Still Krazy after all these years

Krazy and Ignatz

‘A Ragout of Raspberries’ 1941-1942

George Herriman, edited by Bill Blackbeard

Fantagraphics Books: 120 pp., $19.95

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It’s pretty safe to say there’s nothing else like “Krazy Kat.” George Herriman’s odd creation was loved by people as various as Jack Kerouac, Charles Schulz and William Randolph Hearst, who championed and ran the comic strip from 1915 until Herriman’s death in 1944 even though it wasn’t wildly popular. It was never a particular earner, but people saw something in the unreal deserts of Coconino County that kept the strip alive.

The premise is simple. Ignatz Mouse wants to hit Krazy Kat with a brick, which Krazy interprets as love. “L’il ainjil,” Krazy sometimes exclaims when a brick whacks him. It’s simple and utterly insane. It shouldn’t have worked. Yet it did.

Even 20-plus years on, with hints of war, an abbreviated cast and fewer settings than in previous years, the strips reproduced in “Krazy and Ignatz: ‘A Ragout of Raspberries’ 1941-1942” offer that rare thing: a world that feels complete in itself. It’s the really old America, the one that felt it didn’t need a greater world -- felt it so strongly, it barely acknowledged the rest of the planet.

Even in the early 1940s, the America Herriman evokes is still deeply pre-War. It harks back to when the U.S., particularly the West, felt like a place where people (or anthropomorphic animals) of all cultures and nations could come together without slotting into any particular hierarchy. They could speak in their lilting mishmash of languages and be understood because their society was itself a mishmash. Officer Pupp is nominally in charge, but he defers to Krazy, whom he considers a pure soul.

Officer Pupp describes Krazy’s voice as having a “lilt so lush as a throstle thrust, turns winter’s wail to May.” Mrs. Kwakk is the local gossip, and Don Kiyoti the local rake. Bum-Bill Bee claims he’s deposed aristocracy. Ignatz Mouse, the other principal, has something of the Jewish immigrant about him, scrappy and philosophical. In this volume he turns up with a scold of a wife who chases him with a rolling pin.

Officer Pupp is right. Krazy Kat is a sort of a blessed innocent. Although Krazy pines for Ignatz when he isn’t beaning Krazy’s noggin, it’s a chaste love. (It’s not clear if Krazy’s a he or a she; Krazy’s been referred to as a “she” once or twice in earlier books, but I’m not convinced.) The Kat is one of those beautiful people, like Neal Cassady or Janis Joplin, who seem too good for this world, only Krazy lacks tragedy. The character gets baffled by things like mirrors and hasn’t a guileful bone in its hokey feline body. Krazy is a happy Kat. His/her wisdom lies not in knowing but in being.

Historians are slowly realizing that Herriman was a genius at wordplay. His misspellings and turns of phrase pick like a jackdaw through the hodgepodge of cultures and literature of the early 20th century West. Jeet Heer notes in his introduction that when Ignatz sings “Adios Chaparrita Chula,” it’s a take on the Mexican lament “Adios, Mariquita Linda,” which Heer renders here as “goodbye, insolent darling.” One I spotted: Krazy, Ignatz and Officer Pupp sing a song that recalls the Middle English “Summer is icumen in.”

Hints of World War II do, at times, filter through in these strips. Cannons appear, most of which have nothing to do with the plot. In one strip, Officer Pupp uses a black rectangle to censor Ignatz’s thoughts, “Mousie -- no no no -- brick in person, is as bad as brick in thought . . . is no good for liberty.” But the biggest change is a pared down Coconino County. Maybe, as war loomed, the immigrant-rich, dialect-rich cultures the strip drew on began to wonder what exactly an American was, and took steps to be that. Linguists have noticed that immigration eventually creates homogeneity in language. Herriman’s wordplay is far less wide-ranging and goofy in these later years, and his characters seem to follow.

Or a kinder interpretation: In the face of external threat, this magical landscape of mesas and the blue bean bush distilled itself into a mythic one -- pruned its pantheon -- until what was left was so essential, it could communicate with a gesture and be understood.

Reading Herriman is a subtle thing. He started before the one-two-three-Bang! jokes hit mainstream America and never really took to them. He’s often punch-line free, and his backgrounds -- with that three-dimensional slice of a crescent moon -- can be as funny as the gags. Don’t read “Krazy Kat” because it’s good for you. Read it because it is you, an American being, immigrant-infused, with a light-hearted sense of infinite promise. Herriman’s art, word and line, is so damn deep, so damn wonderful and so damnably us.

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Laurel Maury is a New York-based writer and critic.