“Krazy Kat,” one of the most delightfully bizarre cartoon strips to emerge from the early years of the Sunday funnies, was the work of a New Orleans Creole who passed as white, George Herriman. The tirelessly prolific illustrator moved to New York and in 1910 inaugurated a comic strip about a zany family; the bottom of the panels was filled with the antics of the family pet, Krazy Kat, and the rodent of the house, Ignatz Mouse. Before long the cat and mouse game became its own cartoon, one of America's most popular for decades to come.
The illustrated coffee table celebration of the man and his cartoon, Krazy Kat & the Art of George Herriman (published by Abrams ComicArts and edited by graphic artist Craig Yoe) focuses on the syndicated strip but also devotes some attention to the animated short films that emerged as early as 1916 from the Hearst empire; eventually, Paramount and Columbia ran a series of “Krazy Kat” toons. While the movie version deserves at least a short study of its own, Yoe's book is an intriguing reminder of their existence and an allusion to the problem of translating work from one medium to another.
Herriman drew “Krazy Kat” in a rude scrawl of inky zig-zags and wiry scratches and wrote it in a style that brought English to the edge of an unknown language—or at least an unheard of dialect. None of this sat especially well with Hollywood, whose primary interest was in capitalizing on an instantly recognizable name. By the talking era the “Krazy Kat” shorts bore little resemblance to Herriman's creation and looked distinctly like the more obviously cinematic Felix the Cat and Mickey Mouse. The Art of George Herriman reproduces some work related to the films, including a dynamic and colorful Art Deco poster from Columbia. Herriman had little if anything to do with the movies but seemed to bear them no ill will.
Nowadays a free-spirited animator could more easily draw something from “Krazy Kat” and be true to its strange spirit. Set in a surreal desert landscape where trees grew in pots and the night fell in lowered blinds, the story concerned a bizarre love triangle. Ignatz Mouse disliked the story's heroine, Krazy Kat, who interpreted his abuse (usually a brick hurled against her head) as love. The third character, the canine Offissa Pup, loved the oblivious Kat and used his authority as a cop to protect her and punish the anarchic mouse. It was, as Calvin and Hobbes' creator Bill Waterson remarks in one of the essays collected in the book, “a more subtle kind of cartooning than we have today,” which eschewed punchlines for an ongoing sense of irony—a Seinfeld in ink and paper starring anthropomorphic animals in an ongoing relationship without a resolution.
