The Divine Comicy

Whenever you get together a bunch of comics eggheads, if such a thing is possible, you will no doubt get the consensus that "Krazy Kat" was the ultimate comic strip. This comes from its simple theme, revisited constantly over the course of some 30 years, of the poetry of life. Krazy Kat featured three main players: The Kat, who loved the mouse; the dog (Offissa Pupp), who loved the cat; and the mouse (Ignatz) who loved himself; and never the trey shall meet. The mouse took no better joy in anything but lobbing a brick at the cat, and the cat took no more joy than receiving the brick, for that was testimony that the mouse was thinking of him ("him," we think; it was never quite certain.) This look at the fickle nature of being was reflected as well in the surreal backdrops in the background and ground-breaking graphic design of the Sunday pages.

The strip was drawn by George Herriman, who had all the typical newspaper credentials going in. He was born in Louisiana and was thought to have some African ancestry, which no doubt made life difficult in that enlightened state in the post-Reconstruction world, so his family moved to California when he was still a toddler. The landscapes of the desert southwest inspired Herriman and were the models of some of the bizarre formations that appeared in his drawings. Krazy Kat developed out of a kind of footnote to another strip, "The Family Upstairs," in 1910 and survived until Herriman's death in 1944, largely because William Randolph Hearst ("Citizen Kane") loved it.