That We May Mis-Unda-Stend Each Udda

“That we may mis-unda-stendeach udda”:
The Rhetoric of Krazy Kat

Edward A. Shannon
On July 26, 1910, George Herriman introduced the prototypical

Krazy Kat and Ignatz Mouse in the lower right hand corner of his The
Dingbut Family comic strip as a throw-away joke. A mouse hurled a stone
at a cat; hunter became hunted, prey became predator. Herriman was
obviously playing on notions of the underdog (or undermouse) here, and
readers no doubt picked up on the joke rather quickly. In fact, Herriman’s
joke was the essence of the comic strip: a slapstick visual gag loaded with
ironic implications. This one-shot gag would eventually evolve into
Herriman’s life work, first as a daily, and then a Sunday comic strip in
William Randolph Hearst’s newspapers. In its prime, Kruzy Kat was a
masterpiece of its genre, manipulating the twin symbol systems of
language and pictures in such a way as to invalidate both. Herriman’s
creation of his “meaning” through unmeaning establishes Kruzy Kut as an
artifact of the modem era and a forerunner of Postmodernism’s denial of
order.
By 1910, some 15 years after its establishment, the modem comics
page had fallen into the rather predictable format we see in our newspapers
even today. Most comics historians cite The Yellow Kid as the seminal
comic strip. Created by R.F. Outcault in 1895, The Yellow Kid was one of
the first regularly appearing comic characters and the first to gain a mass
popular following. However, Outcault was hardly the cartoonist “who
disturb[ed] the eternal silence of the universe” (Bakhtin 951). In fact,
David Kunzle begins his massive multi-volume history of comic strips
with European illustrated texts of the 15th century. Kruzy Kut emerged into
a field replete with traditions and conventions which Herriman consistently
did away with in his work. Herriman’s earlier, more conventional strips
show that he did indeed “presuppose not only the existence of the language
system he [used] but also [its]...preceding utterances” (Bakhtin 95 1).
If Modern and Postmodern rhetoricians are concerned with how
language “means” and how it fails to “mean,” Kruzy Kut, which began
its run in 1910 and ended in 1944 is an artifact of the modem era and
a suitable text to which to turn our attention. Briefly described:
209
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210 Journal of Popular Culture
Krazy Kut is the triangular love story of a cat (Krazy), a mouse (Ignatz), and a
dog (Officer Pupp). Krazy, a saintly cat of indiscriminategender, is in love with
Ignatz, an unsentimental egotist of a mouse .... Ignatz, who despises all cats,
derives pleasure from “beaning that cat’s noodle” with a brick, an obsessive act
he attempts to perform every day. Krazy...consider[s] the hurled bricks “missils
of affection.” Officer Pupp, unrelenting enforcer of law and order, is in love
with Krazy and seeks to protect “that dear cat” from “sin’s most sinister
symbol,” Ignatz’s brick. (McDonnell26-27)
If we apply Bakhtin’s notions of the speech genre to Krazy Kut, and

consider the strip as a cultural artifact, we can see Krazy Kat as a
deconstructed text; it creates meaning by destroying it.’
Krazy first appeared in a daily strip; that is, a horizontal tier of four
“panels,” in which the drama of the strip was played out. Humorous
strips like Herriman’s Dingbat Family (later, The Family Upstairs) had
already settled on family life, fantasy, anthropomorphic animals,
children, and obsessive “one-trick pony” characters as their standard
fare. The extended Sunday page, where Herriman would eventually take
Krazy Kat and the comic strip genre to their most impressive extremes,
was also firmly established by the time Krazy graduated from a
supporting character in The Family Upstairs to a headliner in hisher
own strip. Unlike the conventions of the daily strip, which have
remained essentially unchanged until today, the conventions of the
Sunday comics page have drastically altered, going from a full
newspaper page, holding up to 25 panels of varying size and shape to
one or two rows of panels, usually square or rectangular. Today’s Sunday
strips are about one fifth the size of the Sunday pages of the twenties and
thirties. The reason for these changes were economic-as more and
more of the newspaper’s pages were sacrificed to advertising, more and
more of the “funnies” disappeared.
Economic factors have had immense impact upon the comic strip,
creating the genre and its context more radically than might be thought
possible in many conventional speech genres. The purpose of the comic
strip, historically, has been to increase readership of the papers in which
they appear. In fact, the battle between Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer over
R.F. Outcault’s Yellow Kid created ripples felt beyond the comics page
and gave birth to the term “yellow journalism.” Hearst and Pulitzer’s
battle, ironically, was over illiterate or semi-literate immigrants (like
Mickey Dugan, the Yellow Kid himself) who ordinarily would not buy a
newspaper, but who were attracted by the colorful drawings.2 In essence,
comics were advertisements for the newspapers in which they appeared.
So Krazy Kat, which had, for the most part, ceased to draw in new
“That we may mis-unda-stendeach udda” 211
readers by the 1930s and 1940s, should have ceased publication.
However, Hearst violated the rules of commerce (perhaps the primary
“genre” of the comics page) and kept the strip alive, transforming it in
the process. With a lifetime contract in hand, Herriman was allowed to
do as he pleased in his strip, regardless of its reception by the readership
(who frequently complained about the complex and beguiling strip). In
fact, Hearst, apparently a fan of Kruzy, forced his editors, who routinely
dropped Kruzy, to keep it in the papers. Kruzy Kut, free of the restraints
of its “illiterate” base readership is almost not a comic strip at all, if we
consider audience a factor in defining a speech genre.
Oddly enough, had Kruzy been more successful in the traditional
sense, Herriman may well have been forced off of the strip, as Winsor
McCay was forced off of the very successful Little Nemo in Slumberland
in 1913 by Hearst and his editors, who considered control of popular
features of more importance than the features themsel~es.~
A recent history of comics, Judith O’Sullivan’s The Great
American Comic Strip, approaches the bewildering Kruzy Kut as
representative of yet another context, or genre. 0’ Sullivan sees
Herriman as a forerunner of the anti-art Dada movement! O’Sullivan
also contends that we should read Kruzy as a product of the African-
American tradition, although Herriman’s heritage is as ambiguous as his
Kat.5The “critical debate” (if we can use such a term for a comic strip)
over Kruzy is significant in that it underlines the problem of establishing
meaning in the strip, which, once it was established in the Sunday
papers, began to create meaning by destroying all of the conventions of
the form and tradition of which it was a product. The comic strip should
be the simplest of all “speech genres,” dealing primarily with irony,
puns, and slapstick. Kruzy Kut, however, deals more concretely with
“meaning” than it ever did with the family squabbles and bland punning
we are familiar with in the comics.
First printed on January 6, 1918, Fig. 1 parallels in its own way the
ideas of I.A. Richards’ Basic English program, as it addresses meaning
by discussing misunderstanding rather than understanding. Appearing as
it does on the brink of the modem era, the strip is even more fraught
with (dare I say it?) “meaning.” When Herriman created Krazy, Ignatz,
and Pupp, he was relying on the “social constructions” of “cat,”
“mouse,” and “dog” and the perceived relationships between these
creatures. As the strip evolved, cat became “Kat,” whose role was the
inverse of “cat.” Herriman created his own construction of these
symbols, constructions which work only within the surreal panel borders
of his comic strip, where neither language nor “reality” could be
depended on for truth (the characters speak a strange collection of
Fig. 1. Kruzy Kut, January 6, 1918 (McDonnell 61). Reprinted with special
permission of King Features Syndicate.
dialects and languages-French, English, Creole, Yiddish, Spanish; the
backgrounds in the drawings change from panel to panel) [See fig. 21.
Once he established the strip’s structural parameters, Herriman wrote
essentially the same story every day for 34 years.
In his history of the comic strip, David Kunzle describes the
relationship between words and pictures in comics:
In the comic strip...the picture unmaskls] the claims of the text ....
Generally speaking, the caption is content to remain subordinate to the
picture; indeed, in point of quantity we make this part of a necessary definition
of the comic strip as a genre to distinguish it from illustration. (374-75)
“That we may mis-unda-stend each udda” 213
Basically, the pictures in a comic strip are truth; the words are not as
reliable. This is the essential ironic charm of the comic strip and the
reason so many adorn our refrigerator doors and office walls, but
Krazy’s “meaning” is the destruction of the form of which it is a product.
The drawings are as unreliable as Herriman’s mish-mash, randomly-
punctuated dialect.
The relationship between words and pictures in comics, what
Joseph Witek calls the “semiotic problem” (qtd. in Coughlin A5) of
comics, is integral to the form. Kunzle’s description is valid for the great
majority of comics. However, it is just this dictum-this truth/value split
between the pictures and words that Herriman violates in Kruzy Kut’s
background drawings, which shift like the desert sands of Krazy’s own
Coconino County. In Krazy Kut there is no “truth” other than that which
Herriman’s characters create for themselves, violating not only the rules
of science and nature, as many comic heroes do, but also violating the
linchpins which hold together the very form in which they are created,
often mockingly commenting on the constraints of these conventions-a
sort of metacomics-within the strip itself [see figs. 3-41.
Hemman’s contemporaries were not timid about creating realities
unlike our own, yet Herriman is essentially unique in that most strips of
his day (and ours) remain true to Kunzle’s definition and to some
concept of an ordered universe. Cliff Sterrett’s Polly and Her Pals
[fig. 51, a family strip which ran from 1912 to 1958, rivaled Krazy Kut
for inventive draftsmanship and panel layout, but refused to abandon
panel borders and a connection to a “reality” something like our own as
did Kruzy. Also, like the wildly imaginative Little Nemo in Slumberland
[fig. 61, which had its initial run from 1905 to 1911, the escapades of
Sterrett’s characters could always be explained rationally. In the case of
Polly, the explanation would be misunderstanding and coincidence,
while in Nemo the only lunacy in the universe was that found in
dreams-which vanished from the world of order with the dawn.
Richard Lanham inadvertently raises the possibilities of a comic
strip rhetoric with his postulations of an “electronic ‘theory”’ to be
applied to a coming “computer terminal text.” Central to Lanham’s
discussion is the notion of the “explosion of the fixed text” that
computer graphics will bring. Lanham sees Dada as a forerunner of the
use of “[t]ypogrophy as a self-conscious expressive parameter” (all 77).
However, the comics (which boasts an early Dada-ist text: Krazy Kut)
are a more obvious example of a written language-“picture writing,” if
you will (Spiegleman 5)-which is intended to draw attention to itself
and away from the conventional written word. Significantly, Lanham
cites Marcel Duchamp’s “R. Mutt Urinal” as an example of Dada’s
discovery of “postmodernism’s radical democratization of art” (77).6
What Lanham does not mention is that Duchamp has tipped his hat to
the comics with his renowned urinal by naming it after another “Mutt”:
A. Mutt of Mutt and Je8, one of the comics’s first recurring features.
It is this postmodern denial of truth in Kruzy Kut that readers of the
strip depend on for its meaning, and Herriman’s manipulation of
unmeaning demonstrates an innate sense of rhetorical principal. In fact,
Stanley Fish’s characterizations of the various manifestations of
rhetorical theory apply rather well to Ignatz (rebellion against “a
brutally...soulless reason”), Krazy (“the mists of religion, magic, and
verbal incantation”), and Pupp (“reason and science”) (Fish 209). Fish
writes that “rhetoric is the force that pulls us away from [a vision of truth
and meaning] into its own world of ever-shifting shapes and shimmering
surfaces” (206). That Herriman’s “truth” is as similar to Fish’s rhetoric
as Fish’s description of rhetoric is to Krazy’s Coconino County reminds
us that Herriman, an artist of the modem era, dealt with the breakdown
of meaning by creating in Kruzy Kut a rhetoric of anti-structure and
unmeaning. To suggest that Herriman was foremost a rhetorician is
absurd and does a disservice to his inspired work. However, Herriman
does tap into the ideas of his day and forecast some Postmodern
attitudes.
While most comic strips are content to mine the workaday concerns
of the homemaker, the secretary, the parent, or even the army private for
their subject matter, Kruzy Kut, was-simply put-a 34-year-long
meditation on meaning, communication, and rhetoric; a meditation
which came to some remarkable conclusions. The traditional “comic
strip homily” we detect in Kruzy-love endures (bricks and all)-is in
fact merely the illustration of Herriman’s thesis that truest meaning is
created through its own destruction. Krazy’s love is a product of hisher
misinterpretation of Ignatz’s attack as the truest “missils of affection”
(these from a married member of another species for which Krazy
harbors an atavistic hatred, a mouse who may well be the same sex as
Krazy). Compounding this misreading is Krazy ’s further misinter-
pretation of Pupp’s hatred of Ignatz as playfulness, and Pupp’s belief that
Krazy must share his feelings about the mouse. Krazy’s love and
contentment grow from ignorance and violence.
Perhaps the truest function of “meaning” in this strip is to play on
the audience’s preconceived notions of morality, love, sexuality, gender,
pain, anger, revenge, genre, and difference and to constantly subvert
those notions, endlessly deferring meaning. No humor, no pathos, no
“meaning” exists in the strip save that created through the clash between
the elements in the strip and the pre-existing notions of those elements in
the reader’s mind, even as David Kunzle argues that the comic strip
existence. Thus, Herriman repeatedly presents, through two world wars

itself depends on such an internal clash of meanings for its very
and the great depression, a world of peace, love, and understanding

created through violence, oppression, and misunderstanding.
Fig. 2. Kruzy Kut, November 3, 1940 (McDonnell 202). Reprinted with

special permission of King Features Syndicate.
Fig. 3. Kruzy Kut, December 25, 1919 (McDonnell63). Reprinted with special

Fig. 4.Kruzy Kut, April 16, 1922 (Herriman 20). Reprinted with special per-
mission of King Features Syndicate.

Fig. 5. Polly and Her Pals, February 27, 1927 (Marschall 142). Reprinted with
special permission of King Features Syndicate.
Fig. 6. Little Nemo, October 14, 1906 (Marschall 82). Reprinted with special

Notes
‘Bakhtin’s discussion of the “beginnings” and “ends” of Speech

Utterances is of interest here: “The boundaries of each concrete utterance as a
unit of speech communication are determined by a change of speaking subjects”
(Bakhtin 952). If we honor this definition, we may discuss Krazy Kat, which
retold the love triangle of Kat, Mouse, and Pupp every day of its run, as a single
utterance which lasted 34 years. How shall we apply these constructions to a
“single” utterance that was over a quarter of a century long?
T h e irony of a speech genre created for an illiterate readership is obvious.
Comics, when they speak to any issue beyond the simplest moralistic homilies
encouraged by newspapers and publishing syndicates, must do so subversively.
It is fitting, then, that they were born to encourage non-readers to buy
newspapers they could not understand.
’See John Canemaker’s Winsor McCay: His Life and Art (New York:
Abbeville Press 1987) for a discussion of Hearst’s strange relationship with
McCay.
4ThomasInge, in “Krazy Kat as American Dada Art” (in Inge’s Comics as
Culture, Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1990) had earlier made a similar argument.
5These readings, each attempting to “see” the strip by seeing it in some
context other than “comic strip” are indicative of the “emerging speech genre”
of the scholarly discussion of comics. Like Krazy Kat itself, discussions of
comic strips as valuable cultural and artistic texts result in a clash of symbol
systems. The clash here is not between words and pictures, but between the
language of scholarly inquiry and “the funnies.” These languages seldom
coexist peacefully.
A recent example of this problem is Jonathan Yardly’s attack on the
scholarly study of comics, “Alice’s Adventure in Comix World.” In order to
ridicule comics scholars, Yardly adapts an Alice in Wonderland scenario to
describe the lunacy of inquiry not directed at canonical works and genres. Of
course, Yardly’s use of Alice, a character from a work which has achieved
canonical status despite its origins in a non-canonical genre-children’s
literature-to attack the study of what Yardly perceive to be “children’s
literature,” seems every bit as silly as does deconstructing the Kat.
Terry Eagleton argues the rhetorical possibilities of popular culture in his
“Political Criticism,” echoing the democratization of art with which Lanham
credits the postmoderns.
Works Cited
Bakhtin, Mikhail. “From The Problems of Speech Genres.” The Rhetorical

Tradition. Ed. Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg. Boston: Bedford
Books of St. Martin’s, 1990.944-63.
Coughlin, Ellen K. “Looking for Messages in Batman and Donald Duck:
Researchers Turn to the Comics.” The Chronicle of Higher Education
5 Sept. 1990: A5+.
Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Minneapolis: U o f
Minnesota P, 1983.
Fish, Stanley. “Rhetoric.” Critical Terms f o r Literary Studies. Ed. Frank
Lentriccia and Thomas Mc Laughlin. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989.
201-22.
Herriman, George. George Herriman’s Krazy and Zgnatz: The Komplete Kat
Komics: A Katnip Kantata in the Key of K. Vol. 7 Forrestville, CA.:
Eclipse/Turtle Island, 1991.
Kunzle, David. A History of the Comic Strip: The Nineteenth Century. 2 vols.
Berkeley: U of California P, 1990.
Lanham, Richard. “Convergent Pressures.” The Future of Doctoral Studies in
America. Ed. Andrew Lundsford et al. New York Modern Language
Association of America, 1989. 73-78.
Marschall. America’s Great Comic Strip Artists. New York: Abbeville, 1988.
McDonnell, Patrick, et al., eds. Krazy Kat: The Comic Art of George Herriman.
New York: Abrams, 1988.
Murray, Peter and Linda Murray. A Dictionary of Art and Artists. Middlesex,
England: Penguin, 1972.
O’Sullivan, Judith. The Great American Comic Strip. Boston: Bulfinch, 1990.
Spiegleman, Art. Introduction. The Complete Color Polly and Her Pals. Series
One: The Surrealist Period. Vol. 1. Ed. Richard Marschall. New York:
Abbeville, 1991: 5-6.
Yardly, Jonathan. “Alice’s Adventures in Comix World.” The News and Record
27 Sept. 1990: 19A.
Edward A. Shannon is a Lecturer in English at North Carolina State

University. He is completing his dissertation in English for the University of
North Carolina at Greensboro. The subject is Magic Realism in contemporary
American fiction and non-fiction.

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“That we may mis-unda-stendeach udda”:

The Rhetoric of Krazy Kat

On July 26, 1910, George Herriman introduced the prototypical

If we apply Bakhtin’s notions of the speech genre to Krazy Kut, and

existence. Thus, Herriman repeatedly presents, through two world wars

and the great depression, a world of peace, love, and understanding

Fig. 2. Kruzy Kut, November 3, 1940 (McDonnell 202). Reprinted with

permission of King Features Syndicate.

mission of King Features Syndicate.

permission of King Features Syndicate.

‘Bakhtin’s discussion of the “beginnings” and “ends” of Speech

Bakhtin, Mikhail. “From The Problems of Speech Genres.” The Rhetorical

Edward A. Shannon is a Lecturer in English at North Carolina State

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