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.