Krazy & Ignatz 1939-1940: "A Brick Stuffed with Moom-bims" (Krazy and Ignatz)

Ever since that historic event on July 26th, 1910 wherein an unnamed mouse "beaned" an unnamed Kat in George Herriman's "The Dingbat Family," an unlikely unreconcilable love has gone unrequited. Somewhere between then and 1940 the Kat fell in love with the mouse. The mouse, with a slight touch of sadism perhaps, grew more and more to savor the tossing of bricks at the Kat's head. Little by little the Kat's non-verbal cartoon responses to these beanings turned from stars of pain into thick, pulsing hearts of love. An impossible love bloomed, a Krazy love. A love between natural enemies, a Kat and a mouse. This irrational and fundamentally flawed comic love came to resemble that often painful and soul-gorging love that vulnerable human beings can experience. The entire comic soon crytallized that nagging and irrational side of the human experience, that mosquito we can't slap, namely, the horrific fact that we sometimes fall hopelessly in love with that which hates us. With that which can never, and never will, return our pining love. But for some reason we cannot stop loving. We then begin to interpret and hope, foolishly, that specific acts the loved object perpetrates are in fact potential signs that reveal a hidden, perhaps unacknowledged, reciprocal love. In such fuzzy states, our wild human brains sometimes interpret insults and negligence as signs of hope. After all, when logic dissipates, abuse trumps indifference, doesn't it? The human condition can sometimes resemble a hammer to the knees. What's wrong with us?"Krazy Kat," as a work of art, embraces and encapsulates this irrational love. We're not even sure, as longtime readers, whether Krazy is a boy or a girl. Regardless, Krazy continues to love Ignatz unconditionally. Ignatz's singular act of whacking Krazy with bricks metamorphizes into a singular act of love, or so it appears to Krazy's lovesick soul. Ignatz, with a parallel compulsion, loves hurling bricks at Krazy to the point of crazed addiction. Enter the third actor, Offissa Pupp, who patrols Coconino County in the eternal pursuit of sin. Some signs hint that Pupp has eyes for Krazy, so Ignatz's brick tossing arouses the highest contempt within his law-abiding by-the-book being. When caught, Ignatz lands in the ubiquitous jail. But Krazy sighs and romances about the love-brick that bounced off of his/her skull. The law comes inbetween an irrational love. Offissa Pupp thinks he's protecting Krazy from the beast Ignatz, when really he's preventing the one act that Krazy thirsts for day in and day out. Myopic, unknowing law, or, in more general terms, morality, stifles irrational pleasure. This tension never ceases, and it tugs and pulls at our humanity.By 1940, George Herriman had developed this theme to a level that can only be described as poetry. Such depth of personal expression can unfortunately lead to public neglect, and the final years of Krazy Kat saw the comic's swift decline into obscurity. People don't often look to the comics page for insights into human nature. But in the case of "Krazy Kat" they should have. Unfortunately, the comic was so revolutionary that few probably sensed what was happening on those blanket-sized pages bursting with surreal color and shapes. Readers just wanted a few yuks. Not only that, fewer and fewer people had access to the comic as the 1940s emerged. Thus, at its peak, the comic vaporized from public view. Only Herriman's lifetime contract with Hearst kept it alive in less than a handful of newspapers.Fantagraphics has also kept "Krazy Kat" alive by publishing this amazing series. Reproduced in full Krazy Kolor, the full impact of these strips explodes on the senses. The September 8th, 1940 strip provides one major highlight. It includes both the classic "zip... pow" centerpiece and the "Mus' be my 'eggo'" panel across the bottom of the main comic. Throughout the quality remains at the utmost. Ancillary characters also appear, most notably Mimi, the French poodle school teacher, who alters the love theme for a short spell."Krazy Kat" ended with Herriman's death in 1944. Fantagraphics thus has a mere two volumes to publish to complete a series that has never seen a full reprint. Early on, they also promised to return to the beginning and republish the Sunday panels from 1916 to 1924. These were previously published by Eclipse, but the series ended at 1924. If Fantagraphics succeeds in this endeavor, they will have provided a great service to those who can't get enough of one of the best comic strips ever to grace a newspaper. Roll on.

With merely two mute characters and a simple hunter-prey plot, Chuck Jones was able to create a whole bunch of wonderful Road Runner-Coyote cartoons. Decades earlier, with little more in the way of characters or plot, George Herriman was able to write a wonderful comic strip, Krazy Kat. Krazy & Ignatz: A Brick Stuffed With Moon-Bims is the eight collection of Sunday strips from Fantagraphics and covers the years 1939 and 1940.Although occasionally other characters appear, the core of the Krazy Kat strips is a romantic triangle. The title character (supposedly of indeterminate gender, but occasionally referred to as male, as in the 4/23/39 strip) is in love with Ignatz Mouse; Ignatz's view of Krazy is less endearing as he constantly beans the Kat on the head with a brick. To Krazy, such concussive blows are like love letters. Offisa Pupp loves Krazy and is constantly running Ignatz to jail for his crimes. So that is the basic storyline, repeated in many (though not all) of the strips: Ignatz attempts to bean Krazy, and when successful, attempts to elude the police.Admittedly, Krazy Kat is rarely laugh-out-loud funny, but there is plenty of humor. Its power often comes from its wholeheartedly surreal atmosphere in which the landscape is constantly changing and reality itself seems fluid. If you think Marmaduke, B.C., or the Family Circus are the pinnacle of the comic strip art, chances are you will not find Krazy Kat all that entertaining. For those who demand a little more out of their comics than poorly written, crudely drawn recycled dreck, however (and Krazy Kat has a reputation for being one of the best comic strips ever), this volume again offers something really delightful.

As with others in this series, the text is good. Nice stories, but comics aren't very readable when reduced to maybe 25% of their original size. Better that than nothing, but not much.

My comic-book store was a little tardy in getting this to me, not that it really matters when you're talking about a strip as well-aged as "Krazy Kat" was in the first place... Reading these colorful Sunday strips, you'd never guess that the world had been plunged into its worst war during this period. Herriman ultimately did slip a few off-hand references to WWII ("tank" bricks, etc.) into later 40s strips, but the brick-related schemes, alliteration, songs, and strange backgrounds during these dreadful 24 months are pretty much indistinguishable from those seen earlier in the 30s. Editor Bill Blackbeard provides his usual quota of half-insightful, half-doubtful "debafflers" - does he REALLY believe that Herriman's offhand use of the phone number "Coconino 69696" in one strip was a veiled reference to oral sex?? - and Jeet Heer contributes an interesting, albeit poorly proof-read, piece on Herriman's use of color. Essential reading for serious comics scholars.