A Kat, a Mouse, a Brick
Be not harsh with ‘Krazy.’ He is but a shadow
of himself caught in the web of this mortal skein.
—George Herriman (1880-1944)
Â
Charlie Chaplin, Jack Kerouac, R. Crumb, Quentin Tarantino.
Krazy Kat has some loyal fans.
Cartoonist George Herriman reprised the same plot
with shifting scenes of a dream-like Arizona landscape.
Characters: an androgynous & incurably romantic black Kat
in thrall to Ignatz, an outsized, stick-legged, pale-pink mouse
who routinely clobbers Kat with a brick. POW!
Kat mistakes each attack as proof of love.
Meanwhile, Offissa Pupp, who has fallen for the tormented
Kat, tries to protect him—or is it her?
A comic love triangle. Unrequited & surreal.
The strip’s biggest fan, William Randolph Hearst,
featured Krazy Kat in his newspapers for thirty years.
Â
Surprise ending: Three decades after Herriman’s death
it’s revealed that the gifted cartoonist—
who’d come to LA from New Orleans— was not ‘Greek’
as he claimed, but mixed-race Creole.
Herriman painstakingly kept his secret, wearing a hat—
day or night— to conceal his ‘knotty’ hair.
Friends remembered a shy, self-effacing man
who lived with wife & daughters in the Hollywood Hills.
Krazy Kat, a brilliant, prescient fable on race?
The cartoonist claimed he ‘just drew what he saw.’
In a 1921 cartoon, a bucket of whitewash falls on Kat.
Only briefly—does the mouse return his love. Then POW!
Â
Joan E. Bauer
Joan E. Bauer is the author of three full-length poetry collections, Fig Season (Turning Point, 2023), The Camera Artist (Turning Point, 2021), and The Almost Sound of Drowning (Main Street Rag, 2008). Recent work has appeared in Paterson Literary Review, Slipstream, Chiron Review, and Vox Populi: A Curated Webspace for Poetry, Politics, and Nature. Three of her poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. For some years, she was a teacher and counselor. She now divides her time between Venice, CA, and Pittsburgh, PA, where she co-curates Hemingway’s Summer Poetry Series with Kristofer Collins.
