one who seems at times to feel the medium of the strip not exactly
suited to him, and at others to find himself at home in it. His
single pictures: _The Days of Real Sport_ and _When a Feller Needs
a Friend_, and the now rapidly disappearing _Kelly Pool_ which was
technically a strip, are notable recreations of simple life. Few of
them are actively funny; some are sentimental. The children of _The
Days of Real Sport_ have an astonishing reality--and none are more
real than the virtually unseen Skinnay, who is always being urged
to “come over.” They are a gallery of country types, some of them
borrowed from literature--the Huck Finn touch is visible--but all of
them freshly observed and dryly recorded. Briggs’ line is distinctive;
one could identify any square inch of his drawings. In _Kelly Pool_
he worked close to Tad’s _Indoor Sports_, and did what Tad hasn’t
done--created a character, the negro waiter George whom I shall be
sorry to lose. George’s amateur interest in pool was continually being
submerged in his professional interest: gettings tips, and his “Bad
day ... ba-a-ad day” when tips were low is a little classic. Deserting
that scene, Briggs has made a successful comedy of domestic life in
_Mr and Mrs_. No one has come so near to the subject--the grumbling,
helpless, assertive, modest, self-satisfied, self-deprecating male,
in his contacts with his sensible, occasionally irritable, wife. As
often as not these episodes end in quarrels--in utter blackness with
harsh bedroom voices continuing a day’s exacerbations; again the
reconciliations are mushy, again they are genuine sentiment. And
around them plays the child whose one function is to say “Papa loves
mamma” at the most appropriate time. It is quite an achievement, for
Briggs has made the ungrateful material interesting, and I can recall
not one of these strips in which he has cracked a joke. Tad here
follows Briggs, respectfully. _For Better or Worse_ is considerably
more obvious, but it has Tad’s special value, in sharpness of
caricature. The surrounding types are brilliantly drawn; only the
central characters remain stock figures. Yet the touch of romance
in Tad, continually overlaid by his sense of the ridiculous, is
precious; he seems aware of the faint aspirations of his characters
and recognizes the _rôles_ which they think they are playing while he
mercilessly shows up their actuality. The finest of the _Indoor Sports_
are those in which two subordinate characters riddle with sarcasm
the pretentions of the others--the clerk pretending to be at ease
when the boss brings his son into the office, the lady of the house
talking about the new motor car, the small-town braggart and the city
swell--characters out of melodrama, some, and others so vividly taken
from life that the very names Tad gives them pass into common speech.
He is an inveterate creator and manipulator of slang; whatever phrase
he makes or picks up has its vogue for months and his own variations
are delightful. Slang is a part of their picture, and he and Walter
Hoban are the only masters of it.
Ketten’s _Day of Rest_ is another strip of this _genre_, interesting
chiefly as a piece of draughtsmanship. He is the most economical of
the comic-strip artists, and his flat characters, without contours or
body, have a sort of jack-in-the-box energy and a sardonic obstinacy.
The Chicago School I have frankly never been able to understand--a
parochialism on my part, or a tribute to its exceptional privacy and
sophistication. It pretends, of course, to be simple, but the fate
of every metropolis is to enter its small-town period at one time or
another, to call itself a village, to build a town hall and sink a
town pump with a silver handle. The Gumps are common people and the
residents of Gasoline Alley are just folks, but I have never been able
to understand what they are doing; I suspect they do nothing. It seems
to me I read columns of conversation daily, and have to continue to the
next day to follow the story. The campaign of Andy Gump for election to
the Senate gave a little body to the serial story--he was so abysmally
the ignorant Congressman that he began to live. But apart from this,
apart from the despairing cry of “Oh, Min,” one recalls nothing of the
Chicago School except the amusing vocabulary of Syd Smith and that Andy
has no chin. It is an excellent symbol; but it isn’t enough for daily
food.
The small-town school of comic strip flourishes in the work of Briggs,
already mentioned, in Webster’s swift sketches of a similar nature,
and in Tom MacNamara’s _Us Boys_. The last of these is an exceptional
fake as small-town, but an amusing and genuine strip. It is people by
creation of fancy--the alarmingly fat, amiable Skinny, the truculent
Eaglebeak Spruder, the little high-brow Van with his innocence and his
spectacles, and Emily, if I recall the name, the village vampire at the
age of seven. Little happens in _Us Boys_, but MacNamara has managed to
convey a genuine emotion in tracing the complicated relations between
his personages--there is actual childhood friendship, actual worry and
pride and anger--all rather gently rendered, and with a recognizable
language.
It is interesting to note that none of these strips make use of the
projectile or the blow as a regular _dénoûement_. I have nothing
against the solution by violence of delicate problems, but since the
comic strip is supposed to be exclusively devoted to physical exploits
I think it is well to remark how placid life is in at least one
significant branch of the art. In effect all the themes of the comic
strip are subjected to a great variety of treatments, and in each of
them you will find, on occasions, the illustrated joke. This is the
weakest of the strips, and, as if aware of its weakness, its creators
give it the snap ending of a blow, or, failing that, show us one
character in consternation at the brilliance of the other’s wit, flying
out of the picture with the cry of “Zowie,” indicating his surcharge of
emotion. This is not the same thing as the wilful violence of _Mutt
and Jeff_, where the attack is due to the malice or stupidity of one
character, the resentment or revenge of the other.
Mutt is a _picaro_, one of the few rogues created in America. There is
nothing too dishonest for him, nor is there any chance so slim that
he won’t take it. He has an object in life: he does not do mean or
vicious things simply for the pleasure of doing them, and so is vastly
superior to the Peck’s Bad Boy type of strip which has an apparently
endless vogue--the type best known in _The Katzenjammer Kids_. This is
the least ingenious, the least interesting as drawing, the sloppiest
in colour, the weakest in conception and in execution, of all the
strips, and it is the one which has determined the intellectual idea
of what all strips are like. It is now divided into two--and they
are equally bad. How happy one could be with neither! The other
outstanding picaresque strip is _Happy Hooligan_--the type tramp--who
with his brother, Gloomy Gus, had added to the gallery of our national
mythology. _Non est qualis erat_--the spark has gone out of him in
recent years.[17] Elsewhere you still find that exceptionally immoral
and dishonest attitude toward the business standards of America. For
the comic strip, especially after you leave the domestic-relations
type which is itself realistic and unsentimental, is specifically
more violent, more dishonest, more tricky and roguish, than America
usually permits its serious arts to be. The strips of cleverness:
_Foxy Grandpa_, the boy inventor, _Hawkshaw the Detective_, haven’t
great vogue. _Boob McNutt_, without a brain in his head, beloved by
the beautiful heiress, has a far greater following, although it is
the least worthy of Rube Goldberg’s astonishing creations. But Mutt
and Jiggs and _Abie the Agent_, and _Barney Google_ and _Eddie’s
Friends_ have so little respect for law, order, the rights of property,
the sanctity of money, the romance of marriage, and all the other
foundations of American life, that if they were put into fiction the
Society for the Suppression of Everything would hale them incontinently
to court and our morals would be saved again.
_The Hall-room Boys_ (now known as _Percy and Ferdy_, I think) are
also picaresque; the indigent pretenders to social eminence who do
anything to get on. They are great bores, not because one foresees the
denunciation at the end, but because they somehow fail to come to life,
and one doesn’t care whether they get away with it or not.
_Abie_ and _Jerry on the Job_ are good strips because they are
self-contained, seldom crack jokes, and have each a significant touch
of satire. Abie is the Jew of commerce and the man of common sense; you
have seen him quarrel with a waiter because of an overcharge of ten
cents, and, encouraged by his companion, replying, “Yes, and it ain’t
the principle, either; it’s the ten cents.” You have seen a thousand
tricks by which he once sold Complex motor cars and now promotes cinema
shows or prize fights. He is the epitome of one side of his race, and
his attractiveness is as remarkable as his jargon. Jerry’s chief fault
is taking a stock situation and prolonging it; his chief virtue, at
the moment, is his funny, hard-boiled attitude towards business. Mr
Givney, the sloppy sentimentalist who is pleased because some one took
him for Mr Taft (“Nice, clean fun,” says Jerry of that), is faced with
the absurd Jerry, who demolishes efficiency systems and the romance of
big business and similar nonsense with his devastating logic or his
complete stupidity. The railway station at Ammonia hasn’t the immortal
character of _The Toonerville Trolley_ (that meets all the trains)
because Fontaine Fox has a far more entertaining manner than Hoban,
and because Fox is actually a caricaturist--all of his figures are
grotesque, the powerful _Katinka_ or _Aunt Eppie_ not more so than the
Skipper. Hoban and Hershfield both understate; Fox exaggerates grossly;
but with his exaggeration he is so ingenious, so inventive that each
strip is funny and the total effect is the creation of character in the
Dickens sense. It is not the method of _Mutt and Jeff_ nor of _Barney
Google_ in which Billy de Beck has done much with a luckless wight, a
sentimentalist, and an endearing fool all rolled into one.
These are the strips which come to life each day, without forcing,
and which stay long in memory. I am stating the case for the strip in
general and have gone so far as to speak well of some I do not admire,
nor read with animation. The continued existence of others remains
a mystery to me; why they live beyond change, and presumably beyond
accidental death, is one of the things no one can profitably speculate
upon. I do not see why I should concede anything more to the enemies
of the strip. In one of _Life’s_ burlesque numbers there was a page
of comics expertly done by j held in the manner of our most popular
artists. Each of the half dozen strips illustrated the joke: “Who was
that lady I seen you with on the street last night?” “That wasn’t a
lady; that was my wife.” Like so many parodies, this arrived too late,
for the current answer is, “That wasn’t a street; that was an alley.”
Each picture ended in a slam and a cry--also belated. The actual
demolition of the slam ending was accomplished by T. E. Powers, who
touches the field of the comic strip rarely, and then with his usual
ferocity. In a footnote to a cartoon he drew _Mike and Mike_. In six
pictures four represented one man hitting the other; once to emphasize
a pointless joke, twice thereafter for no reason at all, and finally to
end the picture. It was destruction by exaggeration; and no comic strip
artist missed the point.
At the extremes of the comic strip are the realistic school and the
fantastic--and of fantasy there are but few practitioners. Tad has
some of the quality in _Judge Rummy_, but for the most part the Judge
and Fedink and the rest are human beings dressed up as dogs--they
are out of Æsop, not out of LaFontaine. But the Judge is actually
funny, and I recall an inhuman and undoglike episode in which he and
Fedink each claimed to have the loudest voice, and so in midwinter,
in a restaurant, each lifted up his voice and uttered and shouted and
bellowed the word “Strawberries” until they were properly thrown into
the street. This is the kind of madness which is required in fantasy,
and Goldberg occasionally has it. He is the most versatile of the lot;
he has created characters, and scenes, and continuous episodes--foolish
questions and meetings of ladies’ clubs and inventions (not so good as
Heath Robinson’s) and through them there has run a wild grotesquerie.
The tortured statues of his _décors_ are marvelous, the way he pushes
stupidity and ugliness to their last possible point, and humour into
everything, is amazing. Yet I feel he is _manqué_, because he has never
found a perfect medium for his work.
Frueh is a fine artist in caricature and could have no such difficulty.
When he took it into his head to do a daily strip he was bound to do
something exceptional, and he succeeded. It is a highly sophisticated
thing in its humour, in its subjects, and pre-eminently in its
execution. His series on prohibition enforcement had infinite
ingenuity, so also his commentaries on political events in New York
city. He remains a caricaturist in these strips, indicating, by his use
of the medium, that its possibilities are not exhausted. Yet for all
his dealing with “ideas” his method remains fantastic, and although
he isn’t technically a comic-strip artist he is the best approach to
the one artist whom I have only mentioned, George Herriman, and to his
immortal creation. For there is, in and outside the comic strip, a
solitary and incomprehensible figure which must be treated apart. The
Krazy Kat that Walks by Himself.
[Illustration: HOW LONG SHALL THIS GO ON?
(_Courtesy of_ Life--_from the burlesque Sunday Supplement
Number_)
A CARTOON. By R. L. Goldberg
]
_The Krazy Kat That
Walks by Himself_
THE KRAZY KAT THAT WALKS BY HIMSELF
Krazy Kat, the daily comic strip of George Herriman is, to me, the
most amusing and fantastic and satisfactory work of art produced in
America to-day. With those who hold that a comic strip cannot be a work
of art I shall not traffic. The qualities of Krazy Kat are irony and
fantasy--exactly the same, it would appear, as distinguish _The Revolt
of the Angels_; it is wholly beside the point to indicate a preference
for the work of Anatole France, which is in the great line, in the
major arts. It happens that in America irony and fantasy are practised
in the major arts by only one or two men, producing high-class trash;
and Mr Herriman, working in a despised medium, without an atom of
pretentiousness, is day after day producing something essentially
fine. It is the result of a naïve sensibility rather like that of the
_douanier_ Rousseau; it does not lack intelligence, because it is a
thought-out, a constructed piece of work. In the second order of the
world’s art it is superbly first rate--and a delight! For ten years,
daily and frequently on Sunday, Krazy Kat has appeared in America; in
that time we have accepted and praised a hundred fakes from Europe and
Asia--silly and trashy plays, bad painting, woful operas, iniquitous
religions, everything paste and brummagem, has had its vogue with us;
and a genuine, honest native product has gone unnoticed until in the
year of grace 1922 a ballet brought it a tardy and grudging acclaim.
Herriman is our great master of the fantastic and his early career
throws a faint light on the invincible creation which is his present
masterpiece. For all of his other things were comparative failures. He
could not find, in the realistic framework he chose, an appropriate
medium for his imaginings, or even for the strange draughtsmanship
which is his natural mode of expression. _The Family Upstairs_ seemed
to the realist reader simply incredible; it failed to give him the
pleasure of recognizing his neighbours in their more ludicrous moments.
_The Dingbats_, hapless wretches, had the same defect. Another strip
came nearer to providing the right tone: _Don Koyote and Sancho Pansy_;
Herriman’s mind has always been preoccupied with the mad knight of
La Mancha, who reappears transfigured in _Krazy Kat_. And--although
the inspirations are _never_ literary--when it isn’t Cervantes it is
Dickens to whom he has the greatest affinity. The Dickens mode operated
in _Baron Bean_--a figure half Micawber, half Charlie Chaplin as man
of the world. I have noted, in writing of Chaplin, Mr Herriman’s acute
and sympathetic appreciation of the first few moments of _The Kid_. It
is only fair to say here that he had himself done the same thing in his
medium. Baron Bean was always in rags, penniless, hungry; but he kept
his man Grimes, and Grimes did his dirty work, Grimes was the Baron’s
outlet, and Grimes, faithful retainer, held by bonds of admiration
and respect, helped the Baron in his one great love affair. Like all
of Herriman’s people, they lived on the enchanted mesa (pronounced:
ma-cey) by Coconino, near the town of Yorba Linda. The Baron was
inventive; lacking the money to finance the purchase of a postage
stamp, he entrusted a love letter to a carrier pigeon; and his “Go, my
paloma,” on that occasion, is immortal.
Some of these characters are reappearing in Herriman’s latest work:
_Stumble Inn_. Of this I have not seen enough to be sure. It is a
mixture of fancy and realism; Mr Stumble himself is the Dickens
character again--the sentimental, endearing innkeeper who would
rather lose his only patron than kill a favourite turkey cock for
Thanksgiving. I have heard that recently a litter of pups has been
found in the cellar of the inn; so I should judge that fantasy has won
the day. For it is Herriman’s bent to disguise what he has to say in
creations of the animal world which are neither human nor animal, but
each _sui generis_.
That is how the Kat started. The thought of a friendship between a cat
and a mouse amused Herriman and one day he wrote them in as a footnote
to _The Family Upstairs_. On their first appearance they played marbles
while the family quarreled; and in the last picture the marble dropped
through a hole in the bottom line. An office boy named Willie was the
first to recognize the strange virtues of _Krazy Kat_. As surely as he
was the greatest of office boys, so the greatest of editors, Arthur
Brisbane, was the next to praise. He urged Herriman to keep the two
characters in action; within a week they began a semi-independent
existence in a strip an inch wide under the older strip. Slowly they
were detached, were placed at one side, and naturally stepped into
the full character of a strip when the _Family_ departed. In time the
Sundays appeared--three quarters of a page, involving the whole Krazy
Kat and Ignatz families[18] and the flourishing town of Coconino--the
flora and fauna of that enchanted region which Herriman created out of
his memories of the Arizona desert he so dearly loves.
In one of his most metaphysical pictures Herriman presents Krazy as
saying to Ignatz: “I ain’t a Kat ... and I ain’t Krazy” (I put dots
to indicate the lunatic shifting of background which goes on while
these remarks are made; although the action is continuous and the
characters motionless, it is in keeping with Herriman’s method to have
the backdrop in a continual state of agitation; you never know when a
shrub will become a redwood, or a hut a church) ... “it’s wot’s behind
me that I am ... it’s the idea behind me, ‘Ignatz’ and that’s wot I
am.” In an attitude of a contortionist Krazy points to the blank space
behind him, and it is there that we must look for the “Idea.” It is
not far to seek. There is a plot and there is a theme--and considering
that since 1913 or so there have been some three thousand strips, one
may guess that the variations are infinite. The plot is that Krazy
(androgynous, but according to his creator willing to be either) is in
love with Ignatz Mouse; Ignatz, who is married, but vagrant, despises
the Kat, and his one joy in life is to “Krease that Kat’s bean with a
brick” from the brickyard of Kolin Kelly. The fatuous Kat (Stark Young
has found the perfect word for him: he is crack-brained) takes the
brick, by a logic and a cosmic memory presently to be explained, as a
symbol of love; he cannot, therefore, appreciate the efforts of Offisa
B. Pupp to guard him and to entrammel the activities of Ignatz Mouse
(or better, Mice). A deadly war is waged between Ignatz and Offisa
Pupp--the latter is himself romantically in love with Krazy; and one
often sees pictures in which Krazy and Ignatz conspire together to
outwit the officer, both wanting the same thing, but with motives all
at cross-purposes. This is the major plot; it is clear that the brick
has little to do with the violent endings of other strips, for it is
surcharged with emotions. It frequently comes not at the end, but
at the beginning of an action; sometimes it does not arrive. It is a
symbol.
The theme is greater than the plot. John Alden Carpenter has pointed
out in the brilliant little foreword[19] to his ballet, that Krazy Kat
is a combination of Parsifal and Don Quixote, the perfect fool and the
perfect knight. Ignatz is Sancho Panza and, I should say, Lucifer.
He loathes the sentimental excursions, the philosophic ramblings of
Krazy; he interrupts with a well-directed brick the romantic excesses
of his companion. For example: Krazy blindfolded and with the scales
of Justice in his hand declares: “Things is all out of perpotion,
‘Ignatz.’” “In what way, fool?” enquires the Mice as the scene shifts
to the edge of a pool in the middle of the desert. “In the way of
‘ocean’ for a instinct.” “Well?” asks Ignatz. They are plunging head
down into mid-sea, and only their hind legs, tails, and words are
visible: “The ocean is so innikwilly distribitted.” They appear, each
prone on a mountain peak, above the clouds, and the Kat says casually
across the chasm to Ignatz: “Take ‘Denva, Kollorado’ and ‘Tulsa,
Okrahoma’ they ain’t got no ocean a tall--” (they are tossed by a vast
sea, together in a packing-case) “while Sem Frencisco, Kellafornia,
and Bostin, Messachoosit, has got more ocean than they can possibly
use”--whereon Ignatz properly distributes a brick evenly on Krazy’s
noodle. Ignatz “has no time” for foolishness; he is a realist and Sees
Things as They ARE. “I don’t believe in Santa Claus,” says he; “I’m too
broad-minded and advanced for such nonsense.”
But Mr Herriman, who is a great ironist, understands pity. It is the
destiny of Ignatz never to know what his brick means to Krazy. He does
not enter into the racial memories of the Kat which go back to the days
of Cleopatra, of the Bubastes, when Kats were held sacred. Then, on a
beautiful day, a mouse fell in love with Krazy, the beautiful daughter
of Kleopatra Kat; bashful, advised by a soothsayer to write his love,
he carved a declaration on a brick and, tossing the “missive,” was
accepted, although he had nearly killed the Kat. “When the Egyptian
day is done it has become the Romeonian custom to crease his lady’s
bean with a brick laden with tender sentiments ... through the tide of
dusty years” ... the tradition continues. But only Krazy knows this.
So at the end it is the incurable romanticist, the victim of acute
Bovaryisme, who triumphs; for Krazy faints daily in full possession
of his illusion, and Ignatz, stupidly hurling his brick, thinking to
injure, fosters the illusion and keeps Krazy “heppy.”