Volume 33, Number 20 · December 18, 1986
The Genius of George Herriman
By Adam Gopnik
Krazy Kat: The Comic Art of George Herriman
by Patrick McDonnell, by Karen O'Connell, by Georgia Riley de Havenon
Abrams, 223 pp., $14.95 (paper)
George Herriman was thirty-three when he solved the problem of evil. This was in 1913, when he introduced Ignatz the mouse into his comic strip, Krazy Kat. Because Krazy Kat includes Ignatz, the crazed brick-throwing rodent, we don't normally think of Herriman's Coconino County as an imaginary Eden, a highly personal vision of a perfectly harmonious place. But in a subtle and surprising way, Herriman's world isn't just Edenic, but really of all imaginary Edens the most like the original: it includes a serpent. The essential triangle and repeated action of Krazy Kat, the perpetual pavane-with-brick among Krazy, Ignatz, and Offissa Pupp, is more or less what would have happened had the Fall never taken place, and Adam and Eve (poetically represented in their presexual state as a single being, the sexually ambivalent Krazy), the Serpent (Ignatz), and the Archangel Michael (Offissa Pupp) been left alone in Eden forever.
Review, 6668 words
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