<span class="SFPTagline"> From SCIFIPEDIA </span>

Krazy Kat by George Herriman is the most critically-praised American comic strip of all time, with plaudits stretching from the influential pioneering study of popular culture, The Seven Lively Arts by Gilbert Seldes (1924), through the Masters of American Comic Art catalog for the groundbreaking art museum exhibition (2005). At first glance, it hardly seems the most likely candidate for this exalted status. Featuring funny animal characters (placing it in the same genre as Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse comics or James Swinnerton’s Little Bears and Tigers), written in dialect reminiscent of the caricatured immigrant speech of the Katzenjammer Kids or the Yiddishisms of Milt Gross (Nize Baby), and drawn in a style deeply rooted in classic bigfoot comics like those of F. Burr Opper (e.g., And Her Name was Maud), the Kat never appeared in more than a couple of score papers. Yet from these unlikely materials, Herriman created a masterpiece that, like the prints of Hogarth and Daumier, seems as contemporary today as when it was created. The protagonists of the strip are a romantic triangle, the ever-desirable Krazy Kat, who loves only Ignatz Mouse. Offissa Pup, the faithful dog sheriff of Coconino County, Arizona, where the strip is set, unrequitedly loves Krazy, and perpetually tries to protect her from Ignatz, who wants only to throw bricks at her – which she is happy to be the target of, seeing them as tokens of true love. In Herriman’s hands, these slapstick materials become visual and literary poetry that resonate with gender ambiguity and emotion. Like sportswriter Ring Lardner, Herriman was admitted into the international pantheon of Surrealists, both for his narrative and for the abstract design of his pages and the hallucinogenic Southwestern-inflected scenery of the strip, which also incorporated Native American iconography from Hopi and Pueblo kachinas and ceramics. Krazy Kat originated as a variously-titled secondary strip running beneath Herriman’s earlier Family Upstairs (also called The Dingbat Family), but the cat and mouse grew on Herriman, who eventually spun them off as their own strip (the title Krazy Kat first appeared October 28, 1913). The strip was filled with diverse and delightful characters, including members of the Kat and Mouse families, the baby-delivering Joe Stork, and the picaresque Don Kiyoti and Sancho Pansy. The strip appeared both daily and Sunday, with the first several years of Sundays published in black and white in the arts and culture sections of the Hearst papers. Although the black and white strips are masterful, Krazy Kat’s finest surrealist imagery and theatrical designs appear in the color strips. Publisher William Randolph Hearst, who always took a personal interest in the comics in his papers, kept the strip alive even though it never was financially successful. Unlike many strips of the golden age, it ended with Herriman’s death in 1944. No one else could continue it, but its influence remains powerful in strips like Berke Breathed’s Bloom County and progeny, Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes, and especially in a worthy successor, Patrick McDonald’s Mutts. Several series of animated cartoons have been produced, the first by Hearst in the teens, but the most successful homage in another medium remains Jay Cantor’s Krazy Kat, a Novel in Five Panels (Knopf, 1988).