Greetings to our old friends at PencilPanelPage, and our new friends at Hooded Utilitarian! We are thrilled that Hooded Utilitarian has agreed to host our comics criticism blog (celebrating two years on the interwebs this autumn), and look forward to your responses to our posts (which, for our new readers, are always framed as questions that are meant to engage you, provoke you, and otherwise prod you into thinking with us about all things comics). We have no distinct agenda, and pose questions that are as likely to be about comics structure, form and technique as they are about content, authorship, or reader reception. Please visit our archive (PencilPanelPage.com) to access earlier posts and comments; you’ll read some interesting pieces, and you’ll get a better sense of our approach and predilections.
Now, let’s begin our promised Krazy Kat foray! This is the first of our five-part roundtable on George Herriman’s seminal comic strip. For the next five weeks, we’ll invite you to join us in re-assessing Herriman’s accomplishment now that Fantagraphics has issued the final volume in its stunning Krazy and Ignatz complete set. I don’t think anyone has gotten his/her head around what it means to have all these strips available to us now in high production-value collections, but there’s no question that Herriman, if he wasn’t already a pulsing blip on your radar, is now a meteor coming at us full-speed. We’ll be interested to hear your responses over the next few weeks; just what does the eternal triangle of Krazy Kat, Ignatz Mouse and Offissa Pupp mean to you? Color or black and white, Sunday or not; is Herriman our great under-appreciated forefather? How does our unprecedented access, via the Fantagraphics republications, to hundreds of Krazy Kat strips alter our sense of the comics canon—its seminal works, its stylistic trajectories, its history and its future?
Here’s what I am thinking about:
In his 1919 essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T.S. Eliot suggested that masterworks fundamentally alter the chain of related works that precede (and, by extension, follow) them:
No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead….[W]hat happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. (Section I, Paragraph 4)
Overlaying a mathematical framework onto this argument helps, I think, so let’s explore Eliot’s assertion as a mathematical postulate. This is not just to say that a new addition to the canon {let T= tradition, or the set of previous masterworks in a given artistic tradition} augments the size or total number of works {T+1}; Eliot seems to suggest that the very properties of T (and thus, by extension, each element of set T, or each of the previous masterworks contained in the set) are fundamentally altered by the new addition. If Herriman’s work is substantial enough—innovative, alert to the unique affordances of the medium, intelligent, taut with momentum—and I do think it is, then a careful, extensive, reading of Krazy Kat ought to change our very perceptions of the comics medium itself, as well as our interpretation of other works in the canon (insert your beloveds here). If I had more space and more time, I’d explore the ways Herriman’s long-running, palimpsestic strip alters my perception of other strips from the early 20th century, but also the ways it changes my perception of newer works, including those that are similarly experimental (in both form and content). If I really had time, I’d want to mount a full-on linguistic study of Krazy Kat’s diction, for never have I seen more virtuoso movement up and down the register scale (informal to formal and back down again), code-switching, regional/literary/archaic/contemporary dialect streaming from the mouths of a gender-bending cat, a dogged pup, and a brick-slinging mouse. I really wanted to do this when I read Ng Suat Tong’s comment on the paucity of true linguistic analysis of comics in his recent (November 4, 2013) post, “Comics Criticism: Even Comics Critics don’t Care about it” on this very site (Hooded Utilitarian): “It’s been some time since I read a detailed analysis of the actual language (structure, style, grammar, whatever) of a literary comic. It might be that these critics don’t often get the chance considering the language skills of most cartoonists.” Herriman is definitely not “most cartoonists!”
What I do have a little more space and time for is a wee study of space in a single Krazy Kat strip, dated January 28, 1922. This one strip seems to me to be the Krazy Kat world in miniature—a near-perfect example of Herriman’s pictorial and linguistic talents. It is pictured in its entirety at the top of this post, of course, but let’s break the page down a little to examine its notable components:
The top panel takes the space of three panels, offering a rectangular capture of all three of our main characters outside at night, separate but absolutely fixated on each other. Krazy sits on the left, thinking of Ignatz, Offissa Pupp is in the center, body angled toward his beloved, Krazy, but his gaze is directed at Ignatz on our right (“I’ve got me eye on you…..bum”). Ignatz peers out of his adobe window, right back at Offissa Pupp: “And a ugly eye it is, too” (a little floating meta-speech bubble to the side stage directs: spoken softly ). Together they stand, separate but connected.
In the center of the page, distinctly forming a unit, the next group of panels (six panels, most borderless with simple white backdrops representing the interior of Ignatz’ house plus one exterior shot with borders) depicts Ignatz’ clever engagement of a local gopher to aid him in bricking Krazy despite the above-ground obstacle of Offissa Pupp who blocks him. Connecting the top panel to this set is a small overlay (see top panel above) that offers this interesting meta-comment:Now, let’s (circle) this (triangle).
I think this is delightful. Not only is space manipulated panel-to-panel, above-ground to below-ground, and as movement of points along a line (Ignatz begins to move from his right-side position to the left), but Herriman also works with borderless panels, carved out groups of panels that form separate scenes, overlay panels, AND the inclusion of meta-references to shape-change that really signal directional shifts in the chasing (who is chasing whom in which direction?).
The final set of panels, as you can see, includes a road shaped according to perspective, a tunneling gopher with Ignatz in tow (moving him right to left unseen by Officer Pupp above ground) in a panel that ends just shy of the right margin, and allows the lowest panel –a landscape– to bleed upward.Maybe this is a reach, but it also seems that the tunneling panel (middle, last row) effectively takes Officer Pupp’s “space” if you follow the spatial logic of the top panel (despite the fact that smaller versions of Pupp appear in that panel and the right edge of the landscape panel). Ignatz has triumphed, but as usual, all three characters have had their anxiety relieved via this act (Krazy has had her/his desired bricking, Offissa Pupp believes he is vigilant, and Ignatz is—at least for the moment—sated).
This single compressed scene is extraordinary in that it is the perfect synecdoche for the strip as a whole, and because it showcases Herriman’s ability to stretch three-dimensional space (in both its physical and psychological permutations) across a two-dimensional frame. If this doesn’t exploit the particular affordance of the comics medium, I don’t know what does.
Now, your thoughts on Krazy Kat! Plus, tune in next week for another installment of our Krazy Kat roundtable.
Hey Adrielle! Welcome to HU!
I love that T.S. Eliot essay, in all its fuddy-duddy reactionariness. I don’t know a ton about Krazy Kat, but looking at this panel and thinking about Eliot I’m wondering how exactly KK has reshaped the comics canon, or where the influence is exactly in contemporary comics. Chris Ware seems like the most obvious answer; I’d always thought of him as a Winsor McCay guy, but I think you can see some of his schematics maybe in the way Herriman uses space too. Is there anyone else? And is there anyone who seems to be thinking about or using Herriman’s language?
Patrick McDonnell’s Mutts is clearly Krazy influenced. I don’t think it’s very good, but it’s an obvious descendant.
What does it take from Krazy Kat? I don’t know that I’ve even seen it….
Hannah Miodrag’s Comics and Language has a whole chapter on the language of Krazy Kat. Well worth reading.
Noah, regarding Mutts and Krazy, there are countless links countless links, explicit and thematic.
Eric, Mutts is not good now, but I think its first 4-5 years stood among (perhaps “as”) the best newspaper strips, post-Peanuts.
Derik, agreed. One of the more interesting analyses of Herriman I’ve read in years.
Adrielle, I can’t comment on the post now, but I have come to wonder if comics criticism could profit from a moratorium on sentences about Krazy Kat’s extraordinary perfectness.
Peter
Is there anyone who doesn’t like Krazy Kat, ever? Domingos was kind of ambivalent, wasn’t he?
I thought maybe I could be contrarian; I’ve sort of been indifferent when I’ve seen it in the past. But I like this page.
Peter: if you read carefully, you’d see that I did not make the sweeping generalization you suggested I made (i.e. Krazy Kat is perfect). Once, I said this particular page is “near- perfect,” then I used perfect as a modifier for synecdoche, in that this page is an optimal representation of the work as a whole. That is not the same thing as suggesting the entire strip is perfect. Though I’ll grant that hyperbole is annoying in criticism, I’d like you to take note of the particular structures I used.
Mutts seems no worse (or better) now than it ever did to me. It’s always been a beautifully-drawn strip but I can’t say I’ve ever loved it, so I’m not sure that I agree about its place, post-Peanuts as one of the best newspaper strips. I’d rather read Arlo and Janis or ZITS, to be honest. (Though I’m sure I will be pilloried for this heresy!)
Krazy Kat, more than perhaps any other comic strip, seems to resist analysis and attempts to describe what made it great. Even Gilbert Seldes’ early celebration of it (The Krazy Kat That Walks By Himself) suffers from this problem. Simply describing the setup and characters (with the inevitable discussion of Krazy’s fluid gender or its shifting backgrounds and wordplay) never seems quite adequate.
Similarly, the many tributes that it has received from other cartoonists in the form of hommages or other visual references to it seem to fall short. For this reason, I’m on record as strongly disliking Chris Ware’s covers to the Fantagraphics reprints, despite their beautiful execution. Ware’s style is so strong that the covers seem to draw attention to him rather than to Herriman’s creation. Even on the covers where he specifically uses characters from the strip one can spot them as Chris Ware illos from a mile away. I far preferred the more modest panel blowups used in the earlier volumes of the series published in the late eighties by Eclipse/Turtle Island.
I think Noah is right that there really don’t seem to be too many Krazy Kat haters out there. The strip is a bit like the Velvet Underground of comic strips, obscure but beloved in its own time and greatly growing in stature after its demise.
So…reception seems to be on people’s minds, but I”m still curious about your perceptions of the actual strip (style, content, characters, language). Anyone out there a heavy reader of Krazy Kat who has particular insights into the strip? Seems like it inspires distant admiration and hovering more often than it elicits true analysis…
I don’t know…I’m sure other folks have talked about this, but the thing that strikes me is the genderlessness of the characters coupled with the SM aspects of the love affair, with Officer Pup as a disapproving (heteronormative?) law that is there to be subverted/add piquancy.
There have to be queer readings of Krazy Kat, right?
Noah, I’m sorry but to reduce Krazy Kat to readings of this sort just sucks the life out of it for me. I’ve always seen the brick and the gender stuff as simply cartoon logic taken to absurd extremes. Discussing Krazy Kat in terms of gender and BDSM makes about as much sense to me as invoking Elmer Fudd in a discussion of the second amendment and gun rights.
Yeah, I know, mileage, variance, etc.
Huh. See it makes it much more enjoyable to me to think that there’s something going on other than just cartoon characters moving around the page. Slapstick’s fun, but this isn’t really inventive enough or kinetic enough to make it really work just on that level for me. The love/violence/gender issues seem like they’re pretty central and conscious….
Welcome to Adrielle and the PPP crew.
I like the Socratic question format — just be careful not to fall into the trap of the rhetorical question (“Marvel:threat or menace?”), or into the opposite trap of open randomness (“What are the ten most potentially awesome webcomics?”)
The above question seems weird to me.
Krazy Kat was sanctioned as canonical BEFORE there was a comics canon, not by just by Seldes but by Pablo Picasso, Juan Miro, Gertrude Stein, Jean Cocteau — and, not least, by William Randolph Hearst, who so loved KK that he forced it down the throats of reluctant editors.
So I don’t quite get this question, but whatever – school me.
BTW there have been worthy strips inspired by KK. Example Bob Laughlin’s ‘Kitz ‘n Katz’:
http://www.google.fr/imgres?hl=fr&biw=1024&bih=571&tbm=isch&tbnid=bR8lfeH9nko21M:&imgrefurl=http://superitch.com/%3Fm%3D200605%26paged%3D2&docid=99wWiB1CzIMxlM&imgurl=http://arflovers.com/images/content/05_18_06_kk1.jpg&w=450&h=271&ei=bRyFUq3IE-md0QWg1YGADQ&zoom=1&iact=rc&dur=141&page=1&tbnh=142&tbnw=228&start=0&ndsp=18&ved=1t:429,r:13,s:0,i:122&tx=139&ty=118
Also, in France, Nikita Mandryka’s ‘Le Concombre Masquè’:
http://www.google.fr/imgres?hl=fr&biw=1024&bih=571&tbm=isch&tbnid=TIwLzv50-LdAgM:&imgrefurl=http://193.251.82.94/pif-collection/concombre.html&docid=_yitRNAfJfamhM&imgurl=http://193.251.82.94/pif-collection/personnages/concombre_pif21.jpg&w=400&h=272&ei=tBuFUp_TJcSk0QW60oHoDg&zoom=1&iact=hc&vpx=200&vpy=119&dur=2468&hovh=185&hovw=272&tx=166&ty=147&page=4&tbnh=156&tbnw=222&start=69&ndsp=25&ved=1t:429,r:77,s:0,i:320
Noah writes:
Fair enough, but I find that whenever I read any kind of analysis of Krazy Kat, the effect is a bit like someone trying to explain a foreign language pun. Something seems to get lost. This never bothers me with some of the analysis I’ve read of say, Peanuts, but Krazy Kat seems to resist this approach. I do like the “debaffler” sections included in the Krazy and Ignatz reprints however, but the goal there is usually to provide a bit of context rather than analysis per se.
Also, I’m not sure if I would even really identify Krazy Kat’s appeal as primarily slapstick, though John Stanley’s take on it seemed to reduce it to that, though to be fair, his version was presumably more indebted to the various animated cartoon versions of Krazy:
http://stanleystories.blogspot.com/2010/05/more-of-stanleys-krazy-kat-from-issue-5.html
AB writes:
And don’t forget Jack Kerouac, who IIRC gives a shout-out to Krazy Kat in On the Road and who also identified it as a kind of Beat Generation precursor, noting “the glee of America, the honesty of America, its wild and self-believing individuality.” Not sure if I agree with him, but it’s cool to know that he was a fan.
Mutts visually riffs on Krazy Kat and The Katzenjammer Kids… I wonder if there are other early strip influences hidden in there?
Adrienne, I’m looking forward to looking back at this tonight and engaging more directly with your analysis of the language and composition…
But right now I have a question on bringing in the T.S. Elliot quote. I think it’s notable that we’re talking about reprintings of Krazy Kat– reprintings that don’t really resemble their original publication. Krazy impacted the ‘meaning’ of comics in the comics canon ‘what would have been the comics canon up to that point,’ but I think it’s good to pay attention to how this re-presentation of also changes Krazy Kat, and the relationship it used to have with the comic medium, as it used to exist at the origin point of a Western Comics canon.
Mutts takes virtually everything from Krazy. Daniel, if it makes you feel any better, I certainly prefer Zits to Mutts.
I actually think trying to read “all of Krazy” is likely to make you like it less. Its greatness is truly of the “one page at a time” variety. There’s so many clever things going on visually and linguistically that you kind of need to spend time with a page in order to see all of its tricks and traps. Trying to read a whole book of these strips (or multiple books) in a short period of time makes one more inclined to read quickly, to try to finish, to try to read it as a narrative progression, etc., none of which is really doing the strip any favors. I like Krazy a lot, but in small doses.
Noah, when I did a survey of Krazy Kriticism some 5-7 years ago, there wasn’t very much gender/queer stuff, though certainly Krazy’s gender ambiguity were mentioned. My guess, though, is that there is more of that out there now as comics criticism has ramped up in academic circles. I definitely tried to explore that (and the racial elements) in my classes on Krazy. Most interesting to me is how the instability in these “social” areas are reflected by the instability of the settings, backgrounds, etc. of the strip. Everything “behind” the characters is constantly changing and in flux without any rhyme or reason. “Instability” seems to be the watchword of the strip, with the possible exception of the “solidity” of Ignatz’s brick itself. I think M. Thomas Inge talked about the whole strip as a battle between imagination and materiality (Krazy imagines Ignatz loves her, so there is nothing he can physically/materially do to overcome that notion). Inge talks about this, and then that seems to apply to so much of the “comics canon” (to bring things back to the Eliotic realm). Snoopy’s imagination, for instance, vs. Charlie Brown’s “real life” of disappointment and misery. Obviously, Calvin and Hobbes is about the transcendence of the imagination, etc. Even (many/most) superhero comics are all about the “power fantasy” vs. the reality of the disappointing secret identity. Of course imagination vs. reality is such a broad “theme” as to be legible anywhere and in anything. Still, it does seem like a powerful current in Krazy and in the comics canon in general. Things like gender and race then can be considered in that context. Is “gender” simply something we imagine, or is a bedrock reality? The same question might be asked of race, and, in fact, Krazy puts these things in conversation with one another. The earlier discussion about Herriman’s “race” and self-identification also feeds into this. Is there a “truth” to the question of Herriman’s race, or did he “imagine” himself into whiteness, etc. etc. These kinds of things make Krazy a fun strip to think about and talk about (also, the fact that it’s funny).
I agree completely. I own all of the Eclipse/Turtle Island and Fantagraphics Krazy and Ignatz books along with the various daily strip anthologies that have appeared over the years (one volume by a company called “Stinging Monkey”, three volumes by the Pacific Comics Club and Craig Yoe’s anthology of the Tiger Tea storyline, none of which are very good btw, I’m really looking forward to the Fantagraphics series of dailies!) but as you mentioned, I rarely read them in large chunks, as I do with say, my Pogo or Peanuts books.
FWIW, I think Zippy the Pinhead, a strip that I truly love and that is in its own way a kind of spiritual descendent of Krazy, is also best read in small doses.
I tried reading a lot of Krazy Kat (1 month of strips a day) earlier this year and it’s hard going. It really is better as a slow experience, in that respect it actually succeeds admirably at its original method of production.
Yeah…I read a book of Zippys last year around this time, and I can see how this is not really the way to approach them.
By the way, with regard to the particular strip reprinted above, it’s worth mentioning that this was from a brief run of the strip in color running from January 7, 1922 to March 11, 1922 on Saturdays with the black and white Sundays continuing as usual. So during this 10-week period Herriman fans were treated to two full-page Krazy Kat strips per week! Seeing how Herriman adapted to various different formats is a further example of his considerable gifts as a cartoonist. I particularly love how in this early color strip the word balloons of Ignatz and the gopher are transparent when they’re shown in the gopher’s tunnel! Herriman utilized this unconventional approach to word balloons on other occasions and I think it’s a wonderful innovation.
Here’s a good overview of the different formats used:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krazy_Kat#Chronology_of_formats
Krazy Kat remained in black and white until 1935, but by then Herriman was structuring his pages very differently.
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To AB and all,
While we all wait anxiously for Michael Tisserand’s Herriman biography, he has been looking into the ranks of the Krazy Kat fan club, thinning it out in some places. He recently wrote to me:
No news either on Cocteau or Miró (or Duchamp or Chaplin). But, he assures me, that we can still hold hands with de Kooning, Nabokov, and Kerouac (whose reference was in a college-lecture-turned-Playboy-essay on the roots of the Beats).
Peter
Thanks Peter. I could have sworn that Kerouac mentioned it in On the Road too, but I checked an online PDF and didn’t find it.
AB: You’re right about the title as it stands. I was really thinking about what happens when quality reprints bring a long run to us all at once, the way binge-watching Dr. Who these days—moving across years of episodes in the space of a few weeks, let’s say—might alter one’s sense of not only the show, but others like it (differently than it did when one watched it serially over a long period of time). I was wondering whether deep immersion in Krazy Kat in 2013 reconfigures one’s sense of the comics canon (as Kaitlyn alludes to in her subsequent post). Thanks for prodding me on this.
Kaitlyn: Thank you for making that distinction; thinking about the differences between the original presentation and all “re-presentations” seems worthwhile, though I did not do that work. What would you say are the key differences?
Eric b: Maybe I’ll sound like I’m contradicting myself, but I couldn’t agree more. One strip at a time. Slowly.
Daniel Parmenter: And off I go down the format rabbit-hole you’ve dug; this is compelling stuff; thanks!
I haven’t read more than two Krazy and Ignatz books (I have 1931-32 and I borrowed another one ages ago at the library), and I think it’s a spectacular comic. I can agree with the “small doses” sentiment, I think I tend to read about 10-15 strips at a time? I have the same experience with Segar’s Popeye, it takes me time to work through one of the FB Popeye books.
I know why I like Krazy Kat, why I like it a lot. It’s about the simple yet really effective art, it’s about strips having multiple “jokes” throughout the page, sometimes not even having a joke altogether. It’s about poetry in both the words and the pictures.. Eh I’m not so great at articulating why I like things, but at least I tried.
I find with some comics that I just love everything about them. Krazy Kat is that kind of comic. I think about the lettering, the speech bubbles, the backgrounds. I just love it. Look forward to reading more.
Adrielle, my apologies for arriving to your excellent post five days late! Thanks for getting the roundtable off to such a good start. I was at the academic conference that preceded the opening of the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum at OSU. The presentations were terrific, although we could have used a bit of this conversation. Lots of talk about Yellow Kid, but no Krazy. And still, the influence of Herriman’s strip was very apparent – not just on the comics “canon” but on comics criticism.
I think the way that we read and talk about comics is deeply indebted to Herriman’s creative choices. Krazy Kat’s legacy has often been framed as being highly stylistic and based on the distinct aesthetic features that made the strip very aware of the reader’s responsibility to decode its narrative gags. The strip you’ve chosen, for example, includes such a broad range of pictographic language, oddly balanced layout choices, multiple voices, and non-sequiturs. (It’s like a primer in comics criticism 101!)
Yet like a few others mentioned, I struggle to find satisfying ways to describe how and why all the strange pieces fit together and work so well. (I completely agree with Eric that it should be read in “small doses” for great effect.) I especially like the fact that some of the elements of the strip don’t make sense, but that after reading them for a while, Herriman teaches you how to distinguish the parts that deserve more scrutiny than others. (Aaron Kashtan gave a great presentation on Jason Shiga’s comic, MEANWHILE, that brings to mind the work of reading a strip like Krazy Kat.)
Also I love the way the setting randomly changes from a tree to a building when Igntaz looks out the window… I might have to write something about that…..
Adrielle: What a gorgeous inaugural post! I’d love to hear more from you about the “let’s (circle) this (triangle)” meta-comment. It suggests that Herriman was interested in manipulating narrative structures with few units but infinite variation. Since the units involved are essentially desiring subject positions, Krazy Kat might call for a Lacanian reading. (I wouldn’t be the one to do it but someone should). It’s stating the obvious, I suppose, but were there other comics artists so attuned to the narremes they manipulated as minimal units?
Eric B & Noah: I didn’t dig too deep but was surprised to see that there are no sustained queer readings of Krazy Kat out there. People seem to prefer to use a language of androgyny, shifting gender, ambiguity, etc. to describe Kat’s desire but there are more than a few moments where it registers unambiguously as male-male desire. There is also the significant fact that he is referred to as a “kweer kat” in a 1916 episode. The word “queer” is documented as having the added connotation of sexual identity in 1914 in the L.A. Times. This was how a lot of pre-Stonewall literature worked, a kind of open secret or closet. Only readers in the know would have picked up on the specific references to same-sex desire while other readers could choose to take other signs to mean what they need it to mean, etc. Also, I’m not an Americanist, but wasn’t the pre-WWII period in the US a bit more open to sexual diversity? Or at least the period before Hays (?) code? Pre-1934 I think it was.
Interesting article, Mitchell.
As for the discussion here: I think one thing that makes analysis of KRAZY KAT so difficult is that the strip changed quite a bit during its 30-plus run. Sure, essentially it remained the same–the brickthrowing and the love/hate-relationships–but KRAZY KAT of the late 30s is a different strip from that of the late 10s in a number of ways. Thus I think in order to analyze it successfully, one should view the different decades of its run as separate entries. I once read an analysis of KK that was very thought-provoking, but it was obvious that its author had mostly read strips from the 10s-early 20s; many of the suggestions would’ve made less sense if he discussed the later years. For instance, one thing seldom mentioned is that Ignatz’s apparent hatred from Krazy seems to eventually calm down; in the earlier Sundays, he actually encourages harm on the Kat beyond the brick-throwing, being quite satisfied whenever he believes Krazy to have lost all of his/her 9 lives. As a contrast, in a much later Sunday (probably early 40s) when Krazy is apparently disposed to a dangerous situation, Ignatz’ attempts to warn him/her against the danger seems genuine (I don’t recall the exact scenario, though–will try to check it up…). It seems that Ignatz’ hatred became less genuine hatred and more “just the natural order of things” with the years.
I’ve also been looking very much forward to the promised reprints of KK-dailies, though I’m most interested in the dailies of the 30s. Though the KK Sunday-page was a masterpiece from the first installment, I think the daily strip of the early years is more mixed; it’s cute, and well-drawn of course, but often relies on vaudeville-puns and such.
As for MUTTS, I still think it’s good overall, though I agree it’s first years were the best. It tends to become a bit repetitive nowadays, and I’m also worried when a cartoonist begins to spend entire weeks of strips at a time illustrating quotes of famous people. Still, it’s definitely better than most syndicated strips out there.