Word: herriman
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With a reputation for beauty and artistry that has long exceeded its availability, "Krazy Kat," the comic strip by George Herriman that ran between 1918 and 1944, has at last begun a full reprinting with high hopes of finishing the job. First begun by the now-defunct Eclipse Books, which got as far as 1924, Fantagraphics Books has picked up where they left off. "Krazy and Ignatz" (120pp.; $14.95) reprints the full-page, Sunday strips from 1925 and 1926, and will continue to reprint two years-worth of Sundays every year until the end. The common thread throughout is love...
...Krazy's gender remains ambiguous) Ignatz' tossed brick arrives with as much love as any bouquet. Completing the ancient dramatic triangle, Officer Pupp's unacknowledged love for Krazy hides behind his bounded duty to prevent all such brick-tossing. Undoubtedly the most remarkable of all variations on a theme, Herriman managed to create decades-worth of strips around these compulsions without once violating the ambiguity of the relationships or harm their possibilities as metaphors. One remarkable strip in the new collection deconstructs the formula as vaudeville. Krazy crosses the stage. A brick flies across the stage. Ignatz crosses the stage...
...poetry of "Krazy Kat" goes beyond its ambiguity of meaning. Herriman's images and language make for pure, direct pleasure. The characters live in a fantastical desert landscape made of potted Joshua trees, adobe jails and giant disembodied elephant's feet. As Krazy argues with Ignatz over whether summer comes before winter the background magically changes from panel to panel - Ignatz on a road; Ignatz atop a mesa; Ignatz in a birdbath, etc. Herriman's simple device to keep readers entertained both narratively and visually goes right the heart of a pure comic art. Cartooning has no obligations to reality...
...have words for a while, because I wanted to try and find the strength of comics as read pictures. I noticed that in reading comics that didn't have words the whole force of the story was propelled by the implied action of the characters. Like in a George Herriman [who wrote 'Krazy Kat' in the 1920s] Sunday page, where he didn't use many words, the characters literally seemed to be moving around on the page. And I noticed that in reading them there were these imaginary sounds that were created in your mind that were analogous to music...
...Nadelman, had responded to anonymous folk art. He found beauty and a sort of wry pathos in them, along with a disregarded but distinct sense of style. Lichtenstein wasn't the first artist to react to American comic strips. Miro is plausibly said to have been influenced by George Herriman's now classic Krazy Kat. Apart from Stuart Davis, however, he was the first American artist to do so, because American artists had always been rather ashamed of their own vernacular...