The premise is simple: a black cat loves scheming a white mouse who incessantly throws bricks at the cat’s head, which police dog Officer Pupp, secretly harboring a passionate love for the cat, tries to prevent.
George Herriman endlessly plays with the above formula in his
legendary newspaper strip
Krazy Kat
, published from 1913 until his death in 1944. Through his
wit
,
detailed characterization
and visual-verbal creativity
, Herriman introduced even the least comically-inclined to the young medium; Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Pablo Picasso, James Joyce, US President Woodrow Wilson, Jackson Pollock, Charlie Chaplin, Frank Capra, P.G. Wodehouse, Willem de Kooning—all
KK
fans among many others.
It was thanks to media tycoon
William Randolph Hearst
, a confirmed fan who gave Herriman
carte blanche
in his newspapers, that the artist was allowed to freely explore countless absurd and melancholy variations on the theme of unrequited love for years on end. Herriman unabashedly took advantage of this, radically exploring the medium’s potential and pushing all of its formal boundaries; readers had to put up with
surreal, Dadaist sceneries
, a language that whirled slang, neologisms, phonetic spelling, and scholarly references, and diffuse gender roles—making Krazy Kat probably
the first gender-fluid star in comic history
.
This volume presents
all
color stories from 1935–1944
and a
detailed introduction
by comic expert
Alexander Braun
, who illuminates Herriman’s multi-ethnic background and reveals what makes this timeless work of art about a queer cat so extraordinary.