Word: kat
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Kat...
Minor Master. Herriman was crazy about Krazy Kat. In all his years of inti macy with him, he never got tired of the Kat. In Herriman's 30-odd years of work - always wearing his hat and usually improvising fresh from the pen - he must have drawn something like 1,500 full-page Kats and 10,000 strips. An amazing number of them are the keenest, dizziest kind of inspiration. Wrote Critic Gilbert Seldes of Herriman's work 20 years ago: "In the second order of the world's art it is superbly first rate...
Problem of Evil. For Herriman's creatures, neither animal nor human, the scratchy, tersely subtle drawing, the hog-Elizabethan talk and supralunar world of Krazy Kat were entirely his own - a new private universe of fantasy, irony, weird characterization, odd beauty. It looks as simple as daylight, this illimitably varied, unchanging little comedy about the noble-souled, loony, amorous Kat who loves to have his bean creased by the brick that malicious Ignatz Mouse loves to throw, while Dogberryish Offisa Pupp, the stolidly distraught embodiment of the Law, tries, and forever fails, to stop the brick. The predicament...
When, some 20 years ago, the intellectuals discovered Herriman, Krazy Kat was compared with Don Quixote and with Pan, Ignatz with Sancho Panza and Lucifer, their creator with Anatole France, the German Expressionists, Charles Dickens. Herriman was praised as draftsman, colorist, creator of magical characters, fantastic inventor, and almost as much-but not perhaps enough-as a writer. In many respects his comic commentary resembles that of Joyce in Finnegans Wake, and Joyce might well have saluted the Herriman line: "Just imegin having your 'ectospasm' running around, William and Nilliam, among the unlimitless etha-golla...
Usually, when the creator of a popular comic strip dies-or even before-another man can understudy him. But when George Herriman died, King Features announced no such plan. Herriman left a backlog of Krazy Kat which will keep the strip running till about the middle of June. When that is over, a unique and endearing form of art and humor will have left the world...