Krazy Kat is a comic strip made by George Herriman back in the 1910s through the 1940s. It’s a famous comic strip. It may not be as well know today among the general population but to comic strip and comic book fans it’s certainly still well known. It was also the favorite comic strip of a lot of artists, writers, and intellectuals in its day. People who might not have been fans of comic in general were fans of Krazy Kat.
As a comic book fan born in the mid 1960s I grew up having heard of Krazy Kat but I never got to read more than a sampling of the strips. I didn’t get my first Krazy Kat book until 1990 or so. I got “The Komplete Kat Komics: Volume Three 1918. I can’t say that I was overly impressed. I liked it well enough but I don’t think I “Got it.” People I read singing the praises of Krazy Kat got it a lot more than I did.
There is a lot of repetition in Krazy Kat. The strip has three main characters: Krazy Kat, Ignatz the mouse, and Officer Pup. The mouse is forever throwing a brick at the cat and hitting him in the head with it. Officer Pup (the dog) is always arresting Ignatz and trying to keep order.
The people who loved Krazy Kat were forever going on about the circle of the brick gag and what it meant and how they really loved each other and yada, yada, yada… Like I said I didn’t get it. I found the strip boring and repetitive. I liked the art. That was terrific. But the strip itself I would give up on after reading a few.
Yet Krazy Kat was a strip I would alway come back too. It was also one of those strips that was always coming back into print. There are decades worth of them and I think the early stuff is in the Public Domain now. So a few publishers have tried their hand at Krazy Kat volumes.
The next volume of Krazy Kat I bought was “Krazy and Ignatz 1937-1938” from Fantagraphics Books. It’s from 2006 and it reprints the Sunday strips in color. I probably bought it around 2006. Once again I was trying to “Get” Krazy Kat and once again I didn’t. I read it and found it repetitive and uninteresting. This is the same critique I’ve heard from other non-fans of Krazy Kat so I knew I wasn’t alone.
Both books have sat on my shelf all these years and occasionally I’l pull them out and look at them. Then a funny thing happened about five years ago. I suddenly “Got” Krazy Kat. I read those Sunday strips, enjoyed them, and found them very fun. I think it was because I started reading them in a different way. I think it also had to do with my own comic strip, “Four Talking Boxes” that I’ve been making for years and years.
Most comic strips, even if they’re gag-a-day comics have a continuity from day to day. Calvin and Hobbes is one of my favorites and Calvin can have an adventure that lasts a few strips. Each strip does exist on its own but also can be read in the context of the other strips. Every Sunday’s Calvin, which had its own self contained continuity, still related to every other strip. They were about his daydreams and nightmares and anything could happen but Calvin was still the little boy we all knew. There was always a connection.
I have another book called “The Silver Age of Superman.” It’s from 1995 and reprints a whole bunch of Silver Age (1950s to 1960s) Superman comic book covers. Back in those days every Superman comic book cover told a story to entice you to buy the comic. The cover could tell the story that was inside the comic or maybe not quite tell the same story. The cover could juice the story up a bit to make it an exciting cover.
Sure the purchasers probably knew who Superman was and what he was about but the cover itself didn’t need continuity with previous covers. It existed in a world by itself. Even to this day I, and lots of other fans, love to look at and enjoy these covers without ever needing to open the book and read the actual comic. The cover is complete unto itself and they can make a book of just covers and fans can “Get it” both literally and figuratively.
I found myself reading Krazy Kat strips like they existed in a world of only that strip and I found myself enjoying them. Sure Ignatz often had a brick at the ready to throw at Krazy Kat but this was a new strip and a new brick. Ignatz and the brick were being born again in the new context of today’s strip. Yesterday’s brick is now meaningless and doesn’t exist. There is only today’s brick and I don’t have to think about yesterday’s brick anymore than I had to think about last month’s Kryptonite on a Superman cover.
I stopped caring about continuity in reading Krazy Kat strips but it was really the continuity of meaning that I abandoned. The characters were all still the same but the relationship between became more fluid. The brick didn’t mean one thing. Sometimes it was a sight gag, sometimes it expressed an emotion, sometimes it was chaos that Officer Pup had to bring order to, and sometimes it was just punctuation to a strip.
Now when I read Krazy Kat I get it. It’s a lot of fun. I read each strip with the idea of who each of the characters is but also with the idea that things can change within each individual strip much the way things can change with each individual Silver Age Superman cover. One month a little girl can be accusing Superman in a courtroom of killing her father (Action Comics 359) and in another month Superman can be planting a Super Flag and declaring himself dictator of Earth (Action Comics 381). Those two covers are completely unrelated continuity-wise but they both play with Superman tropes. This is how I see Krazy Kat now too.
So if you don’t “Get” Krazy Kat as I didn’t for most of my life I say give it another read. Except this time look at it as if each strip is it’s own distinct thing like a comic book cover. It’s part of the whole but also a little separate from it.