Comics

It says a lot about the way a lot of us live our lives, I think. Doesn’t have to, if you don’t want to look at it that way, but try telling that to the fanatics.

Here’s the way it goes: cat, mouse, dog. The cat (kat, more properly) is named Krazy, the mouse Ignatz, and the dog is the lawkeeper, Offisa Pupp. Krazy is in love with Ignatz Mouse, who isn’t exactly wild over the idea, and who responds by throwing bricks at Krazy, which sends Krazy into seventh heaven. Offisa Pup is also in love with Krazy, but is too much the gentleman to let it show, or maybe just plain too repressed, and he spends time agonizing over how to express it. It is Offisa Pupp’s duty to preserve law and order in Coconino County, where the action takes place, and law enforcement usually takes the form of preventing Ignatz from throwing — or even possessing — his brick. The punishment is jail. And that’s it, except for a couple of auxiliary characters like a duck named Mrs. Kwakk Wakk, the town gossip, and Kolin Kelly, who makes the bricks. In keeping with the relationship between law and commerce, Kelly is also a dog.

Coconino County exists, folks. It’s — yes — just over Mingus Mountain. There’s a town there called Sedona, Arizona. Max Ernst lived there once. So did George Herriman. Ernst was one of the founding fathers of the Surrealist movement. Herriman was more famous — he drew Krazy Kat. And Krazy Kat is the only comic strip that I’m positive Max Ernst must’ve read. F.D.R. read it. So did millions of people, and they still do today. From 1911 to 1944, when Herriman died at his home in Los Angeles, Krazy tore across the comics pages of America, enacting one of the profoundly moving stories of our times.

The amazing thing was that something as complex and sophisticated as Krazy could build up such a large and diverse readership. Some dialogue from the February 13, 1938 strip:

OFFISA PUPP: He comes, the offensive iff — all aload with sin and shame. However, when I get through shucking him down, he’ll be hitting the trail light. Pause, mousie, pause. Halt yourself a moment — the law bids you.

IGNATZ: (carrying a valise) Ah — but, koppie dear — I can ill spare, that moment of pause. I am enroad to give visit to my dear pal Krazy.

PUPP: Have done with gammer — spring that valise bag apart and shed the brick within, ’twill lighten your cargo and give ease to your locomotion.

IGNATZ: (surrendering a brick) Oh, loddy me. I just knew that I wasn’t smart enough to smugg that brick apast you — I just knew it you keen, kewt, kunning kop. (Walking away, to himself) Insupportable nonentity — I love to hate him.

And that’s just the first four frames. But it’s Krazy who is the focus of action all throughout the strip’s history. Krazy, of indeterminate gender, who is called “him,” “that dear, sweet Kat,” and “my dear Krazy,” who parades around with Krazy Kittens on occasion, and who walks Coconino County’s streets stark naked, with a bit of ribbon around the neck and sometimes a parasol. Krazy’s speech could be Yiddish or the result of a speech impediment; at the end of the episode recounted above, Krazy walks down the road with Ignatz hidden in the valise, saying “Dun’t mine me, Offissa Pupp — I’m giving the beg an the sitiwation all the hend wot is nezzezizerra — tenx.” Krazy, innocent and sceptical at the same time, not at all impressed when Ignatz demonstrates that the entire world is made out of sand and water, but whose mind is blown when Kolin Kelly adds that “a dish of water, a dash of sand — batter, baste, bake and pfiff — A BRICK.” The next frame shows Krazy on a hilltop, pondering a bit of each: “Movillis, stipenditz, killotzil, ah-h.”

In the few years I’ve been exposed to Krazy and the krew, I’ve come to stand in awe of George Herriman’s genius for simplicity and sophistication. Krazy Kat, with all its various overtones, has come to represent something of an axiom for handling popular art — simple doesn’t have to equal stupid. Folks can get off on the mouse-brick stuff, some of them can appreciate the Shakesperian tinge to the dialogue, still others are fascinated by the way the landscape and plants of Coconino County change from frame to frame, and how the whole set changes from night to day just like that. But it’s still a story of a kat and a mouse. And that’s what’s important.

That axiom is something that has been by and large forgotten by the music-makers of our times, too, and I daresay the rock critics have played their part in helping them forget. Recordings I’ve heard recently made five years ago in Minnesota garages, early stuff by the Velvet Underground, an odd 78 by a hillbilly orchestra, Floyd Ming and his Pet-Steppers’ “Indian War Whoop,” stuff like that’s been more exciting to me than some 26-year-old with a very expensive guitar singing about Jesus. And when good friends come over for beer and banter, they don’t ask what’s new any more — they ask what’s old.

Not to make some blithe prononciamento about “what is old is new,” but — even better — what is eternal is always new, even if it was just created yesterday. And what Krazy Kat has is eternal — maybe the world isn’t like it was when it used to be, and I do wonder if, when it gets to be what it is, it will. And evil still walks with beauty, beauty with evil, and yet, and yet . . .

Coconino County is still there — I was there over Christmas — both in Arizona and on paper. Bobby London, a young cartoonist working with the Air Pirates, a cartoon collective in San Francisco, has revived it in his Dirty Duck strip. Duck, with his toady servant Weevil, seems to be Grouch Marx’ official duck, in love with the liberated Ms Annie Rat, who attends Grateful Dead concerts in Coconino County’s rock-hall. London is Herriman’s spiritual successor, no doubt about that, but it’s dangerous to do that kind of thing any more. The Air Pirates, as you may know, are being sued for some $700,000 damages by Walt Disney Productions for printing cowries featuring Mickey Mouse in some situations that Walt never intended him to get into. (That story’ll be covered here in detail — just wait.) Meanwhile, the Duck carries on where the Kat left off.

I think a lot about the kop’s statement about beauty and evil these days, just as I am constantly trying to sort out the percentages of kat, kop and mouse in myself and the things that happen to me. Ignatz is both driven to throw his brick and contemptuous — sometimes — of his target. Krazy cannot live without the daily dose of pain the brick causes when it creases the cranium. And, like the kop, I can’t help but stand there and mutter to myself “and yet, and yet ...”

So anyway, that’s where I’m gonna leave it for now. As far as I can take it this time. But there’s lots more where this came from — in the funny papers — and that’s where you’ll find me till then.

Ed Ward