Krazy Kat reprinted by Fantagraphics By Jeet Heer National Post (April 13, 2002). In the early days of the last century, Pablo Picasso shared a weekly ritual with Gertrude Stein. After receiving her mail from the United States, Stein would go visit Picasso and read him the Sunday comic strips. Reportedly, one of their favourite funnies was George Herriman's Krazy Kat. When Herriman died in 1944, Walt Disney described him as "a source of inspiration to thousands of artists." Herriman's admirers were great not only in number but also variety. Aside from popular entertainers such as Disney and Frank Capra, Herriman also had a rather select high-brow fan club that included writers such as e.e. cummings and Umberto Eco as well as painters such as Joan Miro and Willem de Kooning. It is one of the great paradoxes of 20th-century culture that high modernist art, which often baffled the general public with its formal experimentation, drew inspiration from the most vulgar manifestations of the mass media. That elusive poet T.S. Eliot, whose difficulty is beloved in graduate classrooms, enjoyed corresponding with Groucho Marx and praised the vitality of the English music hall. Herriman's comic strip Krazy Kat, which ran from 1913 until 1944, is perhaps the best illustration of the mysterious affinity between low and high culture. Krazy Kat appeared in the sensationalist newspapers owned by William Randolph Hearst. The strip frequently dealt in puns and broad physical comedy, of the sort familiar from vaudeville and the music halls. Yet Herriman's creation was startlingly original enough to draw praise from such mandarin artists as Picasso and Stein. At the centre of the strip is an interspecies love triangle: Krazy, a cat who changes gender, loves Ignatz, a mouse. Ignatz, however, hates Krazy and takes delight in bopping him/her with a brick Krazy, with charming naivete, interprets these bricks as symbols of love. Officer Bull Pupp, a police dog who is secretly in love with Krazy, has a clearer view of the matter and tries to jail Ignatz. Krazy, of course, is perfectly indifferent to Pupp but enjoys the way "like lil innisint childrens they [Ignatz and Pupp] play togeda." With its playful ambiguity, Krazy Kat broke away from the stereotype-laden conventions of comic strips. For the most part, cartooning is a conservative art form: Popular strips such as Peanuts, Blondie and Dilbert all deal in the stoic comedy of defeat and resignation. However much Charlie Brown, Dagwood Bumstead or Dilbert grumble about childhood, the family or work, by the last panel they come to accept their lot in life. Though Krazy Kat had a repetitive formula of its own, it took place in an absurdist universe that mocked both rebellion and society's rules. In its topsy-turvy world, everyone won when the formula was enacted: Ignatz enjoys the thrill of brick-throwing, Krazy the pleasure of being bricked, and Officer Pupp the satisfaction of jailing the mouse. Of course, the dog and the mouse have to suffer each other's existence, so the greatest happiness is reserved for the cat. "It is a very nice universe for Krazy," Robert Warshow, a mid-20th-century critic, once wrote. "He loves to be hit by the brick; but he respects Offissa Pupp's motives." Because Herriman constantly played with scenery, gender and page design, his work is often described as surrealistic, though Krazy Kat's dream landscape preceded the official surrealist movement by a decade. Herriman's sense of play and performance may have come from his own history. Born to a mulatto family in New Orleans in 1880, Herriman seems to have passed for white. Most of his friends thought he was of Greek, French or some other, indeterminate, European ancestry. The New Orleans of Herriman's youth had a vibrant, mixed creole culture. Drawing on this background, he had Krazy speak a unique polyglot lingo that combined English, French, Spanish, Yiddish and Brooklynese. Efforts to republish Herriman's work have met with many difficulties, despite the praise it has won. Because his strips appeared in low-brow tabloids that libraries did not stock, it has taken collectors decades to build up a complete inventory of his work. Bill Blackbeard, a popular culture collector, has worked heroically — without institutional academic support — to make Herriman's work available to the public again. Now two publishers have launched ambitious multi-volume series based on Herriman's collections. Seattle-based Fantagraphics will collect the complete Sunday pages, while Stinging Monkey, an upstart operation from Alberta, plans to publish the daily strips. The Sunday pages, celebrated for their inventive visual designs, are the best place to start. True fans will also be delighted by the dailies. Remarkably, Krazy Kat is as fresh now as when it first appeared and repays repeated reading as a work of both high and low culture.