GEORGE HERRIMAN'S KRAZY KAT - GUEST POST BY BARRY PEARL...

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Krazy Kat by cartoonist George Herriman featured a romantic cat and mouse relationship that introduced diversity for the first time in comics!  They are different colours too!  And Krazy was alternately male and then female.

Krazy Kat was a famous and important comic strip that ran from 1913 to 1944.  It first appeared in the New York Evening Journal.  The early Krazy Kat Sundays were printed only in black and white and appeared in a features page, in a non-colour section of the news­paper.  This was usually a section that included articles or editorial cartoons commenting on art, lifestyle, or news events of the day.  In early 1922, Hearst's New York American briefly experimented with a Saturday colour comics section that included a full, broadsheet-size Krazy Kat page.  It didn’t last long.  From 1935 to 1944, Krazy and Ignatz appeared in a tabloid-size comic section only in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and later, Baltimore.  These full-colour comics were found in a Saturday comics section, or in a second Sunday section supplementing the reg­ular full-size comics.

Krazy and Ignatz were introduced in an earlier strip, The Dingbat Family in 1910. The weird premise was always that Krazy loves a mouse, Ignatz, who is an ill-tempered, brick throwing mouse. 

The creativity reflected in the relationship and characterization of the characters had many readers thinking that comics should be regarded more seriously.  Despite the slapstick simplicity of the general premise, the detail combined with Herriman's visual and verbal creativity, made Krazy Kat one of the first comics to be widely praised as "serious" art.

Krazy was animated and brought to the movie theatres in 1916 and had many incarnations.  Now this is speculation, but I truly feel that Krazy influenced the creation of Felix the Cat, who reached the screens in 1919.  Felix was an inspiration for Disney’s Oswald the Rabbit and then Mickey Mouse.  If you look at their early incarnations they all look alike.  So Krazy played an important part in American culture.  (Feel free to disagree.)

Collected Krazys have appeared in many books, some of which (from my own personal collection) can be seen here.  The one marked “Early” is from the Dingbats.  Another one was hand water-coloured by Herriman.  Krazy Kat is definitely worth checking out.

Posted in: Cartoons