Krazy Kat

The guy that does that terrible 'Mutts' strip actually wrote a v. good bk on Herriman abt ten years, so perhaps he knows something Ethan doesn't. It reprints some of Herriman's handcoloured Sunday pages, and they're bleedin' bootiful.

Saying that, KK is by no means as exceptional as the Gopnicks of this world like to think. Cliff Sterret's 'Polly and Her Pals', to name one v. obv. example, is just as 'modernist' (or otherwise) as KK, and Windsor McCay was doing the whole comic strip surrealism thing long before Herriman.

I've never really 'got' 'Pogo' - lovely drawings (in the Dell comics style) but neither as funny or as clever as it likes to think it is. Maybe its an American thing - I know there's lots of 'political satire' in 'Pogo' that prob. doesn't travel. For brilliant drawings and boffo yocks, give me Seegar's 'Thimble Theater' (w/ Popeye) any day.

you could just about make a proto-proto- modernist argt for it a la Douanier Rousseau/Grandma Moses/Satie, or a Primitive Modernist argt a la John Lee Hooker/Howlin Wolf (but where's the electricity?)

I think I will go WAY out on a bonkers Mike Davis limb and conjoin it — via California Anti-Urban Gothic — to LA Noir, for its violence, its disconnected poetry and its never-quite displaced racial-sexual undercurrents. It's bettah than fckin Chinatown anyday.

McKay as draughtsman, peerless, and gentle fantasist, yup, he's up there too, but KK and GH are the real deal.

i'm surprised to see they just reissued the (extremely ODD) '60s cartoon version of this on dvd.

what's it like?

well, it's like the comic strip, only it's a cheap-looking cartoon (made by the same studio that made the later made-for-TV Popeyes, if that tells you anything). and Krazy Kat is a gurl cat from Texas who lisps a lot. and there's a lot of stupid old-cartoon-type plots - Ignatz trying to give up throwing bricks at Krazy, western parodies, that kind of thing. it's really, really, really weird. i have a bargain-bin videotape with about 10 of them.

I've two collections of the cartoons, and they aren't much like the strip. They're inoffensive, but everything that made the strip great, for me, is missing.

weird I have been a Krazy Kat fan since I was a kid, have read tons of collections, seen photos of him, etc. and yet I had never realized before yesterday that he was black.

in the running for the NBA - http://www.nationalbook.org/nba2010_p_youn.html

more details to dig into (& more fun) than John Ashberry's fantasia on Henry Darger, but if you are a big Krazy fan you will definitely enjoy this book regardless of your orientation concerning modern poetry

gah, such a weird combo of loudmouth bullshit and intelligent discussion upthread (was thinking the same after reading that old erykah badu thread on ILM). ilx these days seems so much more civilized, in ways both good and bad. less dumbass flexing, but a lot less unguarded intellectual exploration, too.

particular incensed by ethan's, "i can't stand this wave of shitty indie cartoonists endorsing to their adoring fans which old comics are cool to like..." so fucking myopic and self-centered. i grew up with crazy kat cuz my stepdad (a cartoonist in his heart) had adored herriman all his life. of all the shit he collected, it was the crazy cat stuff that, for teenage me, resonated most immediately and intensely. i think that if you've spent any portion of your life putting pen to paper in hopes of stealing images from other planets, then you can't help but love what herriman did. has nothing to do with what's "cool to like" or whatever. sometimes people just love things, you know?

particularLY

monica youn book sounds intriguing. thanks for the tip MP, will look for it this afternoon...

I don't miss ethan a bit

xp

or momus

i interviewed youn for an article about a KK-related reading she was giving at my university several years ago. i remember nothing about what she was like on the phone (nice, i guess, otherwise i'd remember), but the poetry was decent.

weird I have been a Krazy Kat fan since I was a kid, have read tons of collections, seen photos of him, etc. and yet I had never realized before yesterday that he was black.

You've seen photos of a comic strip character?

he means George Herriman, the creator of Krazy Kat.

and it was in something famously shitty indie cartoonist Bill Watterson wrote that I first heard about Krazy Kat. Though I didn't get to read much of it until Ware and Fantagraphics reissued them, so thank god for indie comics i say.

Ah, okay. Now that I think of it, I remember reading an article about Herriman's racial identity... IIRC he was a light-skinned black man and was able to pass as white for most of his adult life.

(x-post)

[/Tuomas]

Michael Tisserand is working on a book about Herriman's race, which is a complex subject I gather. More here: http://dailycartoonist.com/index.php/2010/10/15/festival-of-cartoon-art-keynote-on-george-herriman/

Yeah, according to this article it didn't even become common knowledge his parents were "colored" until 1971:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/3666365/Herriman-Cartoonist-who-equalled-Cervantes.html

weird I have been a Krazy Kat fan since I was a kid, have read tons of collections, seen photos of him, etc. and yet I had never realized before yesterday that he was black

After all these posts I figure out that you mean George Herriman was black. I thought you meant Krazy was. I just thought I'd whistle past that one. I mean, I was surprised you were this comfy out & out calling Krazy a "he"! Oh, me.

well you were a very lucky lil latham

there's also the Smithsonian Anthology of Comic Books, which has things like Krigstein's 'Master Race', as reviewed here by Martin Skidmore

http://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2008/09/comics-a-beginners-guide-crimesuspense-thrillers/

xpost-ish:

I picked up The Smithsonian Collection Of Newspaper Comics last weekend for three dollars, beating out my last recordholder for bargain hunting: Kramers Ergot #5 (also three dollars).

Jeez louise, it is a marvel.

yeah i had both of those books as a kid. also COMIX a History of comic books in america, which was dope.

and the Penguin book of comics, another must have.

these are all great great choices for anyone who wants to read more classic comic strips (the two smithsonian books changed my life) but it's interesting that none of them are really much like krazy kat. herriman really is totally sui generis.

I had never heard of lionel fyninger till I went to the Whitney the other day to see the Cory Archangel show and checked out the rest. Lionel's work blew me away. It predates Krazy Kat and Polly and Her Pals (and a lot of other stuff) right? So if you want to know how all kinds of german expressionist modern artwork influences emerged in the american comic strip, maybe we should look at the german expressionist artist who dabbled in american comic strips near their birth? Some of it was very Little Nemo, but it had a more surreal/expressionist Krazy Kat quality.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/fantagraphics/412818782/in/photostream/

I was able to get a copy of the Feininger in the mid-90s from (I think) Bud Plant. Really impressive and odd. It's amazing to look at som nay of those early strips by all sorts of people - before the form was codified it seemed so open to anything. Sure helped to have full pages, but in general the variation is incredible.

i think i have a spare copy of the complete feininger comics book if anyone wants to buy it from me.

I would if I had any money.

Just to return to Feininger for a moment. The history confuses me a bit. Born in New York. Moved to Germany. Started doing political stuff in germany, then comic strips that appeared in american newspapers. Then he was a major player in expressionism, an instructor at Bauhaus. Then after being declared "degenerate" by the Nazi's he moved to NY where he continued to paint. He made a few wooden models for a german toy train company that weren't produced, but kept making them, and one of the best parts of the exhibit at the Whitney is the huge collection of wooden toys he made for his family over 40 years. Trains, little train depots, tiny people that look like they're right out of an early comic strip. Pretty great.

the last strip ran 70 years ago today. can't find it online, but if you've never seen it it's one of the eeriest and most poignant endings to any comic i've ever seen.

I've been slowly making my way through the Sundays chronologically over the past few years but I couldn't resist peeking at the last one and yeah, it's pretty damn eerie! Wish it was online...

Huh, that is pretty eerie/poignant -- kind of follows from the one the week before as well.

found it:

https://c2.staticflickr.com/4/3229/2704014905_1fb85b89c1.jpg

of the available collections, what would be a good place for a Krazy Kat neophyte to begin?

Krazy and Ignatz 1916-1918 is a pretty good starting point imo.

This collection has a nice overview of his work. If you just want the comics, any of the collections from 1916 to 1924 or 1925 will be great, they tend to have his most expansive and experimental work, before the his pages got more standardized.

^^^ yeah that book is terrific. really you can't go wrong with any of the collections, but the earlier ones are best to start with -- the later color sunday pages are so stripped-down and succinct that they're almost opaque at times if you don't already know the characters and their relationships.

nb my post from this morning was made before I had any coffee so I totally forgot about that book, which was actually the first one I owned, too, and is a great starting point, probably better than a collection because there's a pretty good bio and tons of examples of his pre-KK stuff.

lovely, thanks for the recommendations!

If you just want the comics, any of the collections from 1916 to 1924 or 1925 will be great, they tend to have his most expansive and experimental work, before the his pages got more standardized.

working my way through these and they are so endlessly entertaining, love the Herbert Hoover jokes

new Herriman bio

http://www.nola.com/arts/index.ssf/2016/11/krazy_kat_herriman_tisserandne.html

remarkable thread here

During this time I want to offer you one of the purest expressions of grief and faith I've ever seen, which is a Krazy Kat comic by George Herriman. 1/7 pic.twitter.com/31NtwwWiIf

— Michael Tisserand (@m_tisserand) April 3, 2020