Essay

nickmartens — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 22:35:00 +0000

In his 1961 essay “On Modernist Painting,” Clement Greenberg describes what he believes is the essence of Modernism: “[It] lies, as I see it, in the use of the characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself–not in order to subvert it, but to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence” (Greenberg 27). He goes on to describe how the Modernist painters Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian tacitly admonished their historical predecessors, who relied on pictorial representation, by stripping painting down to its most fundamental attribute: its flatness. This process, artists working within a medium to rewrite the purpose of that medium, characterizes Modernism in Greenberg’s eyes. However, in his 1990 book Comics as Culture, M. Thomas Inge cites Felton Outcault’s The Yellow Kid, which began publishing in 1895, as the first modern comic strip (7). If we place the beginning of the Modernist period at the traditional date of 1914, then the medium of the comic strip had only 20 years of material upon which to base its rewriting of the medium’s purpose.
George Herriman’s comic strip Krazy Kat enters the discussion in 1913, shortly before the outbreak of the War. Surely this places him firmly in the camp of Modernism, which puts Herriman in the difficult position of needing to reinvent his medium in its gestational phase. I’m being facetious, of course, but this predicament illustrates the unique cultural challenges facing the comic strip in general and Herriman in specific as Modernism swept the western world. Herriman rose to the challenge of the era and created what is widely lauded today as a revolutionary and inventive comic. One would expect that such a work would have sent ripples through the medium, and that one would be able to see the influence of Krazy Kat throughout the comic strips of the 20th century, just as one might with the modernist masters of the novel or of poetry. Sadly, Krazy Kat seems to have no such lineage. Herriman’s masterpiece was unpopular in its own time, and Herriman took a hard artistic tack just as the rest of the medium veered towards popular culture and commercialism. The line of thinking opened by Krazy Kat sadly closed with Herriman’s death in 1944, to be picked up again only intermittently by comic strip luminaries trying to challenge the status quo.
The most recent artist to reignite the torch of Herriman’s legacy was Bill Watterson, who produced Calvin & Hobbes from 1985 to 1995. In the introduction to 1995’s Calvin & Hobbes 10th Anniversary Book, Watterson cites Walt Kelly’s Pogo and Charles Schulz’s Peanuts as major artistic influences, but gives special recognition to Herriman’s work. Watterson says “It is Krazy Kat, however, that fills me with the most awe today. Krazy Kat is more poetic than funny, with a charm that’s impossible to describe… The magic of the strip is not so much in what it says, but how it says it. In its singular, uncompromised vision, its subtle whimsy and its odd beauty, Krazy Kat stands alone” (Watterson 18).
In this light, it does not seem like a stretch to say that Calvin & Hobbes is a direct descendent of Krazy Kat, and that similarities between the two can be chalked up to more than mere coincidence. With the intermediating guidance of Scott McCloud’s ideas of abstraction and icon, I would like to make two arguments with regards to the relationship between Krazy Kat and Calvin & Hobbes. The first is that both authors employ abstraction (or a lack thereof) in their background illustrations to create an effect that is the opposite of what one would intuitively expect. Herriman’s amorphic, shape-shifting backgrounds actually serve as a unifying force in his surreal world, while the scrupulously realistic backgrounds in Watterson’s later comics deceive the reader by presenting fantasy as reality. My second argument has to do with the notion of iconographic actions. Krazy Kat centers on a single iconic action: Ignatz Mouse hurling a brick at Krazy Kat. This action is suffused with rhetorical meaning, and, indeed, the meaning of the entire comic is derived from one simple act. On the other hand, the iconic action of Calvin and Hobbes riding a wagon down a hill is devoid of meaning. Watterson uses this action as a canvas for conversation, but the action itself is rhetorically empty.
A few problems arise when trying to characterize Krazy Kat in broad strokes. The first is that the strip ran for over 30 years, over which time the strip developed immensely, as most comic strips tend to do. I believe that most of the specific points I will be making about the strip are basic enough that they apply to the majority of its run, but I may be mistaken in some cases. The other problem with Krazy Kat is that its collection has been sporadic and incomplete. Some of the strips have been lost to time, and others are only preserved in suboptimal condition. The collection from which I will be presenting strips is printed almost entirely in dark blue ink, despite the fact that many of the Sunday strips were printed in color, or colored by Herriman at a later date.
Nevertheless, enough of Herriman’s work remains intact that it is possible to draw conclusions from the available material. In researching the strip, I found that the word that is used perhaps most frequently to describe Krazy Kat is “surreal,” a description that seems fitting. The cast itself is a hodgepodge of strange anthropomorphic animals whose appearance is unusual, even for cartoon characters. The main characters, Krazy Kat, Ignatz Mouse, and Officer Pupp have oddly humanoid faces, and the supporting cast of animals are often proportioned unconventionally. The dialogue of strip also has the feeling of surreality to it, especially Krazy’s unplaceable dialect. A representative Krazy line would be: “y’know, ‘Ignatz Mice’ can toss a ‘Brick’ an’ make it ‘coive’ jess like a pitcha does a ‘baits ball’–do you?” which translates to: “do you know that Ignatz Mouse can toss a brick and make it curve just like a pitcher does a baseball?” (Herriman 66). As shown in a few of the the strips I will be using as evidence, the flow of conversation in the strips often feels unnatural, and many of the jokes follow a twisted logic if they follow any logic at all.
Krazy Kat, however, seems to be mostly remembered for three distinguishing attributes, each quite surreal in its own right. The first and probably most notable aspect about Krazy Kat is its ongoing “love triangle.” I will be discussing this point in more detail in the second part of this paper, so a brief summary will suffice for now. Basically, Ignatz Mouse, motivated by contempt, is hell-bent on throwing bricks at Krazy’s head. Krazy interprets these bricks as expressions of Ignatz’s love, and eagerly anticipates each assault. Officer Pupp is in love with Krazy, and therefore makes every effort to protect Krazy by imprisoning Ignatz for throwing bricks. Ignatz and Officer Pupp are unaware of Krazy’s interpretation of the situation, and Krazy is oblivious to the others’ motivations. This convoluted relationship served as the basis for 30 years of Krazy Kat comics.
Another notable point about Krazy Kat is the ambiguous nature of Krazy’s gender. Even in my abridged compilation, Krazy is referred to a both a male and a female. In the book’s introduction, E.E. Cummings treats Krazy as a female, but Herriman himself is quoted as saying that Krazy’s gender is undetermined. For the purposes of this essay, and in keeping in solidarity with Cummings, I will refer to Krazy as a female from this point forward. I should also point out that Herriman was not using Krazy’s gender to make what would at the time have been a radical statement about gender identity. The strip’s treatment of the concept of “love” is not romantic or sexual; Herriman always presents it as sweetly innocent.
The final widely-discussed element in Krazy Kat, and the focus of this section, is Herriman’s use of backgrounds. As you can see from my examples of Krazy Kat strips, the scenery shifts between panels. Note also that, even though the actions within some of these strips would surely consume no more time than a minute, day changes to night sporadically along with the panels. This is not by any means a rare occurrence; I can find no examples in my book of the background of a strip remaining consistent from panel to panel. I also want to establish that I am not in this paper making an effort to analyze whether the background shifts function symbolically in relation to the events in the strip. I am only interested in how the shifting background affects our expectations of Krazy’s world.
Scott McCloud, in his book Understanding Comics, does not present as complete a theory regarding the effect of visual simplicity and abstraction in setting as he does regarding characters, but he does touch on the subject briefly. He says “one expects audiences to identify with brick walls or landscapes and indeed, backgrounds tend to be slightly more realistic” (McCloud 42). He also describes the “masking effect,” wherein simply-drawn characters are placed in detailed settings. This, according to McCloud, “allows readers to mask themselves in a character and safely enter a sensually stimulating world” (43). Although he never states it explicitly, it seems to accord to McCloud’s theory that realistic settings are more relatable than abstract or simplified settings. If readers are given a nearly-photographic impression of a setting, it is easy to see how they could place themselves within that world. Conversely, a sparse, undefined setting is so clearly different from our own world that the mind struggles to escape into it. Regardless of whether McCloud intended this reading, it seems reasonable enough to me that I would like to discuss its implication regarding the settings of Krazy Kat and Calvin & Hobbes.
On paper, Krazy Kat sounds like a frantic, even manic comic strip. Essentially, a bunch of odd-looking animals run around a shape-shifting desert while a mouse throws bricks at a cat of indeterminate gender who interprets said bricks as love letters, all with little or no appeal to human logic. This description is accurate to the extent that the strip is totally unrelatable, to frame it in McCloud’s terms. Krazy Kat takes place in a world that is utterly unlike our own. However, one interesting aspect of the strip, which one would never predict from the above overview, is that the whole thing coheres in a surprisingly serene and harmonious way. Krazy’s world is so far detached from our own that questioning it seems absurd. Herriman uses a suite of artistic techniques to produce this effect, but the impact of the background, I think, is most inventive. In its abstract, unrealistic unpredictability, it actually makes Krazy’s world more believable rather than less.
Take this Sunday strip (fig. 1) as an example. It contains each of the three crucial aspects of Krazy Kat I mentioned earlier. The love triangle is actually amplified here, as Krazy not only waits for Ignatz, but she also provides him with her location and a brick. Officer Pupp confounds Ignatz’s attack, and we are left with the melancholy result of the whole cycle of misunderstanding. Moreover, Krazy’s gender ambiguity is in full effect, as she strikes a vaguely masculine pose in panel three and an overtly feminine one in panel eight. And, finally, the background fluctuates wildly throughout the strip, with buildings sprouting out of nowhere, night changing to day, and totally inconsistent rock formations.
This strip is representative, from what I can tell, of the whole of Krazy Kat. And, to be perfectly frank, nothing about it seems to make any sense whatsoever. A million questions could be asked about this strip alone, and none of them could satisfactorily be answered. What makes Herriman’s work so amazing is that, despite the strip’s apparent divorce from logic, the last panel is emotionally evocative. The reader actually believes Krazy’s loneliness and sympathizes with her. The background, besides being aesthetically wonderful, communicates to the reader that this is a world that plays by different rules than ours, so it is alright to give in to the characters.
Here, Herriman actually uses his backgrounds to undermine his own character’s motivations by placing them in a setting that is inconsistent. So, while each of these characters remains stagnant and undeveloped for thirty years, acting over and over again on cyclical motivations, they exist in a world where nothing is fixed. This tension, characters that never change in a world that can’t stop changing, manifests itself in Krazy herself. Her gender is in a constant state of flux, but her appearance is static. In a way, Herriman reverses the normal assumptions we make about the world. For us, the landscape and a person’s gender never change, but how someone looks and behaves is malleable. So, what at first seems like a world completely divorced from logic is actually just one in which our normal conception of logic is inverted. The shifting landscape, then, is a crucial aspect in making this world believable. If Krazy was in gender-flux in a normal world, readers would resist the idea much more than they would in a shifting world. Herriman, in effect, tricks us into believing the world of Krazy Kat by making all metrics of believability irrelevant.
Bill Watterson, in Calvin & Hobbes, plays exactly the opposite trick with his settings. In the later years of the strip, when Watterson demanded that he be given free reign over the format of his Sunday strips, he began to emphasize a certain aspect of Calvin’s fantasies: their realism. Figure 2 is a strip from 1992, and it is roughly representative of the level of detail Watterson includes in his “real” settings. A certain amount of “masking effect” takes place here–the scenery in panel two is surely more detailed than Calvin’s character–but on the whole it is still relatively cartoony. The scenery in the final panel of figure 3, by comparison, is much more elaborate (a brief aside: Watterson actually acknowledges that his desert-scapes are inspired by Krazy Kat). By doing this, Watterson positions the less detailed–less realistic–setting as “real,” while his fantasy settings (of which there are many more examples) are not realistic in the sense that they portray real places, but more realistic in that they are more detailed. Both effects can be seen at play simultaneously in figure 4.
The fact that Watterson is able to use this technique effectively complicates the notion of how setting works in comic strips. In Calvin & Hobbes the worlds that look less like our world are “real,” and those that look more like our world are “fantasy.” To understand this effect, I think we must again consider why Krazy Kat’s backgrounds are effective. I suggest above that they work because they are part of a larger system, of a different world, the rules of which we understand to be different from our own. Calvin & Hobbes is different from Krazy Kat, however, in that Calvin’s world very nearly approximates our own. The only real world rules that Watterson breaks in an egregious way pertain to the nature of Hobbes’s existence and to the process of aging. Yet, we still understand that, even in Calvin’s eminently relatable world, more realistic settings are equated with fantasy. Watterson, I think, is not so much constructing a logical system as he is a visual language. The realistic settings are, essentially, a kind of visual hyperbole. Perhaps this technique was confusing when he first used it, but he eventually trained the readership to read certain visual cues the same way that they would read a figurative device in a novel.
To bring this back to McCloud, a question remains as to whether the masking effect is more prevalent in Watterson’s more realistic strips. That is to say, is it easier to put ourselves in Calvin’s place as he is perched over the precipice than it is when he stalls at the bottom of the hill? For as often as I disagree with McCloud’s notions of relatability , I have to say that I agree with him in this instance. As a lifelong Calvin & Hobbes reader, this comic sticks out in my mind as evoking among the most powerful reactions of any Calvin & Hobbes strip. Perhaps it is just because the fear of heights is an elemental human reaction, but, for some reason, the sprawling landscape below Calvin’s sled seems to encourage me to see that vista from Calvin’s eyes. The effect, then, is that not only do Calvin’s fantasies look more real than the strip’s reality, but they feel more real and they are more relatable. Watterson, rather than bolstering his world’s reality with his treatment of setting, actually subverts “reality” by making the fantasy more realistic. Watterson likely meant to use the realistic fantasies to emphasize Calvin’s vivid imagination, and he seems to have succeeded, but he, like Herriman, makes it surprisingly difficult to pin down a precise definition of reality within the world of Calvin & Hobbes.

*****
McCloud offers a wonderfully clear definition of the word icon: “[an icon is] any image used to represent a person, place, thing or idea” (27). I, of course, need to contort and mangle his theory to apply it to a related, but importantly distinct, area: iconic actions within comics. Specifically, I want to apply ideas about iconography to the action of Ignatz throwing a brick at Krazy and compare it to the action of Calvin and Hobbes charging down a hill on their wagon. The important distinction arises in that I am not examining the brick or the wagon as icons (although those objects do function iconographically) but rather the implications that arise from how the characters use these objects. So, I am not interested in the symbolism contained within the brick, nor the power that the brick bestows upon Ignatz, but rather how the entire premise of Krazy Kat hinges on the event of Ignatz throwing a brick at Krazy.
Krazy Kat is a singularly interesting artwork for a variety of reasons, but perhaps the most intriguing element of the strip is how it could possibly stay focused on the same simple premise for its entire 30-year run. The anthology that I am using for this paper indicates that Herriman’s tunnel-vision is nearly complete. The strip strays from the brick occasionally, but from the earliest example of proto-Krazy Kat from 1911–which ran as a kind of lagniappe alongside an earlier Herriman strip–to comics from the ‘40s, the Krazy-Ignatz-Officer Pupp triangle always seems to take center stage. Herriman’s obsessive dedication to the same joke has, understandably, come to represent the whole of Krazy Kat. And, as one might expect, the action of Ignatz throwing the brick at Krazy has come to represent Herriman’s obsession, hence, it represents all of Krazy Kat.
In searching for Krazy Kat material on the web, I began to realize just how pervasive this icon has become. Not only is it reproduced (poorly) on the cover of my collection (fig. 5), but it also sits atop the Krazy Kat wikipedia entry, it is featured on several more Krazy Kat collections on Amazon.com, and the action of Ignatz hitting Krazy with the brick figures into ten of the top fifteen hits on a Google image search for “Krazy Kat.” What fascinates me about this phenomenon is how well this single iconic action captures the entire breadth of a thirty-year comic strip. In fact, to introduce a new reader to the vast archive of Krazy Kat material, one only need explain the dynamics of the brick-throwing to the newcomer (granted, it’s a long and twisted explanation). This single action, then, is positively brimming with rhetorical value. It is like a concentrated distillation of Herriman’s life’s work: the volume of content is comparatively infinitesimal, but it contains the entire essence of Krazy Kat.
How, then, did Herriman himself exploit the potency of this action? Obviously, earlier statements about the impossibility of broadly categorizing Krazy Kat pertain here, but I found a few examples in my volume that speak to the subject of iconography. The first is the Sunday strip I presented earlier (fig. 1). This strip shows why I chose to describe the throwing as an iconic action rather than an iconic image: the icon (the action of Ignatz throwing the brick) has rhetorical value even in its absence from the strip. In fact, for a significant percentage of the Krazy Kat strips that I have read, the state of Herriman’s world hinges on whether Ignatz throws the brick or not. The action’s presence hangs over each strip like a thundercloud, threatening to descend and consume the strip’s focus at any time. Ignatz’s iconic action is so pervasive throughout Krazy Kat that Herriman (in fig. 1) is able to reduce even the struggle between Ignatz and Officer Pupp to an interaction so simple that it approaches iconic status itself. The second-to-last panel expresses, with four words, the fact that Ignatz has Followed Krazy’s trail and is preparing the hurl the brick, but is foiled by Officer Pupp, who we assume was following Ignatz. By never changing the conflict of the strip, Herriman can remove the need for exposition or explanation because any Krazy Kat reader would read each strip with the assumption of that conflict in his/her mind.
Figure 6 shows some of the ways that Herriman plays with Ignatz’s iconic action. The top strip, in particular, shows that the brick hurling has mathematical repercussions within the world of the strip. If Ignatz throws two bricks, Krazy feels twice the love, and Ignatz gets double jailed. While Herriman is clearly joking here, each of the strips on this page speaks to the notion that the action of Ignatz throwing a brick has automatic and fundamental meaning in Herriman’s world. In fact, Figure 6 can be construed as a demonstration of the physics of Krazy Kat. Just as there are laws and equations that govern mass and energy in our world, brick-hurling can be explained by equations in Krazy’s. This is all a bit silly, I realize, but the overall point I want to make is that meaning in Krazy’s world, much of the time, springs forth from the action of Ignatz throwing the brick. His action (or lack thereof) defines the essence of the strip just as it defines the events that happen within the strip. Using McCloud’s definition, the iconic action of Ignatz hurling the brick represents the entirety of Krazy Kat.
Since this single action is so central to the concept of Krazy Kat, and since Watterson seems to hold Herriman in such high regard, I was initially dismayed that there does not seem to be a corresponding iconic action in Calvin & Hobbes. I can think of a few actions that, if I wanted to reach, I could portray as iconic–Hobbes pouncing on Calvin as he comes through the door, the throwing of snowballs (a tempting but misleading line of inquiry), the playing of Calvinball–but none hold the same iconic weight as a good lob from Ignatz. What I realized, though, is that there is an iconic action within Calvin & Hobbes that serves the opposite rhetorical purpose of Ignatz’s throw: the riding of the wagon.
First, the action of Calvin riding his wagon down a hill at breakneck speed is, like Ignatz’s throw, and iconic action rather than an iconic object/image because Watterson uses Calvin’s radio-flyer sled and toboggan in just the same manner. Moreover, it is not important that Calvin and Hobbes are using whichever toy to get them down the mountain, it only matters that they are, indeed, going down the mountain. Granted, this action is not nearly as pervasive as Ignatz’s throw, neither in terms of public perception nor in its significance within the strip, but, then, there is nothing in all of comics that has the same resonance as Ignatz’s simple action. However, Calvin and Hobbes are depicted riding down a mountain on several of the Calvin & Hobbes book covers, including the first, and Watterson sends the duo off into retirement on their toboggan in the final strip, so the action of flying down the mountain clearly has some resonance, both outside and within the world of the comic.
Figures 7 and 8, though, show that Watterson’s treatment of his iconic action is completely different from Herriman’s. Rather than being placed at the center of attention, the wagon riding is either used metaphorically or it is entirely ignored in the narrative of a given strip. While Calvin and Hobbes, in early strips, sometimes talk about the ride while they rush down the mountain, by the later strips Watterson divorces the dialogue from the ride. But, if an icon must represent something, as McCloud suggests, then what does the action of Calvin and Hobbes riding down the mountain represent? I know that it is generally considered unsporting to quote the author in this kind of discussion, but Watterson comments in the 10th Anniversary Book that “I most often use [Calvin’s wagon] when Calvin gets longwinded or philosophical” (104). Looking at the later wagon strips, I can see that Watterson is no Faulkner, so we can take him at his word when it comes to his own work. If this is the case, then Calvin’s ride down the mountain represents a kind of emptying of visual rhetoric. When Calvin jumps on the wagon, Watterson is declaring that the the narrative potential of the strip’s visuals has been ceded to the dialogue, and that the artwork will, at most, underscore certain patterns or themes in the characters’ speech. Further, it represents the opening of Calvin’s mind. As the visuals fade into the background, one gets the sense that this kind of reckless action somehow sets the boy’s mischievous brain free. When Calvin is hurtling down the mountain, we are seeing his thoughts by a means much less crude than a thought bubble. Just as Calvin seems oblivious to the scenery, the effect of the visuals recedes from the mind of the reader. So, while Ignatz’s throw dominates the narrative of its strip, Calvin’s ride leaves the narrative untouched. Ignatz’s throw carries the meaning of the entire comic, while Calvin’s ride unburdens the strip from the weight of the visuals.
*****[PET THEORY ALERT]*****
When I began this essay, I ran a quick search on the MLA database to see if it returned any results for the terms “Bill Watterson” or “Calvin & Hobbes.” I did not expect to find a vast literature digging into the nuances of Watterson’s work, but I was nevertheless disappointed when not a single article matched my queries. This strikes me as something of an injustice. There are dozens of articles on Krazy Kat, some that even examine details such as Herriman’s depiction of race. I realize that Krazy Kat is a surrealist work written during Modernism, and thus is fertile breeding ground for critical discussion, but in carefully reading these two strips for this paper, I found Watterson’s work to be as artistically relevant as Herriman’s. In fact, the relative dearth of Calvin & Hobbes discussion in this essay is not because the strip is less complex than Krazy Kat. Rather, Calvin & Hobbes, to me at least, is subtler and more impenetrable in its execution. In thinking long enough about Krazy Kat I was eventually able to reach what felt like stable critical ground upon which to base my arguments. With Calvin and Hobbes, I would run into a tangle of sticky questions whenever I plumbed to deep into its treatment of images. I would go as far as to say that Calvin & Hobbes feels Post-Modern next to Krazy Kat’s Modernism. If modernism, as Greenberg suggests, forced artists to tear down their mediums to their barest forms, then Herriman fits the bill. His strip is one joke, told over and over, for thirty years. for a gag-based strip, it is hard to see how a more basic representation of the medium could exist.
Watterson, then, built the medium back up on the foundation laid by Herriman. Sure Calvin & Hobbes was playful, funny and popular, but what else is a newspaper comic supposed to be? Watterson had no William Randolph Hearst to keep his loopy, unpopular comic afloat. Every question that seems simple to answer when looking at Herriman becomes difficult in Watterson. The fact that it seems so effortless and simple belies the delicate construction of the later Calvin & Hobbes strips. Every time I expect examining Calvin & Hobbes to be easy, I end up confounded. More and more, I suspect that Watterson came to leave nothing to chance.

Nick Martens

Essay

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