Krazy Kat was a comic strip from 1913 to 1944. It was pretty unconventional, from the odd premise to the stylized dialog to being occasionally self-referential — sometimes the characters addressed the cartoonist, criticizing some aspect of that day’s strip.
The main characters were Krazy Kat herself (or himself; it was never clear), and his nemesis, Ignatz Mouse. Krazy really was crazy, or at least simple-minded, because she loved Ignatz even though in most strips the mouse threw a brick at him. Krazy was sure the bricks were a sign of affection. The third recurring character was a policeman dog named Officer Pupp. He’s very fond of Krazy and tries to protect her from Ignatz, usually by arresting the mouse.
All the adventures took place in a surreal depiction of an actual place, Coconino County, Arizona, which happened to be where the cartoonist, George Herriman, had a vacation cottage. The landscapes looked like the southwestern desert, but they were never the same from one panel to the next, even if the characters hadn’t moved. There might be a mesa in the background in the first, replaced by what looked like a giant mushroom in the second.
The panels containing the scenes might be in any shape, not just rectangular, and in between the panels were decorations like curtains, stage props, and lights, suggesting that the readers were in on a sort of joke, and the strip was somehow a kind of theater.
But it was the dialog that was the weirdest part of Krazy Kat. Krazy himself talked in a stream of consciousness style depicted with phoetic spelling. He would often call the mouse “Li’l dollink” for “little darling,” or “li’l ainjil” for “little angel” — all of which enraged the short-tempered Ignatz. But there were much longer sections of dialog as well, which tended to include alliteration and imagery: “Agathla, centuries aslumber, shivers in its sleep with splenetic splendor, and spreads abroad a seismic spasm with the supreme suavity of a vagabond volcano.” “Agathla”, in that bit, is referring to Agathla Peak, which in real life is a 1500-foot-high tower of rock in Arizona that was once a volcano.
The dialog also incorporated various languages, from French to Spanish to Yiddish, and included all sorts of gags, jokes, and puns (“A fowl konspirissy – is it pussible?”) as well as Krazy’s unwitting poems: “Out is my light / Dokk is my room / None by demp sheddows beset me.” Adding more self-reference, Krazy occasionally explained what was going on in her own strip: “Ooy, he’s saying something at you — ooh, it sims to be something in werra roughish and werra untootish lengwidge.” That’s Krazy reading a newspaper and describing the strip that the reader was reading at the time. It was about something Ignatz was saying — but which the reader couldn’t, in that case, see.
Krazy Kat was never drawn or written by anyone other than George Herriman. William Randolph Hearst, who owned the New York Evening Journal where Krazy Kat was first published, was a huge fan and gave Herriman a lifetime contract. He refused to let anyone else take over the strip after Herriman’s death in 1944. The strip was sometimes controversial, at least within the newspaper business, partly because it abandoned many of the conventions that comics adhered to at the time. Hearst occasionally had to issue a direct order to include that day’s Krazy Kat in his papers.
There were some occasional characters in Krazy Kat; both Krazy and Ignatz had relatives. In Krazy’s case they were, predictably, crazy: Krazy Katbird and Krazy Katfish were cousins. In the case of the mouse, there were other mice in the family, including Magnolia, Milton, Marshall, and Irving — but as mice, they were all drawn to be exactly identical. Other than family, there was Kolin Kelly, a dog who made bricks (the ones Ignatz kept throwing at Krazy), Joe Stork, who delivered babies (“purveyor of progeny to prince and proletarian”), and Mrs. Kwakk Wakk, a duck who often informed on Ignatz to Officer Pupp.
Krazy Kat never seemed to mind getting hit by bricks, and in the later years of the strip Ignatz tended to be less annoyed by her craziness. There are even suggestions that Ignatz doesn’t despise Krazy, in spite of the bricks. There were some Krazy Kat animated films in the 1930s and 40s, and nowadays you can find several compilations of Krazy Kat (and Herriman’s other work) in books.
