Re-viewing the Earliest Krazy Kat Dailies: Reception, Distribution, Remediation

For nearly thirty years the new modernist studies have expanded our topics of study along vertical and horizontal axes, embracing archival, historicist, and cultural methodologies and internationalizing the authors, movements, and materials we investigate.[1] Innovative analyses of modernism’s engagements with politics, radio, journalism, film, celebrity, music, and periodicals of every sort, and of modernisms across the globe proliferate. Yet the massive archive of modern comics—which includes newspaper comic strips, the gag comics of the smart magazines, the satirical comics of mass newspapers and little magazines, the superhero and genre comic books of the late thirties and beyond, and the graphic narratives, novels, and memoirs of the later twentieth century, many produced in locations other than Anglo-America—remains understudied, only recently attracting the attention it deserves from scholars of modernism and modernity. This neglect is even more surprising because comics responded to modernity in all its facets, took up such a variety of popular genres, and engaged such large and varied audiences—low, middle, and highbrow.

Along with The Journal of Modern Literature’s 2016 cluster on comics and modernism, edited by Jackson Ayres, and the Modernist Studies Association’s 2018 conference on the theme of Graphic Modernisms, held in Columbus Ohio, home of the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum, and Jonathan Najarian’s edited volume Comics and Modernism: History, Form, and Culture (University Press of Mississippi, 2024), this Print Plus cluster on “Modernism in Comics” confirms that scholars of modernism and modernity are at last starting to accord comics the attention they warrant.[2] But it has taken a curiously long time to arrive here. Our field’s slow turn toward comics results in part, I suspect, from the U. S. academy’s enduring neglect of comics as a medium and field of study. Evidently, the twentieth century’s damning critiques of mass and popular cultural forms, from intellectuals of the left and right, has persisted longer regarding comics than other forms of “lumpen” culture—even among “new modernists” committed to expand our studies to less esteemed cultural forms. Thankfully, times are changing, and comics and comic studies are finding a growing foothold in the academy. The field of comic studies is thriving, with students flocking to courses featuring comics and graphic narratives, academic departments hiring faculty with expertise in the field, and scholars producing insightful studies on all aspects of comics. Just as modernist studies have been enriched by engagements with other fields and methodologies—feminist and gender studies, ethnic American studies, critical race theory, ecocriticism, science studies, queer theory, disability studies, periodical studies, etc.—our field will be enriched by engagements with comic studies and the archives of modern comics.

My remit in this cluster is to contribute to that effort by reconsidering, again, the case of George Herriman’s famed Krazy Kat comic. For more than three decades, the familiar story goes, Herriman’s quirky, gender fluid cat, Krazy, and their companions, Ignatz mouse and “Offisa” Pupp, repetitively enacted across Herriman’s dynamic and surreal Southwestern landscapes a mythic love/hate triangle—in which (white) mouse compulsively seeks to throw bricks at (black) cat’s head, cat compulsively seeks such assaults as proofs of the mouse’s love, and (white) dog compulsively seeks to thwart their inverted, sadomasochistic cat and mouse game. Accompanying this repetitive slapstick routine, Herriman’s characters performed a strange and comical verbal give and take, making jokes, queering various polarities (black/white, male/female, love/hate, human/animal), and raising suggestive questions about race, gender, identity, representation, and reality. Animated by this unlikely alchemy, Herriman’s strip achieved that status rarely accorded the ephemeral medium of newspaper comics: it became a canonical classic.

Yet despite the insights of the best scholarly studies of Krazy Kat, this classic of vernacular or popular modernism remains occluded by mythological generalizations.[3] For while Krazy Kat was published as a daily strip for thirty-one years and as a full– or half–page Sunday strip for twenty-eight, too many accounts tend to flatten out the various techniques and innovations Herriman developed over his strip’s career and to reiterate rather than complicate those generalizations. As Sarah Boxer and Aaron Humphrey argue, these difficulties result from the longtime inaccessibility of most Krazy Kat comics and analysts’ attendant dependence on a limited number of strips reproduced (often out of sequence and without original publication dates) in a small number of collections.[4] Not until 1988 was a full-scale effort undertaken to reproduce the full run of Herriman’s celebrated Sunday Krazy Kat comics. Eclipse Books/Turtle Island Foundation launched the effort under the guidance of comics scholar and archivist Bill Blackbeard. Fantagraphics took over in 2002 and completed the project in 2012 (Boxer, “Krazy Kriticism”). Nonetheless, most Krazy Kat daily strips remain comparatively inaccessible, spottily available in out-of-print small press reprints of individual years of the comic’s publication, on fan websites, in digital newspaper archives, and on microfilm.

Responding to the dearth of studies focused on specific periods in Krazy Kat’s publication history and the related tendency to elide differences in Herriman’s innovations across that history, I consider the earliest Krazy Kat dailies published just after Herriman’s comic became an independent daily strip (October 1913), but before the appearance of regular Krazy Kat Sunday comics (April 1916). My essay seeks to elevate this early period of Herriman’s comic from its typical position in the criticism as a less interesting and inventive prelude to the celebrated modernist experimentalism of the Krazy Kat Sundays. Instead, I treat the earliest dailies as comprising a distinctive period in the career of a major popular modernist, worthy of recognition for its own particular virtues.

Put in different terms, my discussion of the earliest Krazy Kat dailies aims to unsettle and complicate the critical consensus on Herriman’s comic established over the past hundred years. In the earliest dailies, at least, we discover aspects of Krazy Kat and its development inadequately registered in the criticism. Analysis of the earliest dailies offers at least four significant benefits. First, the earliest dailies complicate several critical commonplaces about Krazy Kat, demonstrating the value of studying particular periods in the strip’s history and individual strips from those periods. Second, these dailies clarify how Herriman’s early creation of Krazy Kat depended on and responded to the material and economic realities of comic strip production and distribution during the 1910s. Third, the earliest dailies bring into clearer focus the comic’s creative remediations of the modes and methods of vaudeville; no passing fancy that Krazy Kat quickly moves beyond in its teleological trajectory to modernist greatness, Herriman’s adaptations from vaudevillian comedy constitute a foundational factor in the strip’s thematics and aesthetics, shaping in significant ways the entire run of Herriman’s comic. Fourth, because the Krazy Kat dailies foreground neglected but significant traffic occurring between “lowbrow” popular cultural forms—like comic strips and vaudeville—and the self-consciously experimental practices of more esteemed modernisms, they prompt us to rethink more seriously relations between comics (and other “lowbrow” practices and products) and modernism, acknowledging, at last, those relations as integral to each other.

Reconsidering Reception

The earliest dailies complicate prevailing critical accounts of Krazy Kat in part because they confirm that several features understood as defining for Herriman’s comic were absent, differently configured, or only intermittently present. These dailies certainly do, as critics suggest, show Herriman first formulating concerns and techniques that would become signal features of Krazy Kat and impress highbrow and middlebrow readers in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s (inverted food chain, language play, shifting environments), as well as those features that most interest scholars today (meta-mediality; fascination with racial and gender identity). Yet the earliest dailies do not yet consistently portray or portray differently other “defining” features: not only the extravagant proliferation and manipulation of panel and page formats so characteristic of the Krazy Kat Sundays, but also the brick-throwing gag; the dynamic landscapes and backgrounds; the character and role of Bull Pupp; and, most interestingly, the love-hate relationship between Krazy and Ignatz.

If there is a single feature of Herriman’s Krazy Kat repeated so consistently as to have become a critical truism, it is the omnipresence of the brick throwing gag: “Each strip,” in one scholar’s words, “culminates in the mouse’s hurling a brick at the Kat’s head.”[5] While the earliest Krazy Kat dailies strips regularly—though not always—conclude with Ignatz throwing (or preparing to throw) an object at Krazy’s head, the projectile is often not a brick: Ignatz more often throws rocks; but he also tosses a range of other objects, usually related to that day’s particular gag (figs. 1–2).

Despite the critical consensus that among the most characteristic and inventive aspects of Herriman’s Krazy Kat is the strip’s “kaleidoscopic landscape—the deserts of Coconino County, Arizona,” where “the background changes from one panel to the next,”[6] the verbal and slapstick exchanges between Krazy and Ignatz in the earliest dailies do not take place in environments identifiable as Herriman’s Coconino. Herriman does dynamize his characters’ surroundings in these comics, but in ways restrained by the earliest dailies’ unusual format of five vertically oriented panels typically run in a vertical column.[7] Thus while these dailies lack the mesas and flora of Herriman’s surreal Southwest depicted in the Sundays, Herriman mobilizes other aspects of his characters’ environment in other ways. At times, these shifts can be relatively subtle, as objects or plants move or transform around Krazy and Ignatz, as in many Krazy Kat Sunday strips and later dailies (figs. 2–3). Sometimes, however, Herriman shifts the contents of his strip’s five vertical panels more jarringly, placing Krazy and Ignatz in entirely different environments from panel to panel (fig. 4). The earliest Krazy Kat dailies suggest, in fact, that Herriman first developed his signature dynamic landscapes to inject visual variety and energy into a panel format unusually constrained—an example of Herriman’s characteristic experiments in creativity under constraint.[8]

Another feature iterated in the criticism as foundational to Krazy Kat’s formula is the “triangular love story” of Krazy, Ignatz, and Offisa Pupp (Krazy Kat, 26). Not only do the earliest dailies lack the mythic cat–mouse–dog love-hate triangle, but they also render Pupp’s character and role differently than the Sundays and later dailies. Pupp appears relatively infrequently, often simply as a dog (not a police officer), whose relations with both Krazy and Ignatz are more stereotypically dog-like: he shows equal antipathy to cat and mouse, both of whom fear and distrust him (fig. 5). 

And while Pupp occasionally appears as an officer of the law, sporting a police helmet, he displays no particular interest in protecting Krazy, stopping Ignatz from throwing things at Krazy’s head, or jailing Ignatz (fig. 6).

Most important, the relationship between Krazy and Ignatz in the earliest dailies is more varied than critical commonplaces allow. Ignatz is already prompted to bean Krazy, usually out of frustration or anger. But Krazy does not always desire beaning or read it as a love token (figs. 7–18). 

Occasionally, Ignatz demonstrates not only friendship for Krazy but affection (figs. 8–16). 

And while Krazy occasionally refers to Ignatz as “Darlink” or “Enjel” and imagines their love and marriage, at this early stage in their relations, at least (fig. 9), Krazy and Ignatz resemble less a pair of obsessive lover-haters, more often a slapstick comedy team on a vaudeville stage.

It’s useful to reflect a bit further on the absence or embryonic presence in the earliest dailies of characteristics so often asserted as defining and constant. To be sure, their lack and/or nascence result in part, as those accounts that engage the earliest dailies suggest, from Herriman developing over time the key qualities of his comic in response to the demanding conditions of mass comic strip production. Nonetheless, acknowledging the ways Herriman configured the components of Krazy Kat in the earliest dailies can help us appreciate better the specificity of his innovations and achievement in this early, formative moment as well as the dynamism of his creativity across his comic’s career.

Recovering Distribution

The early dailies also complicate critical accounts of Krazy Kat because they foreground underappreciated material realities of comic strip production, syndication, and distribution in the 1910s that conditioned the initial presentation and consumption of Herriman’s strip. Between late-October 1913, when Krazy Kat became a fully independent daily strip, and mid-April 1916, when its first full-page Sunday comic appeared, Herriman produced roughly 750 daily Krazy Kat strips—even as he continued to crank out his earlier Dingbat Family daily strip (where Krazy Kat originated before becoming an independent comic). Given the sheer scale of this output, it isn’t unreasonable to consider Herriman and his fellow cartoonists as modern industrial laborers, mass producing comic strips day in and day out, as Peter Sattler and Tim Blackmore have suggested regarding the strips of Herriman and Windsor McCay, respectively.[9] Little wonder, then, that Herriman—like many of his colleagues—embraced a central gag as a structural backbone around which he continuously played, developing over time Krazy Kat’s other signature thematic concerns and visual techniques. [10]

What’s more, the realities of the national syndication of comic strips in the 1910s created significant variations in the distribution and consumption of Herriman’s earliest Krazy Kat dailies. Critics acknowledge that as Herriman’s style grew more eccentric and experimental over Krazy Kat’s run, the comic’s popularity with readers declined, prompting comic editors across William Randolph Hearst’s syndicate to omit it from local newspapers, until only a small number of papers ran the comic.[11] This account fairly describes the strip’s later years but neglects the fact that Krazy Kat appeared inconsistently in U.S. papers from its earliest publication. Although Aaron Humphrey productively analyzes the influence of Krazy Kat’s publication after Herriman’s death on the comic’s reception, he is less concerned with variations in its publication and reception during the author’s lifetime (“The Cult of Krazy Kat,” 1–24). Even those few scholars whose accounts of Krazy Kat are laudably based not on collections of selected strips, but on archival research, have relied on the archives of Hearst’s flagship papers, the New York Journal and the Los Angeles Examiner, which most consistently ran Herriman’s strip as he produced it. Unfortunately, these justifiable scholarly choices have led analysts to neglect the inconsistencies of comic strip publication and distribution in the 1910s and Herriman’s creative responses to them.

Despite the influence of Hearst’s syndicate, early-century comic editors had significant latitude about how, where, and when they ran daily strips. Some newspapers, including the Buffalo Enquirer, Baltimore Evening Sun, and Oregon Daily Journal, ran regular daily comic pages; many others, including the South Bend News Times, El Paso Herald, Lincoln Daily Star, Minneapolis Morning Tribune, St. Louis Star and Times, and Scranton Truth, did not. On daily comics pages, the earliest Krazy Kat dailies usually appeared—when they did—in the uncommon vertical format down the right or left edge of the comic page, as noted above. This format meant that comic editors had considerable leeway regarding the Krazy Kat dailies: on one hand, Herriman’s strip, unlike most others at the time, could fill in for a vertical column of type on any page, increasing the likelihood that it might appear on any given day; yet, on the other, Krazy Kat was more susceptible than most comics, designed to run horizontally, to replacement by a column of type if print space was needed. Although Herriman produced six daily strips each week, Krazy Kat did not appear daily in many, perhaps most newspapers where it ran. Adding to the inconsistencies of its appearance from newspaper to newspaper, the daily Krazy Kat comic ran in some papers in the more conventional horizontal strip format despite the vertical format in which Herriman designed it (fig. 10). Moreover, the same Krazy Kat strip might appear in different newspapers on different days. And because Herriman’s dailies typically did not develop narratives across multiple days, as some of the period’s family or kids’ comics did, Krazy Kat was especially vulnerable to variations in the order in which comic editors published individual dailies. In short, the earliest Krazy Kat daily comics appeared inconsistently in terms of frequency, format, and order across the newspapers that printed it, contributing to the vagaries of its reception from the start.[12]

Most significant, given the demanding material conditions under which Herriman labored in producing the earliest Krazy Kat dailies and the variations in their publication and distribution, were his creative responses to the comic’s constrained five-panel vertical format. We can witness Herriman first elaborating the vertical format out of a Dingbat Family strip of mid-September 1913 (fig. 11). Although one Krazy Kat daily from early November 1913 shows Herriman dilating the comic from five to eight panels and making this expanded format integral to the strip’s gag, the earliest Krazy Kat comics from that point on worked tightly within the five-panel vertical format (fig. 12). Adapting to the constraining—and sometimes shifting—conditions of publication as he would throughout his career, Herriman found innovation for the earliest Krazy Kat dailies not in the proliferating panels, inventive layouts, expansive landscapes, and elaborate visual activity typical of the Sundays and so often celebrated by scholars, but in his characters’ quirky verbal exchanges and slapstick gags.

Remediating Vaudeville

Most interestingly, the earliest Krazy Kat dailies unsettle critical accounts of Krazy Kat by bringing into clearer focus Herriman’s innovative remediations of the low-brow and populist modes of vaudeville. Jean Lee Cole has established that during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, a new “comic sensibility” developed in the U.S., animated by the various immigrant groups that increasingly populated American cities and transformed American culture. This sensibility provided “the comic foundation” for a range of popular cultural forms, especially “the vaudeville stage, the weekly humor magazines, and the new comic supplements” (Cole, How the Other Half Laughs, 22). It is unsurprising, then, that scholars who have discussed the earliest Krazy Kat dailies register in passing their vaudevillian resemblances. But such accounts treat those traits as characteristics in a brief stage that Krazy Kat matures out of on its teleological trajectory to the modernist greatness of the Sundays.[13]

Krazy Kat was not the only period comic strip that reconfigured the modes of vaudeville. Numerous comics of the time echoed vaudevillian jokes and relied on varieties of slapstick violence.[14] But Herriman’s remediations of vaudeville comedy were distinctive not only because they took place within the confines of the five-panel, vertical format strip but also because they occurred within the genre of the animal comic, a point to which I’ll return.

As I’ll argue now, analyzing how the earliest Krazy Kat dailies transfigured what Henry Jenkins calls the “vaudeville aesthetic” and its “anti-realist” modes of performance confirms that Herriman’s vaudevillian adaptations constitute a foundational factor in his strip’s thematics and aesthetics.[15] A significant number of the attributes now seen as Krazy Kat’s signal characteristics were elaborated from vaudeville: the mix of verbal comedy and slapstick violence; the frequent recourses to song and dance; the regular appearance of curtains and footlights around panels; the querying and queering of gender and racial distinctions; the meta-medial foregrounding of and joking about the materiality and conventions of the comic strip medium; and the strip’s language play and, especially, Krazy’s idiosyncratic dialect.

The early dailies’ reliance on vaudeville is most evident in their centering of the banter and slapstick violence of Krazy and Ignatz, as Ben Schwartz has noted. “As a team,” Schwartz explains, “Krazy and Ignatz are not far removed from the leading stage comedians of their day, [Joe] Weber and [Lew] Fields,” whose famed German or “Dutch” (from Deutsche) act combined “verbal warfare,” delivered in a caricatured German dialect, and slapstick knockabout.[16] The earliest dailies typically present Krazy and Ignatz as a vaudeville comedy duo not unlike Weber and Fields, with a “straight man” (Ignatz) and simpler-minded eccentric, stooge, or “nut” character (Krazy), repeatedly engaging in conversations that culminate with a joke, often based on a malapropism, mispronunciation, or misunderstanding, and an act (or attempted act) of slapstick violence (figs. 1, 10, 13).

Vaudeville’s influence is equally apparent in Krazy’s gender ambiguity. Crossfire comedy teams like Weber and Fields not only combined verbal humor and slapstick violence, as the earliest Krazy Kat dailies do; they also paired hostility and affection. For every act of physical abuse that Meyer (Fields) inflicted on Mike (Weber), or vice versa, they would as often proclaim their mutual affection. While the mingling of hostility and affection that came to define Krazy Kat’s humor eventually solidified into a more fixed and asymmetrical configuration (with Krazy affectionate and Ignatz hostile), in the earliest dailies those roles were less rigidly defined, with both characters periodically expressing hostility and affection for each other. Vaudeville comedy also mingled affection and hostility in its sendups of modern married life, Victorian gender roles, and marital infidelity.[17] Following that lead, family comic strips like George McManus’s Bringing Up Father, Cliff Sterrett’s Polly and her Pals, and Herriman’s Dingbat Family joked continuously about modern marriage and gender roles. The early Krazy Kat dailies regularly engaged in such humor as well, though their protagonists were neither human nor married. Unlike most marriage gags common to the vaudeville stage and the comics page, Herriman’s remediations of such comedy more concertedly queered normative gender categories, evoking vaudeville’s cross dressing and gender reversing comedy.[18] But while cross-dressing vaudeville entertainers’ performances relied primarily on gender reversal, with male-identifying entertainers performing normative female roles and female-identifying entertainers performing normative male roles, Krazy’s gender switching more insistently scrambled and denaturalized those roles (figs. 14–15). Indeed, the earliest dailies offer suggestive evidence that Herriman may have developed Krazy’s gender fluidity as he spun out vaudevillian gags around marriage in response to the pressures of producing new gags day in and day out.

Herriman’s self-reflexive referencing and joking about the conventions of his comic’s medium too owes something to vaudeville comedy. In line with vaudeville’s anti-realist aesthetics, performers would often break the fourth wall and speak directly to audiences, calling attention to the means of their medium and joking at the expense of other performers and audience members (Jenkins, What Made Pistachio Nuts?, 75–76). Julius (Groucho) Marx, for example, honed this practice in the two-man exchanges he developed with his eldest brother Leonard (Chico) once the latter joined the brothers’ troupe for their elaborate school act, Mr. Green’s Reception in 1912.[19] Herriman translated such meta-medial techniques into a number of the earliest Krazy Kat dailies where Krazy, Ignatz, or both interrupt their banter to address readers, calling attention to the conventions of the comic strip medium (figs. 16, 17, 18).

But perhaps the most interesting of Krazy Kat’s vaudevillian features is the comic’s humorous and inventive play with language and Krazy’s unique and synthetic dialect. Herriman’s linguistic innovations have been discussed repeatedly since the 1910s.[20] But their reliance on and resonances with the modalities of vaudeville have not. In an illuminating essay on where Herriman’s distinctive language in Krazy Kat “came from,” for example, Jeet Heer identifies a range of linguistic sources, including frat house beer songs, popular ditties, sermons, political speeches, the patter of carnival barkers and newspaper hawkers, the King James Bible, poetry both popular and literary, and medical and scientific discourse of the period.[21] Despite the variety of cultural materials Heer justly cites as sources for Krazy Kat’s distinctive language, he omits the rich, varied, and comical languages of vaudeville. Yet the very same linguistic materials Heer identifies as grist for Herriman’s comic mill were also key resources for vaudeville humor.

Once we acknowledge Herriman’s early remediations of vaudeville comedy, we can recognize the eclectic verbal jousting and jesting between Krazy and Ignatz as well as Krazy’s eccentric, polyglot, and synthetic dialect as verbal techniques translated from the vaudeville stage to the comics page. As Jenkins, Cole, Paul Distler, and Gavin Jones have shown, such linguistic misunderstandings, malapropisms, and jokes were essential components of the racial and ethnic caricature so characteristic of vaudeville comedy—and the minstrel show before it.[22] But in Krazy Kat, Herriman—the mixed-race cartoonist who passed professionally as white—transmuted those modes of vaudevillian wordplay through the genre of the animal comic from tools of racial and ethnic caricature and comedy into Krazy’s sublime, synthetic speech.[23]

This insight elaborates on the related arguments of Cole and Ian Gordon. Gordon contends that Krazy Kat participated obliquely in a process of commodifying and deracinating the racist caricatures of black Americans so prevalent in minstrelsy, vaudeville, and early comic strips. As newspaper comics spread across the U.S., extending readership in terms of region and class, black comic strip characters and racial humor lost popularity. Nonetheless, Gordon suggests, stereotypes of blackness could “be reanimated in such a way” as to “become available for broader comedic and commercial purposes.” Comic creators and animators deracinated these “African American typographies” by attaching them not to black characters but to animals, like Pat Sullivan’s Felix the Cat, Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse, and Herriman’s Krazy Kat (Gordon, Comic Strips and Consumer Culture, 73, 79). Moreover, as Cole demonstrates, the earliest newspaper comics, especially George Luk’s version of Hogan’s Alley, Rudolph Dirks’s Katzenjammer Kids, Frederick Opper’s Happy Hooligan, and McManus’s Bringing Up Father, complexly elaborated in both visual and verbal registers the ethnic caricatures common in local color humor writing and on the vaudeville stage (How the Other Half Laughs, 74–86).[24] Complementing Gordon and Cole, the foregoing account indicates that Krazy’s distinctive speech also de-ethnicized the stereotyped comic dialects of the various ethnic characters and caricatures that populated vaudeville, from Weber and Fields’s “Dutch” comic duo of Meyer and Mike, to the Elinore Sisters’ caricatures of Irish American women, to the Marx Brothers’ mingling of German, Jewish, Italian, and Irish caricatures in their vaudeville “school acts.”[25]

Herriman’s remediations of the vaudeville aesthetic, especially vaudeville’s wisecracking slapstick comedy through the genre of the animal comic served in part to de-ethnicize key aspects of the “racial comedy” and caricatural portrayals of racial and ethnic characters so central to the vaudeville aesthetic. Translating those physical and, especially, verbal techniques and gags from the vaudeville stage to the comics page through the genre of the animal comic, Herriman detached those tropes from particular racial and ethnic types, extending their appeal both horizontally (across the U.S.) and vertically (up the class ladder) while preserving certain aspects of difference upon which much vaudeville humor relied, and that became hallmarks of Herriman’s comic sensibility (in both senses). If on the vaudeville stage, audiences might enjoy the wisecracking of a comedy duo (mis)speaking in caricatured “ethnic” accents followed by a trained animal act, in Herriman’s comic readers could enjoy an animal act of a wisecracking comedy duo with one partner (mis)speaking in a synthetic dialect no longer attached to a performer dressed in the stock costumes of ethnic and racial types. In mingling the wisecracking, slapstick “ethnic” comedy of the vaudeville stage with the animal act in the earliest Krazy Kat dailies, Herriman began creating something rich and strange—his exemplary work of popular modernism.

Despite the limitations of a position paper necessarily more indicative than comprehensive, this essay has established, I hope, several benefits of attending more closely to the earliest Krazy Kat dailies. Ideally, these benefits also suggest the value of applying comparable attention not only to other distinctive moments in the thirty-one-year run of George Herriman’s Krazy Kat but also to many more of the hundreds of other less familiar newspaper comic strips that proliferated in the opening decades of the twentieth century. Despite their ephemerality, their status as disposable mass entertainments for the popular publics of their moment, such comics were consequential creative works of modernity. They constitute an important archive of modern popular culture, providing myriad new vantages on early twentieth-century modernity, the vernacular modernisms then thriving, and the rich and dynamic traffic between such “lowbrow” cultural forms and the more “respectable” modernisms emerging concurrently.