Understanding Krazy Kat

[url]http://www.tcj.com/krazy-love/[/url]

Krazy Love
BY R.C. Harvey Jan 20, 2017

We don’t have to penetrate more than a fraction of an inch into Michael Tisserand’s inch-and-a-half thick, three-pound 545-page biography of Krazy Kat’s kreator to realize that it is a stupendous triumph of exhaustive research and organizational skill. I’ve read only the first two chapters of Krazy: George Herriman, A Life in Black and White, and I already know more about this shy genius than I ever expected to know. But we don’t have to read even that much to realize that this volume is a biography of the cartoonist, not a critique of his work.

Just riffling the pages of the book reveals that not much of Herriman’s comic strip art is on display, and without visual evidence, we can’t examine or much appreciate his cartooning achievement. And besides, Tisserand himself tells us in an author’s introductory note that “the dimensions of this book do not allow for a full presentation of Herriman’s grand comics.” In fact, there are no complete comic strips on display This book is deliberately not about comic strip artistry. And he tells us exactly that right at the beginning: none of Herriman’s “grand comics.”

Just biography then? No, there’s a little more. “I have included panels from his works to illustrate certain ideas and to give at least a hint of their splendors.”

And so on page 24, we have a panel in which Ignatz, sending a brick to Krazy’s head, exclaims: “You’re now a member of the fraternal brickhood of noble dornicks.” This alludes to Herriman’s father’s involvement with the Masons.

[url]http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/crocker/[/url]

[url]https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/what-was-the-source-of-krazy-kats-comic-genius/2016/12/06/561381e8-bb1f-11e6-91ee-1adddfe36cbe_story.html?utm_term=.bb39c75bc8ae[/url]

[url]https://www.comicsgrid.com/articles/10.16995/cg.97/[/url]

[B][I]You either get it or don't[/I][/B]

[QUOTE=Billy Batson;3927436][B][I]You either get it or don't[/I][/B][/QUOTE]

To a degree that is right, especially with Krazy Kat, which needs a long reading to really appreciate and George was so brilliant at being subtle in is manipulation of space and characterization that it is easy to miss how what he was doing was not just revolutionary for its time, but really has never been repeated. George Herriman seems to have had access to part of his brain that the rest of us just don't have voluntary access to.

[QUOTE]While different critics have found different mythologies in the world of Krazy Kat, they are all in agreement on about a secondary mythology: the unparalleled brilliance of the strip itself, which was published in William Randolph Hearst’s newspapers starting in 1913 until Herriman’s death in 1944. This is not to say that Krazy Kat is not ‘brilliant’, but that its reputation within fan communities has been based largely on received wisdom and previous critical assessments. Although Krazy Kat has been celebrated as one of the greatest achievements in 20th century popular culture, large portions of the strip have been inaccessible to almost all readers since the comic began.[/QUOTE]

Collections are available now and they need to be read and understood in the context of the period of their publication to be truly appreciated. It is possible to read them all, and then say, I don't get it. But at least you should be able to understand what you don't get ;)

[QUOTE]Coconino County, the setting for the action in Krazy Kat, undergoes physical transmutation from panel to panel. The stone of the desert, which in so much American lore symbolizes the rugged indomitable frontier that succumbs only to the rugged, indomitable spirit of the pioneer, instead morphs from moment to moment between the natural and the built. Trees change into buildings, then into rock formations, and cliffs become fortresses, then shrink to pup-tents within a single episode, all without narrative comment. This landscape, with all of the ethos and pathos of the high desert, then, reflects the city nonetheless, for it is in cities that forests are comprised of trees and lampposts in cohabitation, while dwellings built to the scale of flat-topped mesas tower ominously over those whom they're meant to shelter, and all is subject to change without notice as the old is torn down to make way for the new. The perpetual motion of Coconino, a city pretending to be a desert, epitomizes the perpetual ideological and perceptual adjustments that the urban subject must make in order to naturalize the city environment. Herriman elicits the misrecognition of a landscape that is a city in order to bring to light the everyday misrecognition of the city for a landscape. [/QUOTE]

It started as a doodle around another established comic.

OK so Krazy Kat is largely now in the public domain and here is a nice archive of Herriman’s masterpeice


[url]http://comicstriplibrary.org/browse/results?title=1[/url]

[IMG]http://comicstriplibrary.org/images/comics/krazy-kat/krazy-kat-19160423-s.png[/IMG]


[IMG]http://comicstriplibrary.org/images/comics/krazy-kat/krazy-kat-19160430-s.png[/IMG]

[IMG]http://comicstriplibrary.org/images/comics/krazy-kat/krazy-kat-19160507-s.png[/IMG]

just one more...

[IMG]http://comicstriplibrary.org/images/comics/krazy-kat/krazy-kat-19160514-s.png[/IMG]

[QUOTE=Billy Batson;3927436][B][I]You either get it or don't[/I][/B][/QUOTE]

Basically, yeah.

You either understand his abstract approach to how we perceive reality where we unintentionally ignore how society works because we have our nuances... or it's an old timey cartoon about a rat who keeps giving a cat brain damage.

[QUOTE=JDogindy;3939487]Basically, yeah.

You either understand his abstract approach to how we perceive reality where we unintentionally ignore how society works because we have our nuances... or it's an old timey cartoon about a rat who keeps giving a cat brain damage.[/QUOTE]

Such as comics itself is a poetic abstraction in naration, Krazy Kat stretches that poetry beyound any other work, before or since.

But can we not say the same thing about Jack Kirby? I hated Kirby's work as a kid (even though I loved the FF) and it wsn't until I was an adult that I started to understand the unique exaggerations of Kirby was playing with the visual narrative in a very sophisticated way. In truth there is a lot of substandard Kirby work and a lot of it was done when I was a teenager. But as his best, there is much in common between Kirby and Herriman, except that Herriman also played with language in a way the Kirby did not.

[IMG]http://comicstriplibrary.org/images/comics/krazy-kat/krazy-kat-19190226-s.png[/IMG]

This one should be universal?

I was doing research tonight and ran accorss this:

Enjoy

[url]https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/lostmedia/images/6/62/1916-05-28-b.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20160117033812[/url]

[IMG]http://www.mrbrklyn.com/images/comics/1916-05-28-b_hero.jpg[/IMG]

Note:This work is in the public domain

[video=youtube;IMwg_LPQggE]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMwg_LPQggE[/video]