A dreamlike place called Coconino County
I never knew Krazy Kat was genderfluid, but it’s so. Gabrielle Bellot at the New Yorker has the skinny:
“Krazy Kat,” George Herriman’s exuberant and idiosyncratic newspaper comic, was never broadly popular. From the beginning, though, it found fans among writers and artists. P. G. Wodehouse compared it favorably to Wagner’s “Parsifal”; Jack Kerouac later said it influenced the Beats. The strip ran from 1913 until 1944, the year that Herriman died. It is set in a dreamlike place called Coconino County, where a black cat named Krazy loves a white mouse named Ignatz, who throws bricks at Krazy’s head. Krazy interprets the bricks as “love letters.” Meanwhile, a police-officer dog, Offisa Pup, tries to protect Krazy, with whom he is smitten. The structure of the strip was built on reversals: a cat loves a mouse, a dog protects a feline, and, at a time when anti-miscegenation laws held sway in most of the United States, a black animal yearns for a white one.
Herriman was mixed race but “passed” as white; Krazy Kat plays with racial identity as well as gender.
Krazy’s gender, to the consternation of many readers, was never stable. Herriman would switch the cat’s pronouns every so often, sometimes within a strip; in one, from 1921, Krazy switches gender four times in a single sentence. When Krazy is portrayed as male, the comic becomes the story of one male character openly pining for another—in some touching scenes, the characters even nestle together to sleep. For all his pestering and punishing of Krazy, Ignatz ultimately seems to have a soft spot for the ingenuous cat; when Krazy plants a kiss on a sleeping Ignatz in one daily, Ignatz’s dreams, suddenly visible to the reader, become filled with little cupids and hearts. In two strips from 1915, Krazy wonders aloud “whether to take unto myself a ‘wife’ or a ‘husband.’ ” In a strip from 1922, an owl attempts to find out Krazy’s gender by knocking on the cat’s door and asking if the lady or gentleman of the house is in, only to find that Krazy answers to both titles. At the end of the exchange, Krazy charmingly self-identifies simply as “me.”
Both and neither; simply me.
Some fans of “Krazy Kat” were mystified by all of this. In his autobiography, the director Frank Capra described a conversation he had with Herriman on the subject. “I asked him if Krazy Kat was a he or a she,” he writes. Herriman, Capra tells us, lit his pipe before answering. “I get dozens of letters asking me the same question,” Herriman told Capra. “I don’t know. I fooled around with it once; began to think the Kat is a girl—even drew up some strips with her being pregnant. It wasn’t the Kat any longer; too much concerned with her own problems—like a soap opera. . . . Then I realized Krazy was something like a sprite, an elf,” he continued, according to Capra. “They have no sex. So the Kat can’t be a he or a she. The Kat’s a spirit—a pixie—free to butt into anything.”
Puck and Ariel are like that.
I asked Tisserand if he thought Herriman’s own experience with racial identity and his depiction of gender in the strip were linked. Tisserand pointed me to a 1914 strip, in which Ignatz asks Krazy about sometimes being a “Miss” and sometimes a “Mr.” “It’s a sed story, ‘Ignatz,’ which will move you to a tear,” Krazy says. “When us ladies first got the ‘votes,’ I went to a voting boot to vote. The man said to me, Is you ‘Miss,’ ‘Mrs.,’ or ‘Mr.’? Not to offend him, I said, Any one which you like sir, or all three should you rather have it that way. Well, it’s here my sedness begun,” Krazy concludes. Tisserand said, “Herriman wouldn’t have had that exact experience, but would have, at the age of nineteen, while living in a boarding house at Coney Island, had to choose his own racial designation, for the first time in his life.” Herriman, like Krazy, might have decided “to choose whatever wouldn’t give offense,” Tisserand proposed. In a world that required rigid demarcations, being someone who didn’t fit neatly could feel both dangerous and demeaning.
Broadly speaking, not fitting neatly can be quite a fine thing. Fitting neatly can be terribly limiting. I recommend fitting sloppily.
Kat fans know this. What is less apparent is the way Herriman played with race.
And even in real life, refusing to conform can get you hit with bricks – whether metaphorically or concretely. I never fit in with any group I was part of, and I still tend to live around the edges, because I don’t define myself neatly, and tend to befuddle people who want me to be one thing or another. People often don’t quite know what to make of me. So they define me in their terms, deal with me based on how they define me, and if I’m willing to accept their definition, fine, we can manage. Otherwise, there may be bricks (usually thrown at me, not by me).
I vaguely recognise the cartoon, but haven’t really read it. Fantastic drawing!
Krazy Kat is like mandatory education for anyone’s dabbled with cartoons; hang with people who draw, sooner or later it comes up. And I’ve always loved how completely its own thing it always was.
That elfin thing, I always find it so charming, and that really was part of it, beyond the idiosyncratic art and language. And it’s kinda funny and a measure I think of how deeply entrenched are assumptions about gender that even such a deliberately innocent, guileless character seems strangely, cleverly subversive, doing that. Far more effectively, I kinda suspect, even than in-your-face cross-dressing Bugs Bunny, who, sure, is far less subtly _parodying_ gender roles, deliberately contradicting expectations. Krazy just being Krazy, asking nothing more, and making little more explicit comment on any of it than those occasional oblique, rueful shrugs about ‘sedness’, slips past defenses and assumptions, just by being. And there really is something brilliant about that.
Slapstick, social commentary, surrealism, lyricism, just-so stories–Herriman did them all and more. The strip is as brilliant as narrative as it is as graphic art.
And as graphic art–in b&w, in color, those dreamy Arizona backgrounds shifting from panel to panel–Krazy Kat was nonpareil. For a while Herriman played with the bounds of the form itself, but when the syndicate insisted on uniform boxy panels that would fit neatly into any newspaper’s funny pages, he complied with characteristic modesty.*
* He once turned down a raise offered him personally by Hearst, because he knew his strip was not profitable. (Hearst was a fan.)
http://www.comicstriplibrary.org/images/comics/krazy-kat/krazy-kat-19160423-s.png
We have a real Coconino County here in Arizona. I saw an excellent exhibition of Herriman’s drawings there several years ago.
Lady Mondegreen @ #6 –
Okay, now I’m gonna bawl.
In the early 1990s, the Beau Jest Moving Theater company in Boston produced a two-act play of dialog and lyrics from the original comics.
I found this video of some scenes from the original production. The video gives you some idea, but the experience of being there with an audience was surreal. The “stage” was simply laid on the floor, so there was no fourth wall to break. In the group scenes, you can see Elyse Garfinkel as Ignatz Mouse was impossibly tiny, which totally hooked me into suspending my disbelief of everything else. And her gag at 3:30-3:50 blew our minds!