What If the X-Men Were Black?

Posted on December 16, 2013 by Orion Martin

An edited image from the series X-Men of Color.

“The X-Men are hated, feared and despised collectively by humanity for no other reason than that they are mutants. So what we have here, intended or not, is a book that is about racism, bigotry and prejudice.”
Longtime X-Men writer Chris Claremont

Imagine a work of fiction that focuses on the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s except that in this work, white men have replaced all of the people of color. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X both have white stand-ins and white followers. In fact, almost all of the characters are white men. It may seem bizarre, but this is the X-Men.

The first issue of X-Men was written by Stan Lee and published in 1963. The fictional world, which continues today in the Disney-owned Marvel Universe, featured super-powered teenagers who worked in a group as the X-Men. Unlike other characters that Stan Lee created, these teenagers do not become superheroes through a freak accident, but were instead born with a genetic mutation known as the x-gene that manifests as superpowers (“mutations”) around the time of puberty. They hide their identity as super powered humans for fear that they will be killed by angry mobs.

An image of mob violence from the Stan Lee and Steve Ditko era.

Stan Lee has explained that his main impetus for having the superheroes be mutants was that he wouldn’t have to invent origin stories for every new character. However, he also claims that the comparison to Civil Rights was present from the start. In a recent interview he said, “It not only made them different, but it was a good metaphor for what was happening with the civil rights movement in the country at that time.”
Since the original, largely unpopular episodes written by Stan Lee, dozens of other writers (most of them white men) have built and expanded the world of the X-Men. New characters were added, and the discrimination that mutants like the X-Men face in the Marvel Universe was developed. Over time, the dynamic of the “feared and hated” mutants who nevertheless defend ordinary humans has been used to explore different dynamics of power and privilege*. These include anti-Semitism, racism, and LGBT issues (ableism and sexism, though extremely relevant, are almost never addressed).

Noteworthy X-Men events with social implications include:

—The founding of Genosha, a fictional country where mutants are enslaved – a direct reference to Apartheid.
—A genocide of 16 million mutants.
—The development of a cure for the x-gene mutations, causing a schism in the mutant community.
—The spread of the Legacy Virus, a disease that targeted only mutants. The virus is a clear reference to the AIDS virus and its impact on the LGBT community.

Despite the flexibility of “mutantity” to be a stand in for various aspects of privilege, the Civil Rights movement and racism are topics that come up repeatedly in the X-Men comics and films. Professor X is repeatedly compared to Martin Luther King, and the dream of “peaceful integration.” Magneto, his enemy, advocates for violent mutant revolution and quotes Malcolm X**. Characters in the comic use the fictional slur “mutie” and compare it to racial slurs.

This sequence from God Loves, Man Kills by Chris Claremont shows how Storm and other nonwhite characters are used as props to legitimize the idea that the X-Men are an oppressed minority.

What’s disturbing about the series is that is that all of these issues are played out by a cast of characters dominated by wealthy, straight, cisgender, Christian, able-bodied, white men. The X-Men are the victims of discrimination for their mutant identity, with little or no mention of the huge privileges they enjoy.

Neil Shyminsky argues persuasively that playing out Civil Rights-related struggles with an all white cast allows the white male audience of the comics to appropriate the struggles of marginalized peoples. He concludes that, “While its stated mission is to promote the acceptance of minorities of all kinds, X-Men has not only failed to adequately redress issues of inequality – it actually reinforces inequality.”**

An unedited image from the comics.

I wanted to remix these stories and imagine what they could have been if they had dealt with actual instead of fictional dimensions of privilege. Searching through 50 years of X-Men comics, I selected a half dozen iconic images and scenes relating to discrimination. In these images, I edited the comics so that every mutant had a skin color that was some shade of brown.

In the alternate universe where the all mutants are black, many events in the X-Men history become actual social commentary because they are dealing with real dimensions of power. Reading about black teenagers standing up to a largely white mob is different than reading about white teenagers in the same situation. These images show that when the writers of the X-Men do comment on social issues, the meaning of these comments is hampered and distorted by the translations from reality to fantasy and fantasy back to reality.

Left, the original frames in which Colossus stands up to a mob. Right, the edited version of the same sequence from the project X-Men of Color.

Re-coloring the X-Men so that all mutants are people of color not only makes the themes of discrimination more relevant, it also introduces hundreds of non-white characters who are complex and fully realized. This is something that’s lacking from the current Marvel Universe. Why is Psylocke not only an Asian person of British descent, but also a ninja? Why is Storm not simply a mutant of color, but an African witch-priestess? As comics great Dwayne McDuffie said, “You only had two types of characters available for children. You had the stupid angry brute and the he’s-smart-but-he’s-black characters.” There’s certainly more roles for a non-white characters now than when he said that in 1993, but most super hero comics are written about characters that were invented decades ago. By recoloring the comics, we can grandfather characters into the Marvel Universe who are not defined by their race.

Before and after comparison of Emma Frost.

Simply changing the skin color of the mutants obviously doesn’t address all of the issues around privilege in the Marvel Universe. The visual and narrative sexism that permeates superhero comics remains intact. Some characteristics of white characters also become negative stereotypes when applied to non-white characters. Wolverine is a symbol of wild, untamed, white male power, but when I recolor his skin to imagine him as a person of color, his snarling, predatory aggression reads as a stereotype of wild black men. This is a great demonstration of the way that white male characters are free to inhabit any role, whereas centuries of accumulated stereotypes shape the way we understand people of color in fiction***.

An edited image from the series X-Men of Color.

Promoters of the X-Men have spent years trying to convince audiences that these white characters are tapping into the struggle of black Americans. Strange as the substitution of white men for black activists may seem, it’s not unique. Fantasy universes often comment on social issues through the veil of imaginary prejudices****. My goal is that by looking at these images people will question whether an invented minority is really the best way to understand our country’s history and practice of race-based violence.

You can find a few more images at my website.)

Other resources related to this issue:
More NonSense: No More Mutants by Michael Buntag http://nonsensicalwords.blogspot.com/2010/10/more-nonsense-no-more-mutants.html
We Have The Power To Change MARVEL and DC Comics: Support Diversity, Support Miles! by Jay Deitcher http://www.unleashthefanboy.com/editorial/we-have-the-power-to-change-marvel-and-dc-comics-support-diversity-support-miles/44986

* The most appropriate metaphor for the original Stan Lee comics is probably invisible dimensions of power such as LGBT issues or religion. In the original comics, the X-Men hide their mutations in order to pass as humans (Angel uses belts to strap his wings down under a suit coat). In later generations, some of the mutants are visibly mutated to the point they could never pass as humans.
** Shyminsky also notes that recent generations of X-Men writers have reacted to the politics of appropriation in the series’ history. He cites Grant Morrison’s U-Men as an example.
***I think it’s interesting that the same characteristics that make Wolverine a white male icon are also regressive stereotypes of black men.
****I often think of house-elf slavery in Harry Potter, but it actually starts much earlier:

How does anthropomorphism represent race in Krazy Kat?

Posted on December 12, 2013 by Qiana Whitted

In their essay collection, Thinking about Animals: New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism, editors Lorraine Daston and Gregg Mitman assert that “humans, past and present, hither and yon, think they know how animals think, and they habitually use animals to help them do their own thinking about themselves.” Prompted by the ubiquitous manifestations of anthropomorphism in the arts and sciences, religion and folklore, advertising, and nature documentary filmmaking, the collection’s introduction charts the various psychological, religious, and ethic orientations toward ascribing human behaviors and characteristics to animals and asks: “Has the animal become, like that of the taxidermist’s craft, little more than a human-sculpted object in which the animal’s glass eye merely reflects our own projections?”

The question provides us with an opportunity to linger on the cat and mouse game at the center of George Herriman’s Krazy Kat. We might consider what the comic strip’s premise has inherited from Anansi, Aesop, Brer Rabbit, and other tales of talking animals in its serial run from the First World War to the Second, through Women’s Suffrage, the Great Depression, the New Deal, and the Segregation Era. Or we can reflect on how the strengths and weaknesses of Krazy Kat shape our interpretation of animal characters in the comic art and animation that followed Herriman’s lead. Felix, Mickey, Woody, and Fritz come to mind, but anthropomorphic animals as a trope touch a remarkable number of genres and styles, including titles such as Fables, Mouse Guard, Beasts of Burden, Pride of Bagdad, Bayou, Blacksad, and We3. And of course, given the subject of recent conversations on HU, we might even wonder: if it wasn’t for Krazy Kat, would we even have Art Spiegelman’s Maus?

While the animals of Coconino County engage a range of social identities and historical contexts against the love triangle between Krazy, Ignatz, and Offisa Pup, I’m particularly interested in the way anthropomorphism externalizes race in the comic strip. Daston and Mitman go on to make the point that animals are not merely “a blank screen” in anthropomorphic representation; their own actions and behaviors as animals bring “added value” to human projections. And so Herriman’s decision to undermine the well-known antagonisms between mice, cats, and dogs is meaningful, and not just because of the way the cartoonist endeavored to conceal his own mixed-race identity.

In Krazy Kat, the cat that chases the mouse isn’t driven by food or deadly sport, but by the kind of desire and affinity that is undeterred by species. In order to take part in this desire as readers, we have to accept what Jeet Heer characterizes as “the strange internal logic of the world Herriman created: we never ask why a cat should love a mouse, or a dog love a cat, since it seems natural. And this, perhaps, is where race becomes relevant.” Indeed, the comic strip’s defiance of the “natural order” brings to mind the discredited scientific theories used to superimpose racial categories onto a Great Chain of Being. Herriman’s anthropomorphism may dramatize difference, but not incompatibility and in the process, the comic affirms Krazy as America’s quintessential stray.

Heer points out that Krazy’s blackness becomes more pronounced over time, particularly with the appearance of his blues singing “Uncle Tom” cat. Added to this are several comic strips in which racism and white supremacy serve as the primary target of comedic reversals and impersonations. In one story, Ignatz falls for Krazy after the cat has been drenched in whitewash and the mouse longs for the “beautiful nymph” who is “white as a lily, pure as the driven snow.” Once Krazy washes off the paint, Ignatz’s outrage returns. In another instance, Ignatz tans in the sun and throws a brick at a confused Krazy who angrily responds in kind, saying “Dunt think I’m no ‘Desdamonia’ you Otello.” Krazy’s uncharacteristic behavior seems especially odd in this strip until one considers that he is not actually upset because a black mouse has thrown the brick, but because the brick-thrower is someone other than Ignatz. Certainly the Shakespearean allusion speaks to this tragic tangle of racial and gendered constructs.

Yet while the racial politics in examples like these are more explicit, I find them to be less compelling and somewhat disconnected from the “strange internal logic of the world Herriman created.” (Having discussed Herriman’s Musical Mose elsewhere, I would argue that this comic strip manipulates the concept of racial and ethnic “impussanation” much more effectively in the way that it sets caricatures against one another.) I believe that it is through the anthropomorphic structures of Krazy Kat and not through buckets of whitewash that Herriman achieves his most complex and multi-dimensional engagement with race and other “human-sculpted” realities. What is your take on how race is shaped by the anthropomorphic tropes in Krazy Kat?

What roles might linguistic arbitrariness play in Krazy Kat?

Posted on December 5, 2013 by Frank Bramlett

Welcome to the third post in the Pencil Panel Page roundtable on George Herriman’s Krazy Kat. We are glad to have found a new home here at Hooded Utilitarian, and as Adrielle said in her inaugural post, you should dive into our archives here.

Since there has been some concern expressed on the Hooded Utilitarian site about the state of linguistic analysis, I wish to start my post on Krazy Kat with a note about the linguistic analysis of comics in general. As a linguist, I am most interested in the way that linguistic codes function in comics. I concentrate on the analysis of dialogue using methods borrowed from conversation analysis, primarily but not exclusively to highlight the interrelationship of language and identity. You might take a look at my essay on verbal camp in the Rawhide Kid as an example. But in addition to discourse analysis, and especially for my posts on Pencil Panel Page, I draw broadly on morphology, lexical semantics, dialect and register, as well as principles of bilingual code-switching, among others. Some commenters on Hooded Utilitarian have cited Hannah Miodrag’s book, Comics and Language (2013); Adrielle’s post two weeks ago mentions it. I would also like to note that I edited a collection of essays called Linguistics and the Study of Comics, published by Palgrave in 2012. You can read the table of contents and the introductory chapter here. My understanding is that Neil Cohn has a new book in the works, as well, about visual language. This is a very exciting time to be a linguist and to have interest in comics! And for those of you who are concerned about the dearth of linguistic analysis in comics, never fear! Much more is coming.

And now—on to language and sound in Krazy Kat. The point of Miodrag’s chapter on Herriman is ‘sidelining the visual (and thematic) content in favor of linguistic [in order] to illustrate how comics might truly be approached as literature, and to present a more convincing argument than has previously been achieved for their literary potential’ (p. 21). Some people will agree with Miodrag that comics are literature, and her goals are laudable. But for linguists, the point of a linguistic analysis of comics has very little to do with proving their literary worth. For me, a linguistic analysis demonstrates the nature of comics as comics and their relationship to linguistic systems. The aim is not to use linguistics to measure the nature of comics as literature or architecture or fine art or anything else.

But Miodrag does make some fine points in her discussion of arbitrary minimal units, which are essential in understanding linguistic systems. The arbitrariness of language can be discovered at the phonetic level: with just so many vowels available and a larger but nevertheless limited number of consonants, the tiny phonetic inventory of human speech sounds must necessarily be manipulated to produce vast numbers of unique combinations ranging across more than 6000 languages. (See Ethnologue for more about the world’s linguistic diversity). Depending on the dialect, English has roughly 12 to 14 vowels; other languages have more, others fewer. What this means is that phones cannot have frozen or static or essential functions: their functions are assigned by the speech communities that use them, and those functions always change.

Arbitrariness, of course, may also be illustrated at the morphological, syntactic, and lexical levels. Whether we call it chicken or poultry or fowl, we know that those words refer to a type of bird used around the world for food. Eventually, we’ll call that same bird something else, because languages change and the sign that we use to refer to that type of bird is arbitrary. We could even call it frindle if we wanted to.

Most linguists agree, though, that not every single unit in language is arbitrary. Sometimes, a syntactic form is only semiarbitrary. Consider these two sentences:

(a) We had pizza and beer after we finished our workout at the gym.

(b) After we finished our workout at the gym, we had pizza and beer.

The events here occur in the same order chronologically, but they are reversed syntactically. But in (b), the syntactic order of events mimics the chronological order of events. Workout at the gym comes first, pizza and beer comes next, so the order of (b) is not entirely arbitrary.

I think that the limits of arbitrariness play an important role in Krazy Kat. Like many comics creators, Herriman uses sound effects to provide an auditory element to the page. Many linguists consider human sounds meant to mimic sounds from the environment as semiarbitrary in nature. Even though a rooster says cock-a-doodle-doo in English, says quiquiriquí in Spanish, and says gokogoko in Cantonese—even though these are different phonetic representations—they are not completely arbitrary. They in some sense mimic the acoustic sounds outside the linguistic system.

Herriman’s use of sound effects is fascinating, and a quick survey of the Sunday comics (Fantagraphics, 1916–1918) demonstrates his playfulness and creativity. I’d like to consider one particular sequence when Krazy Kat and Ignatz Mouse switch bodies. In the opening panel of the September 9th strip, we see a Krazy Kat throw a brick and hit an Ignatz Mouse with it:

The sound effect of the brick sailing through the air is Zizz. (Zizz probably because bricks don’t go fap fap fap or sklircha sklircha when they nudge their way through air molecules.) When the brick strikes Ignatz, the sound is Blop!! Naturally, the other characters in the strip are mystified. They simply cannot believe that the mild-mannered, gentle, and kind Krazy has turned the tables on that spiteful bully Ignatz. The mystery is so deep that Herriman takes three Sunday comics to reveal the secret to readers.

In the second installment, on September 16th, the strip opens with a memory. It is an inset of the same event shown on September 9th, with a couple of different details:

This time, when Krazy throws the brick, it says Jazzzz. And when Brick hits Ignatz, the sound is MBOB. There are a few other differences, too, like Krazy’s stance and the absence of speech on 16 September. (In both scenes, Krazy throws the brick from right to left: see Roy Cook’s earlier post about this.)

In the third installment, on Sunday 23 September, Herriman solves the mystery and puts Krazy and Ignatz back in their proper roles. In scene 12, we witness (the real) Ignatz throwing a rock at (the real) Krazy. The sound of the rock sailing through the air is Jazz, and the rock strikes Krazy with a Pap. The anomalous characters and actions have been resolved, and all is right with the world again.

Miodrag is right when she argues that Herriman pushes the boundaries of the standard English linguistic system by making full use of the arbitariness of minimal units. The same can be said for his sound effects. But not all of Herriman’s sound effects push the boundaries of the units. He often uses a standard(?) pow or bop or bam or zip, but his tool kit is wide-ranging. Herriman’s use of sound effects is highly creative. Just as he plays with arbitrary minimal units in creating the linguistic repertoire of characters, he also plays with the representation of nonlinguistic sound. Of course in Krazy Kat, bricks don’t always make sounds when they fly through the air or hit someone on the head. And at times, even on the same page, the sound effects for the same action are variable:

Ignatz throws a brick (from right to left), and the sound effect is Zib. Later, on this very same page, the sound effect for a similar action is Bzip.

My main question on arbitrariness has to do with the sound jazz. Unlike bam or fwip, jazz is a word that has standing in other areas or domains of English. Its precise etymology is unclear, but early uses of the word associate it with such activities as baseball. (The American Dialect Society voted it the Word of the Century in 2000.) Nowadays, it is most often associated with an important musical genre. I believe Herriman uses jazz as the sound of an object whizzing through the air not because of its arbitrariness but because of its multiple meanings. Herriman plays with these multiple meanings—the arbitrary ones—that jazz contains and brings them to bear on the semiarbitrary representation of enivronmental sound in comics. Maybe the relationship between Krazy and Ignatz needs something more than a regular old sound effect, and Herriman uses jazz as a way to give their relationship a little something extra. Maybe the sound of the brick is more than physically acoustic: maybe it’s music to their ears.

Earlier comments on our Krazy Kat roundtable express the sense that Herriman’s comic is best read slowly, in small doses. A slow reading allows us to savor the visual and the verbal, but we also get to revel in the playful, almost-but-not-quite arbitrary representation of acoustics. As much arbitrariness as we sometimes see in the language and behaviors of Krazy Kat characters, as well as the background scenes, we know that Herriman doesn’t go too far afield lest he lose the reader in a fog of inscrutability. But Herriman does make his readers work for it, and as a result of this slow, sumptuous reading, we are very richly rewarded.

A Picture of Krazy Kat

Posted on November 22, 2013 by Noah Berlatsky

Last week Eric Berlatsky (that’s my brother!) left a comment on the PPP Krazy Kat roundtable in which he argued that one of the hallmarks of the strip is the way that settings and backgrounds are so unstable. “Everything “behind” the characters is constantly changing and in flux without any rhyme or reason,” he says. ” “Instability” seems to be the watchword of the strip, with the possible exception of the “solidity” of Ignatz’s brick itself.”

Eric talks about this in regards to the strips’ social positioning; the queer BDSM Kat/Ignatz/Pup triangle, and/or Herriman’s own fluid, possibly closeted or masked relationship to African-American identity. However, it seems to me that it could also be read formally rather than culturally.

For example, take this strip I pulled from the internet at random:

As Eric says, the background here shift insistently. In the first panel, Krazy and pup are positioned at night beside a tree on a straight road, with a curved rock formation off in the distance. The two panels below seem to be in daylight (the color of the sky blurring into the color of the ground from the panel above(. The tree disappears, and there are different rock formations (and what looks like a volcano) off in the distance. Then, in the next large panel, we see the (formerly straight) road curving off towards the obelisk, from behind which a gold moon rises. The sky is no longer the solid black of the first panel, but is instead a mass of cross-hatchings, almost ostentatiously referencing the hand that drew it. All this time, Officer Pup is explaining, with much assertion and repetition, that the waiting Krazy will never see a blue moon; declaring his faith in a natural order even as the world around him haphazardly shuffles trees and roads, creativity sliding out from under the rotund figure of law and order, who looks not unlike a big blue moon himself. Finally, Pup exits, and as Krazy lurches into quasi song (“Bee-Ell-oo-oo-oo Blue”) we see behind the monument (or did the monument just move over?) where Ignatz prepares to launch an ersatz blue moon balloon. Surely Krazy here is the reader, not so much gullible as eager to be gulled, while Ignatz is Herriman, the artist arranging and rearranging the props for the delight/confounding of all us waiting Kats. The arrangement of the two moons, one above the other on the page despite the alteration of all other visual cues, is perhaps the tell; the real paper moon is as fake as the fake paper moon, or perhaps even slightly more fake, since the blue acknowledges its artifice.

Stumbling on such a clearly self-referential strip wasn’t an accident I don’t think. Here’s another I picked out.

Again, Kat as reader, Ignatz as creator, with the changing delights before the lens mirroring the giddy changes in background, as day swaps for night, trees replace rock formations, and the road arcs one way and then the other. Krazy even guesses that one misshapen piece of tschotskes is a “Komic”, in case we missed the joke. And then, the final turn-around, officer pup calls an end to the proceedings and the comic, returning to one of the strip’s most stable iconic images; Ignatz locked up in the dull jail, the world all bricked up and stolid till Ignatz (or Herriman) gets out to draw the next page.

And then there’s this:

That center second line panel tilts to create a straight frame within a crooked frame, a deliberate drawing of a drawing, created this time by Pup and placed in its jailhouse place by Krazy — even the creator is unstable, and who is creating who. In the final row, the left-hand panel is inset, like a painting against the black sky, so that the prison wall with the fake Ignatz painting looks itself like a cardboard facade. Krazy and the duck walk towards the fake painting on the fake drawing, burbling garbled names of masterpieces, while Krazy throws that brick against the left to right run of the reading. Roy T. Cook suggested that the brick’s reverse zip “highlights the artificiality” of Ignatz’s action. Everything, in short, is what it shouldn’t be; the genius of the artist is to krazily wrong all rights.

Adrielle Mitchell talked in her post about the way that George Herriman reshaped the comics canon; in comments Alex Buchet points out that Krazy Kat is in many ways in the high art canon, much loved by people like Juan Miro and Gertrude Stein.

Given that, perhaps Krazy Kat’s place in the canon is in some ways to create the notion of a canon,or to make a strip which demands a kind of canonicity. Art presents itself as art through the assumption of individual afflatus — the vision as meme. Krazy Kat, in the insistence of its artifice, is almost(?) a parody of avant garde brio, virtuosically creating a new world with every panel. Herriman makes a space for comics creator as genius because he drew himself as genius, high art in a blue moon.

Why Does Ignatz Throw from Right to Left?

Posted on November 21, 2013 by Roy T. Cook

In an essay on Herriman’s Krazy Kat titled “The Gift”, Douglas Wolk notes that:

Everything from Herriman’s crabbed handwriting and batty phenotic spellings to his habit of showing Ignatz’s brick flying from right to left (against the flow of reading) to the way he constructs his panels and pages – with vistas so wide the eye can’t take them in all at once – means you need to slow down and be mindful of each element of his work to show how funny it really is.

Now, Wolk is certainly right that all of these odd characteristics of Krazy Kat interfere with a quick, superficial reading – one that merely looks ahead to the punchline. But might there be more going on?

Anyone who has ever read a how-to book on comics – from How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way (Lee and Buscema) to Drawing Words and Writing Pictures (Abel and Madden) – knows that one of the first rules of action is that temporally extended events should be portrayed as moving from left to right. As a result, the different parts of the action – the release of a brick, its trajectory through the air, its impact on a cat’s head – will be read in the temporal order in which they occur (McCloud’s discussion of the passing of time within a panel in Understanding Comics is also of relevance here). So why does Herriman, more often than not, break this rule with Ignatz’s brick?

Now, there is an easy explanation: The depiction of the brick as flying from right to left goes against the rules of comics composition as we have know them. But it was Herriman, amongst others (including of course Eisner, McKay, etc.) who discovered and developed these rules, through decades of trial and error and aesthetic experimentation. So perhaps this particular aspect of the construction of action scenes in comics just wasn’t apparent or important to Herriman.

While simple, this explanation seems unlikely. After all, Herriman was certainly a sophisticated enough practitioner of the comics art to realize that the right to left orientation of the flight of the brick would interfere with ‘natural’ reading. So why did he do it?

Here’s another, more theoretically interesting possibility: Depicting the brick as being tossed from right to left doesn’t merely slow the reader down. Instead, it highlights, in a sense, the artificiality of Ignatz’s act of violence. In drawing the path of the brick in this manner, Herriman is de-emphasizing this action as an action. After all, we don’t read Krazy Kat strips in order to find out how the big action sequence turns out each day – that is, in order to find out who wins the brick fight. Rather, the tossing of the brick is one of a number of uniform narrative ingredients that Herriman re-mixes, mashes, and rearranges in each strip. In de-emphasizing the action, Herriman also emphasizes the nature of the thrown brick as just one of a number of generic ingredients that go into a Krazy Kat strip (where, for these purposes, Krazy Kat is a genre unto itself).
____
You can see the entire PPP Krazy Kat Roundtable here.

Eric Berlatsky on Queerness and Krazy Kat

Posted on November 17, 2013 by Noah Berlatsky

Eric had a great comment on Adrielle’s post, so I thought I’d reprint it here.

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).

The whole Krazy Kat roundtable so far on PencilPanelPage is here.

How does George Herriman’s Krazy Kat Reshape the Comics Canon?

Posted on November 14, 2013 by Adrielle Mitchell

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 20^th 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.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

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