widely known for his Acme Novelty Library series and the graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth. Born in Omaha, Nebraska, he resides in the Chicago area, Illinois...
admires the strip, and his frequent publisher, Fantagraphics, is currently reissuing its entire run in volumes designed by Ware (which also include reproduction of Herriman miscellanea, some of it donated by Ware) . In the 1980s, Sam Hurt
Eyebeam (comic)
Eyebeam was a daily comic strip written and illustrated by Sam Hurt at the University of Texas at Austin. Unlike most college strips, its popularity led to a print life past Hurt's graduation. The strip ran in the college's Daily Texan from 1980–1990, though primeval examples from 1978-1979...
shows a clear Herriman influence, particularly in its continually morphing backgrounds. Among non-cartoonists, Jay Cantor
Jay Cantor
Jay Cantor, B.A., Ph.D. is an American novelist, and essayist.He graduated from Harvard University with a BA, and from University of California, Santa Cruz with a Ph.D.He teaches at Tufts University....
's 1987 novel Krazy Kat uses Herriman's characters to analyze humanity's reaction to nuclear weapon
Nuclear weapon
A nuclear weapon is an explosive device that derives its destructive force from nuclear reactions, either fission or a combination of fission and fusion. Both reactions release vast quantities of energy from relatively small amounts of matter. The first fission bomb test released the same amount...
s, while Michael Stipe
Michael Stipe
John Michael Stipe is an American singer and lyricist. He was the lead vocalist of the alternative rock band R.E.M.Stipe is noted and occasionally parodied for the "mumbling" style of his early career as well as his social and political activism. He was in charge of R.E.M.'s visual image; often...
of the rock band R.E.M. has a tattoo
Tattoo
A tattoo is made by inserting indelible ink into the dermis layer of the skin to change the pigment. Tattoos on humans are a type of body modification, and tattoos on other animals are most commonly used for identification purposes...
of Ignatz and Krazy. In one Garfield
Garfield
Garfield is a comic strip created by Jim Davis. Published since June 19, 1978, it chronicles the life of the title character, the cat Garfield ; his owner, Jon Arbuckle; and Arbuckle's dog, Odie...
comic strip, where it shows the Garfield logo, you can see Ignatz throwing a brick at Garfield. Also, in the Garfield TV special Garfield: His 9 Lives
Garfield: His 9 Lives
Garfield: His 9 Lives is a 1984 book of illustrated short stories showing the "nine lives" of comic strip character Garfield...
, Garfield plays a stunt double for Krazy Kat.
Reprints and compilations
For many decades, Herriman's strip was only sporadically available. The first Krazy Kat collection, published by Henry HoltHenry Holt
Henry Holt , was a book publisher and author.Henry Holt was born in Baltimore, Maryland on January 3, 1840.He graduated from Yale in 1862....
& Co. in 1946, just two years after Herriman's death, gathered 200 selected strips. In Europe, the cartoons were first reprinted in 1965 by the Italian magazine Linus, and appeared in the pages of the French monthly Charlie Mensuel starting in 1970. In 1969, Grosset & Dunlap
Grosset & Dunlap
Grosset & Dunlap is a United States book publisher founded in 1898.The company was purchased by G. P. Putnam's Sons in 1982 and today is part of the British publishing conglomerate, Pearson PLC through its American subsidiary Penguin Group....
produced a single hardcover collection of selected episodes and sequences spanning the entire length of the strip's run. The Netherlands' Real Free Press published five issues of "Krazy Kat Komix" in 1974-1976, containing a few hundred strips apiece; each of the issues' covers was designed by Joost Swarte
Joost Swarte
Joost Swarte is a Dutch comic artist and graphic designer. He is best known for his ligne claire or clear line style of drawing, and in fact coined the term....
. However, owing to the difficulty of tracking down high-quality copies of the original newspapers, no plans for a comprehensive collection of Krazy Kat strips surfaced until the 1980s.
All of the Sunday strip
Sunday strip
A Sunday strip is a newspaper comic strip format, where comic strips are printed in the Sunday newspaper, usually in a special section called the Sunday comics, and virtually always in color. Some readers called these sections the Sunday funnies...
s from 1916 to 1924 were reprinted by Eclipse Comics
Eclipse Comics
Eclipse Comics was an American comic book publisher, one of several independent publishers during the 1980s and early 1990s. In 1978, it published the first graphic novel intended for the newly created comic book specialty store market...
in cooperation with Turtle Island Press. The intent was to eventually reprint every Sunday Krazy Kat, but this planned series was aborted when Eclipse ceased business in 1992. Beginning in 2002, Fantagraphics resumed reprinting Sunday Krazy Kats where Eclipse left off; in 2008, their tenth release completed the run with 1944. Fantagraphics' future plans involve reissuing in the same format the strips previously printed in Eclipse's now out-of-print volumes. Both the Eclipse and Fantagraphics reprints include additional rarities such as older George Herriman cartoons predating Krazy Kat.
Kitchen Sink Press
Kitchen Sink Press
Kitchen Sink Press was a comic book publishing company founded by Denis Kitchen in 1970. Kitchen owned and operated Kitchen Sink Press until 1999. Kitchen Sink Press was a pioneering publisher of underground comics, and was also responsible for numerous republications of classic comic strips in...
, in association with Remco Worldservice Books, reprinted two volumes of color Sunday strips dating from 1935 to 1937; but like Eclipse, they collapsed before they could continue the series.
The daily strip
Daily strip
A daily strip is a newspaper comic strip format, appearing on weekdays, Monday through Saturday, as contrasted with a Sunday strip, which typically only appears on Sundays....
s for 1921 to 1923 were reprinted by Pacific Comics Club. The 1922 and 1923 books skipped a small number of strips, which have now been reprinted by Comics Revue
Comics Revue
Comics Revue is a bi-monthly small press comic book published by Manuscript Press and edited by Rick Norwood. Don Markstein edited the publication from 1984 to 1987 and 1992 to 1996....
. Comics Revue
Comics Revue
Comics Revue is a bi-monthly small press comic book published by Manuscript Press and edited by Rick Norwood. Don Markstein edited the publication from 1984 to 1987 and 1992 to 1996....
has also published all of the daily strips from September 8, 1930 through December 31, 1934. Fantagraphics come out with a one-shot reprint of daily strips from 1910s and 1920s in 2007, and plans a more complete reprinting of the daily strip in the future.
Scattered Sundays and dailies have appeared in several collections, including the Grosset & Dunlap
Grosset & Dunlap
Grosset & Dunlap is a United States book publisher founded in 1898.The company was purchased by G. P. Putnam's Sons in 1982 and today is part of the British publishing conglomerate, Pearson PLC through its American subsidiary Penguin Group....
book reprinted by Nostalgia Press
Woody Gelman
Woodrow Gelman , better known as Woody Gelman, was a publisher, a cartoonist, a novelist and an artist-writer for animation and comic books. As the publisher of Nostalgia Press, he pioneered the reprinting of vintage comic strips in quality hardcovers and trade paperbacks...
, but the most readily available sampling of Sundays and dailies from throughout the strip's run is Krazy Kat: The Comic Art of George Herriman, published by Harry N. Abrams, Inc. in 1986. It includes a detailed biography of Herriman and was, for a long time, the only in-print book to republish Krazy Kat strips from after 1940. Although it contains over 200 strips, including many color Sundays, it is light on material from 1923 to 1937.
Henry Holt & Co.
- Krazy Kat (1946) Introduction by e.e. cummings. Hardcover B&W compilation of daily and Sunday strips, concentrating on 1930–1944.
Grosset & Dunlap/Nostalgia Press/Madison Square Press
- Krazy Kat: A Classic from the Golden Age of Comics (1969, 1975) An entirely different compilation of dailies and Sundays, with examples from the entire run of the strip—including 23 "Dingbat Family" bottom strips. Reprints the e.e. cummings introduction from the Henry Holt volume. 8 pages in full color; some later editions have daily strips reproduced in blue ink. ISBN 0-448-11945-5 (hardcover), ISBN 0-448-11951-X (paperback)
Street Enterprises (Menomonee Falls)
- (George Herriman's) Krazy Kat Vol. 1, No. 1 (March 1973) 32-page newsprint magazine reprinting 60 daily strips from July 3–October 28, 1933. (Inside cover claims inaccurately that they are from 1935.)
Real Free Press
- Krazy Kat Komix, Nos. 1-5 (1974–1976) Joost SwarteJoost SwarteJoost Swarte is a Dutch comic artist and graphic designer. He is best known for his ligne claire or clear line style of drawing, and in fact coined the term....
, ed. The 5-issue magazine also features other Herriman strips.
Hyperion Press
- The Family Upstairs: Introducing Krazy Kat: The Complete Strip, 1910–1912 (1977, 1992) Introduction by Bill Blackbeard. ISBN 0-88355-643-X (hardcover), ISBN 0-88355-642-1 (softcover)
Harry N. Abrams
- Krazy Kat: The Comic Art of George Herriman (1986) Patrick McDonnell, Karen O'Connell, eds. Various strips in B&W and color, mostly from original art, including some watercolor paintings. ISBN 0-8109-8152-1 (hardcover), ISBN 0-8109-9185-3 (softcover)
Morning Star Publications
- Coconino Chronicle (1988) Alec Finlay, ed. 130 strips from 1927–1928.
Eclipse Comics
"Krazy and Ignatz: The Komplete Kat Komics" (series), Bill Blackbeard, ed. Each of these volumes reprints a year of Sunday strips.- Vol 1: Krazy & Ignatz (1988) 1916 strips. ISBN 0-913035-49-1
- Vol 2: The Other Side To the Shore Of Here (1989) 1917 strips. ISBN 0-913035-74-2
- Vol 3: The Limbo of Useless Unconsciousness (1989) 1918 strips. ISBN 0-913035-76-9
- Vol 4: Howling Among the Halls of Night (1989) 1919 strips. ISBN 1-56060-019-5
- Vol 5: Pilgrims on the Road to Nowhere (1990) 1920 strips. ISBN 1-56060-023-3
- Vol 6: Sure As Moons is Cheeses (1990) 1921 strips. ISBN 1-56060-034-9
- Vol 7: A Katnip Kantata in the Key of K (1991) 1922 strips, including 10 color Saturday strips. ISBN 1-56060-063-2
- Vol 8: Inna Yott On the Muddy Geranium (1991) 1923 strips. ISBN 1-56060-066-7
- Vol 9: Shed a Soft Mongolian Tear (1992) 1924 strips. ISBN 1-56060-102-7
- Vol 10: Honeysuckil Love is Doubly Swit (unpublished) 1925 strips. ISBN 1-56060-203-1
Kitchen Sink Press
"The Komplete Kolor Krazy Kat" (series). Each volume reprinted two years of Sundays. (The publisher dissolved before the series' aim of completeness could be achieved.)- Vol 1: 1935–1936 (1990) Rick Marshall, Bill Watterson, contributors. ISBN 0-924359-06-4
- Vol 2: 1936–1937 (1991) Rick Marshall, ed. ISBN 0-924359-07-2
Stinging Monkey/BookSurge
- Krazy & Ignatz, The Dailies. Vol 1: 1918–1919 (2001, 2003) Gregory Fink, ed., introduction by Bill Blackbeard. (Stinging Monkey edition in large format, ISBN 978-0-9688676-0-0. BookSurge reprint in smaller 7.9 × 6 inch format, ISBN 1-59109-975-7, ISBN 978-1-59109-975-8)
Pacific Comics
"All the Daily Strips...." (series) 6¼ x 6¼ inch format.- Krazy Kat vol 1: 1921 (2003)
- Krazy Kat vol 2: 1922 (2004)
- Krazy Kat Vol 3: 1923 (2005)
"Presents Krazy and Ignatz" (series) Four 3¼ x 4 inch volumes reproducing the 1921 strips in miniature.
Fantagraphics Books
(Picking up where Eclipse left off, each of the following volumes reprints 2 years of Sundays. Bill BlackbeardBill Blackbeard
William Elsworth Blackbeard , better known as Bill Blackbeard, was a writer-editor and the founder-director of the San Francisco Academy of Comic Art, a comprehensive collection of comic strips and cartoon art from American newspapers...
, series editor. Chris Ware
Chris Ware
Franklin Christenson Ware , is an American comic book artist and cartoonist, widely known for his Acme Novelty Library series and the graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth. Born in Omaha, Nebraska, he resides in the Chicago area, Illinois...
, designer. The first five volumes are in B&W, as originally printed.)
- Krazy & Ignatz in "There Is A Heppy Lend Furfur A-Waay": 1925–1926 (2002) ISBN 1-56097-386-2
- Krazy & Ignatz in "Love Letters In Ancient Brick": 1927–1928 (2002) ISBN 1-56097-507-5
- Krazy & Ignatz in "A Mice, A Brick, A Lovely Night": 1929–1930 (2003) ISBN 1-56097-529-6
- Krazy & Ignatz in "A Kat Alilt with Song": 1931–1932 (2004) ISBN 1-56097-594-6
- Krazy & Ignatz in "Necromancy by the Blue Bean Bush": 1933–1934 (2005) ISBN 1-56097-620-9
- Krazy & Ignatz: The Complete Sunday Strips: 1925–1934 (Collects the five paperback volumes 1925–1934 in a single hardcover volume. Only 1000 copies printed, only available by direct order from the publisher.) ISBN 1-56097-522-9
(The following volumes, through 1944, are in color, reflecting the shift to color in the Sunday newspaper version.)
- Krazy & Ignatz in "A Wild Warmth of Chromatic Gravy": 1935–1936 (2005) ISBN 1-56097-690-X, 2005
- Krazy & Ignatz in "Shifting Sands Dusts its Cheeks in Powdered Beauty": 1937–1938 (2006) ISBN 1-56097-734-5
- Krazy & Ignatz in "A Brick Stuffed with Moom-bins": 1939–1940 (2007) ISBN 1-56097-789-2
- Krazy & Ignatz in "A Ragout of Raspberries": 1941–1942 (2007) ISBN 1-56097-887-2
- Krazy & Ignatz in "He Nods in Quiescent Siesta": 1943–1944 (2008) ISBN 1-56097-932-1
- Krazy & Ignatz: The Complete Sunday Strips: 1935–1944 (Collects the five paperback volumes 1935–1944 in a single hardcover volume. Only 1000 copies printed, only available by direct order from the publisher.)
- Krazy & Ignatz: The Kat Who Walked in Beauty (2007) 11" × 15" horizontal hardcover; reprints dailies from 1911–12, 1914, 9 months of large-format dailies from 1920 with an additional month from late 1921, and 1922 pantomime ballet artwork. ISBN 1-56097-854-6
- Krazy & Ignatz in "Love in a Kestle or Love in a Hut": 1916–1918 (2010) ISBN 1-60699-316-3
- Krazy & Ignatz in "A Kind, Benevolent and Amiable Brick": 1919–1921 (2011) ISBN 1-60699-364-4
- Krazy & Ignatz: The Sketchbook Strips: 1910–1913 (2011) ISBN 1-60699-387-9 (hardcover) (apparently not yet released)
Sunday Press Books
- Krazy Kat: A Celebration of Sundays (2010) Patrick McDonnell, Peter Maresca, eds. Various Sundays reprinted in their original size and colors. ISBN 0-9768885-8-0 (hardcover)
IDW Publishing
- George Herriman's Krazy + Ignatz in Tiger Tea (January 2010) Craig Yoe, ed. Collects the "Tiger Tea" storyline from the daily strips, May 1936-March 1937. ISBN 978-1-60010-645-3 (hardcover)
See also
- Krazy Kat filmographyKrazy Kat filmographyAfter George Herriman conceived the Krazy Kat comic strip in 1913, the title character began appearing in animated shorts three years later. From 1916 to 1940, Krazy Kat was featured in 232 films...
, a complete list of theatrical cartoons based on the comic strip
External links
- Krazy Kat at Internet ArchiveInternet ArchiveThe Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It offers permanent storage and access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, music, moving images, and nearly 3 million public domain books. The Internet Archive...
(comic strips, video and audio) - Coconino County — History, bios, strip archive, bibliography and more.
- "'Some Say it With A Brick': George Herriman's Krazy Kat" — A critical essay.
- Full video of the "Krazy Goes A-Wooing" silent animated short produced by Hearst, with some similarities to the strip.
- The Columbia Crow's Nest — Includes information on the Mintz-era cartoons bearing the Krazy Kat name.
- Ignatz Mouse — A site built around the second character of the strip. Forums, archives, etc...
- Krazy Kat Cartoons from the 1960s — A list of Krazy Kat cartoons in full-colors.
- Comic Strip Library — Archive of many strips in very high resolution.
- Bill Watterson's foreword of the book "The Komplete Kolor Krazy Kat"