[Originally written as part of a comic library blog/fundraiser.]

It seems like there’s recently been a large and important uptick in comics that intentionally and forcefully reject the idea of narrative. See, for instance, Kim Jooha’s blog or the “surreal” section of CBLOM (a section heading that I’m not entirely happy with). Non-narrative comics—comics as abstraction, as poetry, as mix tape, and more—make great strides in breaking down the ghetto of comics as a home for genre fiction and memoir.

George Herriman was an early pioneer in tossing narrative verisimilitude out the window. Krazy and Ignatz literally grew out of a previous strip, moving from the basement of a sitcom house into a strip of their own. Editors initially deemed it as unfit for comics sections, so editor William Randolph Hearst put it in his Art & Drama section, giving Herriman a lifetime contract.

It’s a tale as old as time: nonbinary Krazy, a cat, is in love with Ignatz, a mouse. Ignatz seeks to bean Krazy with a brick, which Krazy reads as a “missile of affection.” Ofissa Bull Pupp, a police dog, wants to keep Krazy safe, perhaps out of duty or perhaps out of love.

Across almost 30 years of shifting formats and shapes, the strip iterated around these three like a jazz ballet, developing the mythological symbolism of Coconino County and its dozens of inhabitants. From panel to panel, backgrounds shifted and switched: night became day, urbanity turns to desert, and sun shifts to moon shaped like a dollop of ice cream. Nonsequiter panels sat obstinately in the center of Sunday spreads, and characters spoke in thick regionalisms (maybe descended from Herriman’s Creole heritage); it’s almost as though Krazy Kat defied readability, aiming instead for a state of graceful rhythm.