The brick is the medium of their love

Brianna provides a robust argument for shipping Krazy and Ignatz.

What is beautiful about the animal to the human is the animal’s sheer representational quality embodied best in children’s stories and folktales. So many cartoon characters are animals, and the animalic is necessarily illustrative in human language. A question such as one’s favorite animal is revealing of the individual’s personality exactly for these strong punctuated sites of character. A girl with dull brown hair, round glasses, bad posture, and a shy temperament is mousy exactly because she is a concentration of pure mouse wavelengths.

Krazy Kat was an ongoing daily strip produced by cartoonist George Herriman during the first half of the 20th century. Herriman’s strip is populated by idiosyncratic animals: the eponymous Krazy, a black cat; Ignatz, a mouse; and Offissa Pupp, a dog, amongst other characters. At the center of Herriman’s tableau is the love triangle occurring between Krazy, Ignatz, and Offissa Pupp.

Diagram illustrating love triangle among the three major characters in Krazy Kat

The illustration above can be further simplified to:

Krazy <——> Ignatz: Primary heart direction

Krazy <—x—> Offissa Pupp: Secondary love flow

Ignatz <—~—> Offissa Pupp: Tertiary heart arrow

The main love-diagonal occurs between Krazy and Ignatz, in which Krazy’s desire for Ignatz remains impossible. The key drama of Krazy Kat is Ignatz’s casting of a brick at Krazy’s head. The brick, as will be elaborated later, is somewhat of an object in the classic Freudian sense and consequently serves as Krazy’s primordial love vision. For Krazy (and rightly so) the brick is Ignatz’s reciprocation of her desire. The secondary love-diagonal connects Offissa Pupp, a necessary foil to Ignatz’s depravity, to Krazy, who largely seems oblivious to or uninterested in Offissa Pupp’s attraction. Often, Krazy is hostile to Pupp’s intervention in the familiar ritual of Ignatz beaning her head. Many strips end with Offissa Pupp arresting Ignatz and jailing him. The final, and less direct but still generative, love-diagonal aligns Ignatz and Offissa Pupp as Krazy’s ‘ill-suitors.’ Dog and mouse, Pupp and Ignatz, bisect in their representational contrast to the cat and its nature. Cat needs mouse, and dogs are only in sharp relief against a feline background, but dog and mouse only intersect so far as their feline (or anti-feline) interests. Krazy Kat operates on several registers, all frequently parallel to the strip’s provisional plot and slapstick comedy.

The Three Degrees of Krazy Kat

The first, and most self-reflexive, degree through which to access Krazy Kat is the role of distance in making art that posits an aesthetic relation between an artist, his autobiography, and his art. In his essay on drama “The Crisis in the Life of an Actress”, originally published as an article in a Danish newspaper, Kierkegaard tracks the developing career of a young actress Frau Heiberg. In her youth, Heiberg is renowned for her beauty, however these qualities fade or become less pronounced the older she gets. Despite losing her storied youth, Heiberg maintains an indelible actress. One of the Heiberg’s most notable roles, as illustrated by “Crisis”, is that of Shakespeare’s Juliet. Central to Kierkegaard’s argument is the idea of aesthetic distance, or put another way, the selfsame qualities that correlate in both an artist or author and her artistic production. For Kierkegaard, a then-seventeen year old actress’ portrayal of Juliet would be incapacious in so far as youthfulness is still within reach. Heiberg, at the time of Kierkegaard’s essay thirty-one years old, and her de-neoteny, paradoxically allow her to present a faithful portrayal of Juliet at seventeen. Lastly, I’d like to note that that Kierkegaard describes Heiberg’s acting prowess in relation to the dialectical, wherein time is the dialectic that suspends the actress in its diaphonous fluid. There is no past, therefore no looking back; there is only now, and what is to come. Counterintuitively, the time-dialectic central to, as Kierkegaard puts it, the “mature” portrayal of Juliet by Heiberg is only possible in so far as Heiberg has to return to girlhood, and reprise herself. Simultaneously, in her distanced portrayal of an adolescent, Heiberg gains the “reflective” qualities only age can bestow. Aesthetic distance allows the reader to estimate the capacity of the second and third degrees or registers in their efficacy to produce understanding of Herriman’s artistic intentions in Krazy Kat. Don’t look back, it is where you’re going.

The second register with which to access Herriman’s hermetic strip is an emergent identity politic, which comes about via commentators connecting Krazy and her literal (and subsequently racial) blackness to Herriman’s own mixed-race ancestry. This is not baseless; the argot of the strip, characterised by lyrical speech and misprision, that is so central to Krazy Kat, bares semantic and formal resemblances to the very Creole Herriman would grow up speaking in his native New Orleans. It logically follows that a racial politic is mappable onto Herriman’s strip vis-a-vis his (auto)biography, yet criticism rarely surfaces a comparable gender politic. This linking of Herriman’s contested racialization and Krazy’s formal qualities in Krazy Kat is perhaps more popular to critics solely on the basis of what is verifiable about Herriman’s life. People are less interested and less likely to suppose that he could be a girl because there are no surviving documents that point to the cartoonist’s hypothetical gender deviance. If there is parity between Herriman’s and Krazy’s racialization, why not also speculate on a gender politic rooted in Herriman’s ‘autobio’ as well? In any case, gender appears in Krazy Kat as an oft-toggled state, with Krazy liable to be girl or boy depending on the day, some classic reference to the complimentary yin-yang parody that is the binarist nature of sex.

Before diving into the third register of Herriman’s strip, I’d like to speculate briefly on and provide connections between the lenses of interpretation we’ve already discussed. Krazy Kat is an object of aesthetic distance endemic to the slapstick play that unfolds across black and white daily and later beginning in 1916, full color weeklies on Sundays. It’s also worth noting that Herriman’s Sunday pages are the most widely publicized and critically received. Fans on Reddit and Internet forums alike have speculated why Herriman’s reprinters, particularly Fantagraphics, do not release more collections of Krazy Kat dailies. While its easy to conclude that quality (the Sunday pages are considered the most artistic) and length (Krazy Kat ran for over thirty years until Herriman’s death) are the chief motivations for publishing decisions therein, is there not more to the Krazy Kat dailies than as a mere waste product of the oft-collected Sundays? In truth, there is some opposition to the commercial aspect of cartooning here, where dailies fulfill demands and workloads. More interesting to me however, is a necessary linking of the diaristic output of cartoon dailies and their linking of the diary to the commercial and the public, as opposed to associating what is memoiristic to the interior and the private. Herriman’s desaturated and Manichean dailies introduce a third degree of Krazy Kat: the psychological or cathetic dimension. A cathetic view of Herriman’s newspaper cartoon strip posits an answer to the problem of, well, the multiple lenses of interpretation, or “registers” with which a Krazy Kat reader may enjoy it.

Though both find currency in Freud’s early contributions to the field of psychology, and sound uncannily similar, the cathetic is the opposite of the cathartic. Catharsis is more readily associated with the artistic process, conjuring an image of an anguished artist engaging in something between neurotic revenge fantasies and maladaptive daydreaming. The Greek root word katharos means ‘pure’ or ‘spotless.’ Seemingly, we can say that expression is the property of the cathartic: emotions are expelled. But is artistic creation necessarily always cathartic? A cathetic view of artmaking cuts to the punch: there’s something diachronic in artistic expression, if catharsis is purgation and the artist must enjoy a long career, then is she ever really clean? Playing in her own dirt, the artist’s expulsion of negative and otherwise antisocial emotion must also cathect in the symbolic process that joins the art object to its maker.

Catharsis is the opposite movement of cathexis, wherein energy becomes attached to an object. Inevitably the concentration of energy within a particular idea, object, or person, denoting cathexis, lands us squarely in the realm of the symbolic. For Freud, cathexis allows the body to be a signifier. It’s hard to overstate the importance of Freud’s revelations: the genesis of cathexis cleanly escapes the mind-body problem, wherein bodies can express psychological symptoms in a process known as conversion hysteria. Cathexis and catharsis are homeostatic doubles, and proceed in order of appearance.

Dailies and weeklies, cathexis and catharsis

I’m going to risk a tangential departure and harp again on the historical reception of Krazy Kat and its discontents. While Herriman’s oeuvre is highly lauded, I’ve equally heard from cartoonists and connoisseurs alike that the strip is illogical and not really funny. True, the environment of Coconino County is constantly shifting, the Lays chip moon the residents’ only North Star. This allows Herriman increased formal invention in the execution of the weeklies, imbuing the classic anti-populist confusion innate to the avant-garde. It’s complicated. The deliberate misspelling and misprision adds another strata to trying to ‘get’ Krazy Kat. Herriman’s scratchy ink imparts a visual density as counterpoint to the more straightforward and commercial dailies. Simultaneously, large swathes of color interrupt a usually hermetic scratch from Herriman’s pen, but are largely considered more formally inventive and opaque in content than the dailies.

Thinking more on the cathetic and the formalism of the daily comic strip, the seeming ‘resort’ to inked perfection and simple gag lines in weekday strips actually allows for more flexibility in form than popularly conceived. A daily comic strip is the Sunday weekly worn inside-out, fruitful for formal invention in that it allows for the least expressive, and therefore cathetic, output.

If the brick mediates Krazy and Ignatz, acting as reciprocal desire for cat and mouse, then cartooning can be said to mediate the book-as-sequential-form (or the medium called sequential art; for me, this includes anywhere from Muybridge to cel animation to the procession of moving images or film), allowing for continuous reciprocity, and inevitably cathecting, of the artistic self. This usually resembles the inversion of catharsis wherein art objects are not merely expressions of traumatic and otherwise influential events in an individual’s life, but also re-attach and re-stage the original trauma by conceptually and formally embedding said trauma into the art object. The wound is opening again and again. Art is not (or just cathartic); art is non-healing. Fuck it, bandages off!

In this sense, Herriman’s dailies are anti-expressive and revisit the site of the original wound. These are the doomsday prepper plans, the manifestation of repression, that must necessarily occur before the expressive, and in comparison, utopic weeklies. The gorgeous sounding board of a perverted interiority, the dailies reverberate in the continuous cycling of psychic energy, culminating in and expressed by the idealistic, saturated, and resolutely more pictorial colored vision of the weeklies. Pro-expressive, the Sunday strips conclude the week (if we both agree that Monday marks the start of the week despite the tired and dusty Gregorian calendar) and mark the end of a cycle. Anti-expressive, the commercial tradition of the daily comic strip seeks a twin flame. The polyphonic layouts of the Krazy Kat weeklies compliment the relatively ascetic compositions of the dailies. The strength of the dailies, despite public reception that they are less artistic than the weeklies, is that they are so limited. Think of a divination system: there are set constraints (such as 64 hexagrams in the I-Ching or 78 cards in the Rider-Waite tarot deck), but within these outwardly narrow conditions great variation occurs. Like the lucky 777 of the slot machine or the 2:22 A.m. of a digital clock, arrangement and order (like the straightforward panel sequences of Herriman’s dailies) precipitate meaning.

Case Studies

Despite their denied brilliance and poor public reception, I will now turn to a few of early Krazy Kat dailies.

January 6th, 1918

In this daily from 1918 where our hero Krazy, and her paramour Ignatz, are pictured sitting at a table, Krazy poses an interrogative question: “Why is ‘lenguage’ Ignatz?” Ignatz rejoins with “‘Language’ is that we may understand one another.” I fixate on this first panel because of the curious structures it propagates. One is the architecture of the sentence: The first line of dialogue appears to be an interrogative clause. Krazy poses a question and expects an answer. Yet, by the fifth panel we learn that she has her own conclusions about the nature of language, perhaps rendering her initial question to be rhetorical or an indirect speech act, in nature. The strip’s punchline, “Then, I would say, ‘lenguage’ is, that we may mis-unda-stand each udda.” Another structure that occurs is the mirroring of the first with the fifth and final panel. The first panel seems to provide the answer to Krazy’s question, but as the punchline reveals, the meaning of language itself is arrested, and is only “resolved” in the final panel. The strip is additionally anti-expressive in the sense that belies a clean resolution in the dilemma posed by the functionality of language in (human) consciousness and sociality. Additionally, the five horizontally arranged panels allow for a subversive rhythm. Visually, this splits this daily in two, but also follows the syntactical arrangement of a joke. We have the set-up in the form of the interrogative Wh-question posed by Krazy as the first line of dialogue in the strip, the import and comedic possibilities of the cat’s query almost thoroughly exhausted after Ignatz rhetorically answers Krazy’s second interrogative clause of the strip with a “Yes, that’s so.” The middle, or third panel then serves as the conflict in the anatomy of the gag, escalating the discursive potential of Krazy’s question about language. This is again, best embodied by the clause that introduces Ignatz’s first reply, which I’ll simply reduce to the simple koan of “language is”. More mirrored images, doubles and twins: the fourth panel again reverses the dynamics of Krazy’s question in the third panel: “Can you unda-stend a Finn, Leplender, or an Oshkosher, huh?” When we do arrive at an almost post-coital punchline (see the discussion of Krazy and Ignatz’s affair above), we find Ignatz vexed, illustrated by the nonsense punctuational nonsense glyphs that float above his head.

Dailies precede graphic novels in order of mass-consumption, as newspapers are so cheap, the book-form so complicated and cathartic, the cartoon daily cathetic but simple. Dailies appear vestigial as bound printed matter has prevailed, like garments with no seams. It’s also inevitably a better value for a consumer; the expressive potentiality of the comics medium is easily held and compact in a single object as opposed to endless journalist origami. The modern comics consumer is a snob, but a highly domesticated one, preferring the pretension of the book to the vulgarity of the single page. Nevertheless, let’s present another daily strip from Herriman during Krazy Kat’s run.

Date unknown

Dates unknown (a part of the same daily strip; panels 1,2, and 3 depicted in sequential order)

The two sets of panels above return us to the racial register of Herriman’s comics, but also shed light on Krazy Kat as an aesthetically distanced project. The strip is almost straightforward in both form and content; Krazy is black, Ignatz is white, and the two switch complexions to the presumed bemusement of the dog-painter in the first panel of the daily. This can easily be likened to the phenomenon of racial passing and Herriman’s mixed-race ancestry. Something unravels, however, in the audience of this big transracial joke: the painter. The dog-painter is a classic portrait, perhaps even a “study” of a bohemian artist, beret included. The first panel of the daily is landscape in orientation, capturing a wide shot of a rarely chummy Krazy and Ignatz on a log, somewhere in Coconino County. The dog-painter seemingly stumbles upon this scene and is convinced that the scene before him will produce a black-and-white study. Unless you’re a Dutch master, studies are the ugly stepchildren of an artist’s oeuvre, incomplete as a work in its preparatory disposition. Ignatz underscores this point after Krazy observes that she and Ignatz are the subjects of the black-and-white study, calling the dog-painter a ‘wimwam’. To be a study is to never really be done, eclipsed by the artistic success of the finished work. Insulted, Krazy and Ignatz thus devise to deceive the canine painter by magically switching to each other’s complexions. The dog problematizes the familiar black-white binary in US race relations in the sense that he remains unracialized. Representative of the artist position, the dog’s opening line is punctuated by affected ‘oho’s, rendering a scene that can be neatly mapped onto a historiography of modernism and colonialism. Proto-Picasso that he is, this unnamed dog escapes the perils of (artistic) observation: the claustrophobia invoked by being classified, visually or otherwise. Krazy and Ignatz upend the canine reality, causing a painterly psychosis and a crisis in what the dog knows to be true. As artists, sometimes even our subject matter misbehaves, volatile under the microscope. The scientific and the sentimental both exist in the artist’s gaze, as much as our perception passes for objectivity. The third panel (and the last of this strip I could readily access through the Internet) displays the complementarity of race. Ignatz’s change is the most dramatic, the whites of his eyes hilariously contrasting his now dark skintone, a caricatured and exaggerated relief found in the increased codification of blackface into American entertainment. Krazy and Ignatz insist upon not being studies, but masterpieces that prevent a straightforward analytic on the racial Other. Duboisian double consciousness could only become more perverted in subsequent dailies.

January 31st, 1938

February 1st, 1938

February 2nd, 1938

These Krazy Kat dailies, occurring from January 31st to February 2nd, 1938, play with the ideas of twins and triplets. The ‘twins’, or the double versions of Krazy, Ignatz, and Offissa Pupp that appear throughout, present a fascinating psychological structure, wherein the Other is always coterminous with the Self. But in the final panel of the Krazy Kat strip from February 2nd, 1938, we see a tertiary multiplication of Ignatz’s form, with three Ignatzes resisting arrest from the now twinned Offissa Pupp. Ignatz appears like a Hindu deity, three-headed and three-armed, alluding to his immense power. Krazy is somewhat of the straight man in this series of dailies, as she is the only character in this sequence who remains as an individual, despite these strips riffing on her twoness, two sides of the same coin raced and gendered. But what I’m most interested in the cathetic and social dimensions of these dailies, and so the previous sentence serves as my final note on Krazy Kat’s identity politic.

Returning to Freudian cathexis and the explicit love triangle of Krazy, Ignatz, and Offissa Pupp, we can identify a series of love objects from our main cast. Ignatz as Krazy’s love-object, Krazy as Ignatz’s love-object, mediated by the brick, and Krazy as Offissa Pupp’s love-object. The love-object, be it Krazy or Ignatz (Offissa Pup, an unfortunate incel whose psychic energy cathects in the object of him upholding the law), is the target of cathexis. Krazy, Ignatz, and Offissa Pupp are holographic distillations of psychological archetypes. Krazy is virtuous, Ignatz is sinful, and Offissa Pupp is rules and order. We can think of Krazy as the Ego, Ignatz as the Id, and Offissa Pupp as the Superego, reflecting Freud’s tripartite organization of the mind. I want to suspend this interpretation, however, because I think this division of Krazy Kat’s characters into the three parts of the psyche would deny that Krazy and Ignatz’s affair is mutual. Ultimately, positing that Krazy Kat’s is analogous to Freud’s structural model of the human mind defaults to Krazy being conscious and her love for Ignatz merely a sublimated desire, our rodent antagonist becoming unconscious pigment in the attempt to paint Krazy Kat as the human mind. I am undoubtedly a Krazy-Ignatz shipper as evidenced by this writing, so I am undoubtedly aware that Ignatz has a wife and kids. Krazy and Ignatz’s love is impossible due to the mores of Coconino County society and their illicit affair, embodied by the brick (oh, the phallocentrism contained here!), only occurs under the guise of Ignatz’s perceived transgression. Offissa Pupp believes Ignatz’s “beaning” of Krazy with the brick is merely the mouse’s antisocial impulses, and sees himself as Krazy’s hero. Like sexual euphemisms or the references to alcohol and marijuana found in early 20th century American popular music, Krazy and Ignatz’s love must remain coded in the language of the law. Perhaps none of this psychological nonsense is really necessary. After all, of mice and men, neither know what they want.

December 3rd, 1938

Krazy Kat debuts on October 28th, 1913. A Scorpio sun and Libra moon, the independent comic strip comprises just more than half of its cartoonist George Herriman’s life by the time he passes on April 25th, 1944. Krazy Kat consists of daily and weekly comic strips, the latter being much more labor-intensive. On Sundays, Herriman’s artistic abilities and experimentation are on full display, resulting in erratic and mercurial Southwest landscapes and delicious verbal foreplay among Krazy Kat’s vibrant cast. My focus on dailies as opposed to weeklies isn’t intended to get you to believe the daily strips were artistically superior to the Sunday weeklies meticulously penned and colored by Herriman. I merely present my Krazy theism as a testament to the independent cartoon strip’s enduring relevance. The multiple registers of Krazy Kat, including the racial, aesthetic, and psychological presents the then-ongoing newspaper comic as replete with self-reflexivity, creating an almost biological organization of sense and perception with which to read Krazy Kat.

The strip above, dating from December 3rd, 1943, captures Herriman at his most laconic and terse, months before his death. It embodies Krazy Kat at its best: the depiction of cosmic balances concentrated in the story of a cat in love with a mouse. Krazy rightfully deems heliocentrism in her plain, pithy language. No sunset in Coconino County is the same, the individuation of that day’s twilight affecting a reflective mood in this protagonist. The sun diffuses soft light over the arid environs of Coconino, inspiring Krazy to exclaim an unnecessarily hyphenated and necessarily doubled “Twi-light.” A subtle darkening in the second panel shows Krazy in a relaxed, meditative state. In the following panel, she opens her eyes, and though the halftone submerging the previous panel has lifted, it seems only to serve as visual emphasis for final panel. Completely obscured except for her pupils and the whites of her eyes, Krazy declares “Twi-dark.” Light and shadow crystallize as Herriman’s characteristic absurdist humor in the final panel, but it is the third panel that is most interesting to me. Before saying “Twi-dark”, Krazy appears in an inverted halo of light, centered in the individual panel. Towards the bottom of the frame is a four-sided shape demarcated into various squares and rectangles intersecting at right angles. The sun and the moon are seemingly referenced in the shape at the base of the panel, as indicated by the circular shapes and enclosing ring of white around the black center. Herriman captures the transition from light to dark, the too-jotted-to-be-true abstraction of passing time culminating in the final panel’s inky space.

June 25th, 1944

Herriman passes away on April 25th, 1944. The final strip of Krazy Kat appears two months later, outliving its creator. On June 25th 1944, we last glimpse Krazy afloat at sea, unsure if this occurs before or after Offissa Pupp has rescued Krazy from the body of water where she seemingly almost drowns. The high-contrast palette of the panels evokes eclipse season, casting odd shadows on the flat plane of desert sand. This portends change and transformation. Cathexis and catharsis catch a vibe together. Once expressed, energy doesn’t truly die.