Word: ignatz
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Read episodically, these strips must have seemed little more than a mysterious downer. Presented collectively, the themes become much clearer, with narrative threads that tenuously link one strip to the next. Most are mute pantomimes featuring the Quimby character, who, not coincidentally, looks a lot like George Herriman's Ignatz Mouse. (Ignatz and Krazy Kat appear within the first ten pages of the sketchbooks, along with Superman, Batman, some live model drawings and an empty laundry room.) Quimby's nature changes from strip to strip. Sometimes he seems cruel, slapping around his pal Sparky, a cat without a body...
That is the sound of a brick kreasing a kat's kranium. Ignatz Mouse lives for making such a noise, just as Krazy Kat lives to hear it and Officer Pupp lives to prevent it. Krazy, you see, loves Ignatz. For him (or her, as 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...
...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...
...Krazy and Ignatz" series, should it see its end, will make up a cultural loss as significant as finding a complete version of Eric Von Stroheim's "Greed." Like any great art work, during its own time "Krazy Kat," received as much mystified disdain as it got praise from many of the jazz-age "inelectjools." At least now we will be able to judge for ourselves whether Gilbert Seldes was correct when he wrote in 1924: "Krazy Kat, the daily comic strip of George Herriman is, to me, the most amusing and fantastic and satisfactory work of art produced...
...Krazy and Ignatz: 1925-1926" can be found at superior comic and book stores starting this week...