2 2 S U N DAY , M A R CH 5 , 20 2 3 “ I BECAME A CARTOONIST,” G eorge Herriman wrote in 1926, “as a sort of revenge on the world.” From 1913 to 1944, Herriman’s strip “Krazy & Ignatz” enthralled readers with a linguistic gumbo of high Elizabethan and low Brooklynese, acrobatic linemanship and surreally shaded, ever-changing desert backdrops. Admirers in- cluded James Joyce and E.E. Cummings, whose introduction to the first collection of “Krazy & Ig- natz” strips views them as a political allegory. Now Fantagraphic has published THE GEORGE H E RRIMAN LIBRARY: Krazy & Ignatz 1925-1927, the fourth of 10 planned volumes. While the daily “Krazys” appeared in single strips, the Sunday strips, as reflected in these heavyweight hard- cover editions devoted to the Sundaya, take up the full page, immersing you in poetic rehearsals of motion and ponds of negative space. I savored a day apiece with all four books (dur- ing Valentine’s week, appropriately). Not a mo- ment of boredom, not a hint the author was flag- ging with the recurring plot of the belligerent, brick-throwing mouse Ignatz and the cat who loves him, Krazy. When read in sequence, context jumps out. Krazy wants a “league of relations” in 1920, echo- ing the postwar armistice, while Ignatz prefers a “league of bricks.” By 1927 we’re well into Prohi- bition. “A empty ‘jug’ is a safe ‘jug,’ ” Krazy ex- plains, dumping precious catnip, “and I do hope my ection will have a bennefishil iffeck upon the woil in generil.” (Spoiler: Ignatz gets drunk.) This is classic Herriman, the sense of some- thing lived beneath the Aesopian riddle. One re- cent fixation is Krazy’s strategically ambiguous gender, with “he” and “she” pronouns galore. You can sometimes feel the tug of race in the me- dium of these early black-and-white drawings, too (Herriman, who was born Black in New Or- leans, passed for white in the newsrooms of New York and California). When an ostrich steals ev- eryone’s ink in 1926, turning the town white and himself black, the creatures of Coconino County curse him in language that the narrator, leaving their speech bubbles empty, is “unable to in- scribe.” Herriman’s revenge? If there has ever been a time to relish his puzzles, to search for or reject meanings in them, that time is now. I was also taken with special “Book of Magic” panels from a 1922 children’s supplement, col- lected for the first time in an appendix to Volume 4. The images before you were originally printed in layered water-based inks with instructions to dampen the newsprint and “develop” its colors. The thought of kids dragging wet cotton balls across the page, then watching Ignatz’s white bricks melt into a gauzy orange, really tickled me. Before the critics and scholars came for Her- riman, here was free association of a purer kind. 0 U p Close / Krazy Kat / B y Walker Mimms A new volume of George Herriman’s ‘Krazy & Ignatz’ strips enthralls and delights. WALKER MIMMS has written on art and culture for The Times, The Guardian, The New York Review of Books and elsewhere. For 30 years, Herriman’s plot never changed. The cat Krazy pines for the mouse Ignatz. Ignatz resents the affection, so he hurls a brick at the cat’s head whenever he can. Poor Krazy mistakes the bricks for love. Offisa Pup, the canine cop who loves Krazy, tries to jail the belligerent mouse. Above, Ignatz tries to kick the habit. 0 T H E N E W YO R K T I M E S B O O K R E V I E W 2 3 The innate, preschool grammar of Krazy’s dialogue, and Herriman’s ingenious phonetic spellings, have an organic logic about them that makes you instantly aware of how artificial your own language is. When Krazy and Ignatz debate the color of an elephant, Herriman plays with the infamous free-associative quality of his comic strip by changing the species and hue of the animal in question. The result, as always, is a brick for Krazy. 0