KRAZY KAT
I have, as I mentioned a post or two ago, been reading quite a bit of Krazy Kat lately. Fantagraphics, the same publisher who has begun putting out the complete run of Peanuts strips, has been doing the same for Krazy Kat (at least the Sunday pages) for some time now, and they're magnificent pieces of work. Each one has a cover designed by Chris Ware (U. Texas grad and cartoonist of Jimmy Corrigan and much else), an extensive article about George Herriman (the cartoonist behind Krazy Kat) and usually some extras. The latest edition (covering 1931-32) could stand some proofreading but, like all the others, is quite good--mostly because of the cartoons contained within.
There is one central theme to the Krazy Kat universe (aka Coconino County, Arizona)--a love triangle: Krazy Kat is in love with Ignatz Mouse (himself married with children), who loathes all cats and throws bricks at Krazy's head every single day with the grim determination of an obsessive-compulsive. (Krazy misinterprets these bricks as "love missiles" and emotionally relies on being hit with a brick.) Ignatz is generally arrested in the course of, or just after, committing this assault by Officer Pupp--himself in love with Krazy, Krazy being (almost!) entirely oblivious to this.
So, basically, a perfectly reasonable Krazy Kat strip consists of a mouse throwing a brick at a cat's head, and thereupon being put in jail by a dog. And, honestly, these three elements are present in most of the stips. Krazy Kat, though, manages to avoid being tedious and repetitious, and this is the genius of George Harriman.
First, there's the visual look of the cartoons. The lines are very bold, the shading excellent; Herriman is skilled at his craft, to be sure. Krazy, though, doesn't look an awful lot like a cat, and Officer Pupp sometimes has his weaknesses in drawing as well. They're so iconic, though, that this doesn't really matter. Where the drawings shine is in the background and how each frame is constructed. A famous aspect of Krazy Kat is how a scene can play out with no obvious movement--everyone standing in place listening to each other talk, for example--and in every frame, the background is different. To take an example, in the June 14, 1931 strip Officer Pupp is declaiming, to a mute but disbelieving audience of Krazy and Ignatz, all the great aspects of his character that make him the exemplary cop he is. In the first, he's leaning on a milepost with three mesas in the background. In the next, a single mesa in the far distance. In the third, a tree and a fence. Then he's standing right in front of a wall. Then a road with a very strange building in the background. And so on and so on. The effect breaks up what would be visual monotony in a static strip, and also each image presents a different "look" to the desert landscape of Coconino which builds depth to the whole "metaverse."
Then there is the supporting cast. Behind the three main characters is a rural desert county in Arizona populated by various anthropomorphic animals. There's Mrs. Kwakk-Wakk, the notorious gossip, and Kolin Kelly, purveyor of bricks. Joe Stork, the alcoholic baby-delivering/bootlegging stork who lives high on Enchanted Mesa. The Doormouse and Churchmouse--who each carry their titular objects around with them wherever they go. Bum Bill Bee, the...well...bee named "Bill" who's a bum, enigmatic and wise, carrying with him his honey pot.
All these characters (and Lord knows I left some out) have quite well-defined character, and combining them with the three main characters can lead to an almost infinite number of situations and opportunities for slapstick, verbal humor, Keystone Kops imitations, and much else. Nothing seems forced; everyone in the strip acts in accordance with their natures, and as a result the strip never seems forced, or reaching for a joke outside the boundaries established by the strip's history.
Finally, there's Herriman's gift of language. Krazy Kat famously speaks in a fractured dialect all Krazy's own--Krazy sings, in one strip, "Een nahl my drims, your fare face bims, you're the dollink awv my hott swee-daddoline." Krazy talks like that all the time; it can be hard to understand what Krazy's saying, sometimes, unless you read it aloud--and sometimes then it doesn't even work, and Krazy becomes impaled on the pointier parts of the English language itself. Then there's the narrator, who speaks as few comic narrators ever speak: "Ignatz, full of a cogent and cohesive sapience, unfolds to Krazy Kat certain mystifications of science, who accepts it all with an attitude of incredulity not wholly unmixed with doubt." That's just great stuff, intricate language played for laughs. (In that strip, Ignatz was showing Krazy how a radio worked.)
I get a lot out of reading Krazy Kat. A great many people do; it's attracted many notable fans over the years, like e e cummings, Jack Kerouac, and other literary and artistic lights. Herriman had a vast career, almost thirty years drawing Krazy Kat from 1915 to 1944. All this leads to a question: Does Krazy Kat transcend being a mere comic strip, and is itself High Art? Does it, in fact--along with other masters of the genre, perhaps--ennoble the entire comic strip and comic book medium to the status of Art?
Fantagraphics is determined to make the answer to both questions "Yes." This is a popular notion amongst afficionados of the genre; in a Calvin and Hobbes strip, Calvin points to a Roy Lichtenstein in a book (and pronounces it "high art"), and then a comic strip in the paper ("low art"), and the question is put to the reader how ridiculous this is. Then there's the Graphic Novel, and other "literary" forms of comics--most of Alan Moore's output, Dave Sim's Cerebus, Art Spiegelman's Maus, Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, and much else over the last couple of decades.
There's a sense that, somehow, Krazy Kat is fundamentally different from Garfield, Cerebus fundamentally different from Spiderman. Somehow nobler, somehow on a higher cultural plane. Why can't comics be taken seriously? Why aren't comics treated as Art, and displayed in museums alongside the Lichtensteins they inspired?
I'm not sure. Probably there are several reasons, some good and some (more?) not-so-good. The real question is this: Should we--if I may speak for comic fans everywhere for a moment--really want this to happen?
Krazy Kat, being published by the vanguard publisher of the Comics as Art movement, is already perilously close to being Taken Seriously as Art (even before Fantagraphics stepped in). When something becomes Taken Seriously, you see, it stops being whatever it was and begins being a "simulacrum of reality."
There's a lot in Krazy Kat to make academic ("serious") critics all weak and drooly. Its heyday was during the interwar years and the depression, both eras pregnant with meaning for the modern critic--the Jazz Age, a theoretically more permissive society, and then the Depression, the comeuppance for...well, take your pick of perceived ills in early 20th century America. These are Big Times. Then there's Krazy Kat--one of the first (and only) sexually ambiguous characters in comic history. Krazy his/herself is not aware of her/his gender. So you have your sexual ambiguity, your potential for homoerotic subtext, transgressive sexuality lurking under the surface.
These are, of course, all important subjects. The thing is, Krazy Kat isn't these subjects, it's a glorious strip that appeared every day for thirty years and captured legions of fans with its funny drawings, witty wordplay, and beautiful cast and setting. This is individual genius, though, and the price of Being Taken Seriously is that one's work is swallowed whole by one's times, rather than standing amidst them. "How did Herriman do this? What were his skills? What can other users of words and images learn from him and these strips?" are not valid questions, really, in Serious Discourse.
Innocence and a sense of craft are lost when something enters a museum. When someone looks at a piece of modern art or reads a modern piece of literature--which, I remind the reader, a great many people want comics to be--one is trained to think first and foremost "What does this mean?" What comment is being made? What comment is implicit in the work, regardless of authorial or artistic intent (which is generally entirely irrelevant)? Anything subconcious going on here? (Answer: Yes, something subconcious is always going on here.) A writer, reading a book, thinks "Is this good? What makes it good? What can I take from this?" Such aesthetic considerations are becoming increasingly rare in academic criticism.
If comics are Taken Seriously, we are going to have to watch discussion of comics stop hinging on their humor or aesthetic qualities and begin seeing them as pregnant with meaning, artifacts of their times, separated from their original creator and given over to the tender mercies of comparative literature professors.
Then there's the whole nature of respect. Bill Watterson considered himself an artist who worked in a particular medium, and was never granted the kind of respect that is tendered to Serious Artists, the ones who have their stuff hanging in the museums. Instead, Calvin and Hobbes merely became icons, instantly recognizable, main characters in bestselling books that are still in print long after they left the comics pages, formative images for an entire generation. No, I repeat no, artist or author working in the same period approached that level. I'm not sure who the last artist is who had that kind of penetration into the zeitgeist--maybe Jackson Pollock, maybe not anyone since Monet, maybe not anyone.
There's a sense that the important is the enemy of the beautiful. I have read scores of journal articles about works of literature, and I felt like asking the author "Did you like this book? Should I read this book? Is this an important lesson imparted by the book, or...what? What did you gain by researching this, or should I gain by reading it?" In fact, they are of course not "books"--or poems, or plays, or dialogues, or take-out menus--but "texts," so as to not privilege one class of text over another. Some of these texts under study are bad, some are good, but all have become Important because of their very textness; Importance knows no qualities.
Speaking only for myself, I do not want comics and comic books to become Texts. I do not want Krazy Kat under the critical microscope as a metaphor for sexuality or the Jazz Age. I do not want Peanuts to be studied for its simulacra of suburbanization during the Cold War. If comics are to be studied, they should be studied for the cartoonist's craft, which is far easier to do with them under the control of amateurs and fellow-craftsmen, far from the rarefied level of Serious Appreciation.
