Movies - Krazy Kat

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Krazy Kat is a comic strip created by George Herriman that appeared in weekday and Sunday U.S. newspapers between 1913 and 1944. It was first published in William Randolph Hearst's New York Evening Journal. Set against a dreamlike portrayal of Herriman's vacation home of Coconino County, Arizona, Krazy Kat's mixture of surrealism, innocent playfulness, and poetic language have made it a favorite of comics aficionados and art critics for more than eighty years.

The strip focuses on the relationship triangle between its title character, a carefree and innocent cat of indeterminate gender (but often referred to in prose as female), her antagonist Ignatz Mouse, and the protective police-dog Officer Bull Pupp. Krazy nurses an unrequited love for the mouse, but Ignatz despises her and constantly schemes to throw a brick at her head; for unknown reasons, Krazy takes this as a sign of affection. Officer 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. Gilbert Seldes, a noted art critic of the time, 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." Famed poet E. E. Cummings, as another Herriman admirer, wrote the introduction to the first collection of the strip in book form. In more recent years, many modern cartoonists have cited Krazy Kat as a major influence.

Overview

Krazy Kat takes place in a heavily stylized version of Coconino County, Arizona, with Herriman filling the page with landscapes typical of the Painted Desert. These backgrounds tend to change dramatically between panels even while the characters remain stationary. A Southwestern visual style is evident throughout, with clay-shingled rooftops, trees planted in pots with designs imitating Navajo art, and references to Mexican-American culture. The descriptive passages mix whimsical and often alliterative language with a 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 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 straightforward, Herriman always found ways to tweak the formula. Sometimes, Ignatz's plans to surreptitiously lob a brick at Krazy's head succeed; other times Officer Pupp outsmarts the wily mouse 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 simple-minded 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 the cartoonist for not having finished drawing the jail.

Public reaction at the time was mixed; many were puzzled by its iconoclastic refusal to conform to comic strip conventions and simple 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.

Characters

Krazy Kat

Simple-minded and curious, the strip's title character drifts through life in Coconino County without a care. Krazy's dialogue is a highly stylized argot ("A fowl konspirissy - is it pussible?") phonetically evoking a mixture of English, French, Spanish, Yiddish, and other dialects. On those occasions when Ignatz is caught before he can launch his brick, Krazy is left pining for her "l'il ainjil" and wonders where her 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 E. E. Cummings) have referred to her 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 pointedly about 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."

Ignatz

Ignatz Mouse is driven to distraction by Krazy's naïveté, and nothing gives him greater joy than to toss a brick at the Kat's head. To shield his plans from the ever-vigilant (and ever-suspecting) Officer 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.

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Movies - Krazy Kat

Overview

Characters

Krazy Kat

Ignatz

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