Krazy Kat - History

History

Krazy Kat evolved from an earlier comic strip of Herriman's, The Dingbat Family, which started in 1910 and would later be renamed The Family Upstairs. This comic chronicled the Dingbats' attempts to avoid the mischief of the mysterious unseen family living in the apartment above theirs and to unmask that family. Herriman would complete the cartoons about the Dingbats, and finding himself with time left over in his 8-hour work day, filled the bottom of the strip with slapstick drawings of the upstairs family's mouse preying upon the Dingbats' cat.

This "basement strip" grew into something much larger than the original cartoon. It became a daily comic strip with a title (running vertically down the side of the page) on October 28, 1913 and a black and white full-page Sunday cartoon on April 23, 1916. Due to the objections of editors, who didn't think it was suitable for the comics sections, Krazy Kat originally appeared in the Hearst papers' art and drama sections. Hearst himself, however, enjoyed the strip so much that he gave Herriman a lifetime contract and guaranteed the cartoonist complete creative freedom.

Despite its low popularity among the general public, Krazy Kat gained a wide following among intellectuals. In 1922, a jazz ballet based on the comic was produced and scored by John Alden Carpenter; though the performance played to sold-out crowds on two nights and was given positive reviews in The New York Times and The New Republic, it failed to boost the strip's popularity as Hearst had hoped. In addition to Seldes and cummings, contemporary admirers of Krazy Kat included Willem de Kooning, H. L. Mencken, and Jack Kerouac. More recent scholars and authors have seen the strip as reflecting the Dada movement and prefiguring postmodernism.

Beginning in 1935, Krazy Kat's Sunday edition was published in full color. Though the number of newspapers carrying it dwindled in its last decade, Herriman continued to draw Krazy Kat—creating roughly 3,000 cartoons—until his death in April 1944 (the final page was published exactly two months later, on June 25). Hearst promptly canceled the strip after the artist died, because, contrary to the common practice of the time, he did not want to see a new cartoonist take over.