When director Fritz Lang fled Nazi Germany for California in 1933, he determined that nothing was more American that the funnies, and it was largely from them that he learned English, a notion scarcely conceivable in today’s wasteland of four panel gag humor. But that was a time when comic strips kept company with jazz, Jewish comedy, and arguably Lang’s own medium as the first distinctly American art forms. Among Lang’s favorite strips was George Herriman’s critically acclaimed but not especially popular Krazy Kat, which in its own way dealt with the process of becoming and being an American.

Herriman had been a cartoonist for over a decade, trying various strips before finding his stride with Krazy, who first appeared in 1910 as a waste space gag (mouse chases cat) in an urban-based strip, the Dingbat Family, detailing one family’s encounters with their seldom seen but frequently disruptive upstairs neighbors. In 1916, Krazy Kat was given his own strip and moved to Coconino County.

(In that same year, Herriman began providing illustrations for archy and mehitabel, New York Sun columnist Don Marquis’s fabulous tales written by archy, a cockroach moonlighting as a free verse poet and often featuring his friend mehitabel, a alley cat of questionable character and romantic aspirations who claims to have been Cleopatra in a past life. Because archy typed his missives on Don Marquis’s typewriter, one letter at a time, his missives were, necessarily, all lower case.)



Krazy Kat’s plot can be distilled down to a love triangle within which the eponymous, androgynous and racially ambiguous kat is almost inevitably the “victim” of the hurled bricks of its one true love, Ignatz, a worldly and sociopathic married mouse. And these beanings almost inevitably result in the rodent’s confinement in the jail (made of bricks, of course) of Offisa Pup, who is in love with the kat — who understands the bricks only as tokens of love. Cartoonist Bill Watterson of Calvin and Hobbes fame hit the nail (or perhaps the kat) on the head with his remark that the “narrow plot seems to have set free every other aspect of the cartoon to become poetry, and the strip is, to my mind, cartooning at its most pure.”

Foremost among these liberated aspects is the strip’s Coconino County, Arizona setting — home of the Grand Canyon — that Herriman rendered into what fellow word dis- and con-tortionist and Krazy Kat fan ee cummings described as “a strictly irrational landscape in perpetual metamorphosis.”  The backgrounds at once represent and manifest a strange fluidity of circumstance and identity, as trees become churches and mesas skyscrapers; skies go from stripes of daylight to inky nights housing upside down moons in the space of a sentence and the time of a panel.

And, weirder still, nothing funny happens in most of the comics, at least so far as we’ve come to understand humor. Writing on Krazy Kat, Umberto Eco makes the point that “the traditional strip, even if it narrates an episode that concludes in the space of four panels, will not work if considered separately; rather it acquires flavor only in the continuous and obstinate series, which unfolds, strip after strip, day by day.”

This we might call picaresque, pre-situational humor. In Krazy Kat, this slow unfolding — strip by strip, brick by brick — opens into an older, sadder spirit of humor as fundamental misapprehension. Ignatz throws the brick to spite the quixotic kat’s dreamy flights of fancy but Krazy incorporates the bricks into those very flights. (One of Herriman’s earlier strips, by the by, was Don Koyote and Sancho Pansy”). Watterson adds to this that Offisa Pup, acting out of obligation and affection, protects Krazy from the bricks the feline fancies, thus “interfering with a process that’s satisfying to everyone for all the wrong reasons.”

But this dynamic never resolved, but continued evolving with Herriman’s changing fancy. In the teens, for instance, Offisa Pup is just one of the county’s many residents; in the 1920s, the bricks begin to really bother him, and by the 30s they are the focal point of his existence. (The new Fantagraphics editions, the only volumes presently in print, each cover two years of full page Sunday strips, beginning in 1925 where a previous run of reissues left off, but they are beautifully packaged, a perfectly good starting point for those new to Krazy Kat).



What remains central to the strip throughout is the brick — alternately weapon, valentine, and prison — that serves as the symbol of the mutual miscommunication that binds the strip’s three principles. And words for Herriman are the bricks of  language; his creations speak in a pun-y patois whose elements include but are by no means limited to Yiddish, Spanish, and street slang, Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Dickens, full of purposeful misspellings and bizarre punctuation. The strip is a free market hodge-podge of cultures, sounds, and meanings, uniquely and unmistakably American.

As was the strip’s creator. Too much ink has already been spilled on Herriman’s passing for white, and how the strip’s shifting perspectives and mutable characters reflect that decision. And none of it is worthwhile. Doubtless there is a relation, and I’m certain it’s too complex to be formally drawn out and distilled.


Herriman’s wedding photo, which I believe is the only known picture of him without a hat.

Krazy Kat never was very popular with readers but was championed by William Randolph Hearst, who took his funnies most seriously, and whose Xanadu one suspects bore some resemblance to Coconino County’s distinctively American mish-mash of cultures and environments. The strip ran because Heart demanded it run, over the objections of many of his editors.

But among Herriman few fans were an elite bunch. It was the first comic to receive serious cultural notice and praise. In 1919, the strip was the subject of reprinted in his seminal collection of essays on inherently American art forms, the Seven Lively Arts, and was made into a ballet by John Alden Carpenter. The strip’s fans included President Coolidge, Pablo Picasso, Charlie Chaplin, Gertrude Stein, Walt Disney, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, H. L. Mencken, Jack Kerouac, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

When Herriman died in 1944, strips were expected to outlive their authors (though they often continued to be “signed” by their dead creators). But Krazy Kat — too unpopular to be profitable and too idiosyncratic to be imitated — was allowed to die with its creator. To give the last word to Lang, writing with that sort of insight into American culture that only immigrants are privy to, “Krazy’s philosophy… makes a brick on his — (her?) — noggin the purveyor of true love. For the Krazys of this world there are no austerities.”