The “Truth” About Krazy Kat? by H. Lee Parten
January 2, 2015 at 11:26pm
“Four-Color Brick Brutality,” by Hourthirteen
The original Herriman panel
I oil paint from time to time – scifi themes, classic art forgeries, land]scapes, etc. Some of these I have on my wall in my bedroom..I was in bed this morning just starering at the pictures on my walls, particularly my latest painting, Ignatz Mouse beaning Krazy Kat with a brick. And then I started looking at it metaphorically…and I realized: My God! The picture if full of sex! Look at the two pictures here, one is the original art and one is my painting. I duplicated the panel almost exactly, except I changed the sound effect of the brick hitting Krazy’s head, and slightly curved the horizon a little more than it is in the original. The colors are based on the coloring used in the Sunday comics, and the setting is a flat, dessert-like Arizona, with a few towering rocks and mesas.
So look at it…See the phallic symbol? The position of the brick? The clouds? Interesting. If you’re only familiar with the limited animation television cartoon of the early 60s, you may not know that Krazy Kat was probably comics first transgender character. That’s right, she was definitely female in the cartoon, but in the strip, Krazy’s sex was malleable – in some strips she was referred to as a “she,” but in others as a “he,” depending on the situation, or seemingly, the whim of George Herriman, the strip’s creator. Either way, Krazy’s personality was consistent; dreamy, poetic, befuddled…the epitome of a “sensitive” type who may not be sure of her/his own identity.
Now what makes it even weirder is that Ignatz is definitely male. (He is shown with a wife and a ratpack of children in several strips.) He doesn’t seem to HATE Krazy Kat, but he rejects her/his total adoration in the most violent way. This is typical behavior of someone repulsed by what they see as an unwanted and “unnatural” interest, which would certainly be applicable to a cat in love with a mouse. Ignatz is also disrespectful to the local law, represented by Offica Pup. Meanwhile, Offica Pup is also male, and he is in love with Krazy, and the strip is ostensibly about Pup’s efforts to stop Ignatz from assaulting Krazy with bricks. Krazy sees Offica Pup’s affection for her/him as simple, almost casual, acquaintance, and never seems to notice the torch the cop carries for her/him.
What does it all mean? Hell if I know. But I’m forming a theory that Herriman’s strip was subversive. It operated on three levels. Some saw and loved it as a simple humor strip, other, slightly more intellectual, (Or at least believed themselves to be so,) admired it for its poetic turns and ethereal qualities…But maybe a third view is possible. To me it depicts the story of a sexually….oh, I hate to use the word “confused”….when maybe another would fit better. Maybe “Krazy Kat and Ignatz Mouse” is a story about the need for tolerance of sexual identity. The three characters constantly reenact their little passion play, with only slight variance, like one continual dream for over 30YEARS, until Herriman’s death in 1944.
Pretty deep for what some, including me, considered a silly little cartoon once upon a time, huh?
On a side note, “Krazy and Ignatz” had racial undertones too. Turns out that although Herriman identified himself as white, his birth certificate says he was “colored,”of mixed races – white and black. It seems Herriman went through more than a little effort to repress his racial identity during his lifetime – this was the 1920s and 1930s America, after all. He let people assume he was Italian, and always wore a hat to hide his “kinky hair.” Certainly this fact of his life bled into his comic more than once. In a few running sequences in the strip, through a convoluted set of events, Krazy’s black fur is dyed white, and it’s the only time Ignatz falls in love with Krazy. On the flip side, once when Ignatz gets covered with black soot, Krazy rejects him. She refers to him as “A lil Eetiopium Mice.” When he looses the soot covering, she loves him again.
Every artist puts some amount of his or herself into their art. We often express part or parts of ourselves in ways they cannot express in any other way. I know from experience. In my very early writings and drawn stories from my pre-teen and teen years, I see my then-repressed homosexuality all over it, to embarrassing levels. So I’m thinking Herriman might have been at least bisexual, if not flat-out gay. Also, being of mixed race, he needed, out of necessity, to not only pass for white, but straight, in a time when being one or the other, or both, could get you lynched. He had a wife and at least one child, but that has never prevented anyone from “straddling the fence,” so to speak, or outright jumping it from time to time.
So there you have my theory. Herriman, either consciously or subconsciously, used his “Krazy Kat and Ignatz Mouse” comic strip to express his hidden secrets and desires.
And that’s how I ended up with a huge, spurting boner in the background of my silly little painting.
See a kouple of “Krazy Kat” cartoons on Youtube here:
Thanks to Wikipedia’s biography of George Herriman for the revelation about his ethnicity, which helped to make this little article even more of a deeper examination than I was originally aiming for: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Herriman#Personal_life
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