Krazy Kat
After I wrote the post on Bill Griffith last month I saw that the web log Pseudopodium raised up the old comic Krazy Kat for consideration. As always the conversation there goes on above my head. But Krazy Kat, Ignatz, Officer Pup all quality and intriguing stuff. There's more than you dream of in the narrow angles of your everydayness. While I knew these characters, I've happened upon them over the years I never sat down with a group of strips to really learn George Herriman's work. Even from the little I know if tempted to drift towards the comfortable fallacy of believing that only within the current period of American history have we had the sophistication to understand ourselves; Krazy Kat's disinclination towards insight is anodyne. I have only to close my eyes and feel the sweet press of brick, to recall my love.
I had finished the Bill Griffith's post thinking there was more to say. I use this as excuse to try.
Comics make me happy. This isn't to say I expect nothing from them but a simple-minded wallow. Far from it I expect from comics a heads-up on everthing I need to know or think about. This led me to reflect on what comics from what various dark interior reaches resonate within me. For purposes here I restrict this mostly to comic strips or panels that were produced for newspapers. Ones that were written and drawn every day and that I encountered that way. Especially focusing on serial comics involving reoccurring characters, and narratives. This does bias things somewhat towards older or ceased comics. Before the era of zombie comics that never die. It may be one of those regional dialect things but I call these thing the funnies, and I want them to be funny. Graphic novels are different thing. Monographs opposed to serials to start with. More deliberately cinematic in style and conception. I also don't expect I'll find myself including much alternative or self published stuff because you are either one of the 20 or so people who know about them or you aren't. Another thing I like about this topic is that it lends itself to become a complete wikifest. I have been unable to think of a comic yet that did not have a wikipedia entry for itself or its creator. A feature not a bug is how I see that. Wikipedia does not look at popular culture, it is popular culture. Of course not all these wiki entries have examples of their comic strips. This forces me to write about things that are not in front of me. I suppose this is fine if you just want to spark a revery. Otherwise for any other sort of critical thinking it is best if you can land samples of the work some way. Comics are art, visual symbolism reigns . Much of a given comic exists in the way the characters and their world are drawn. What things in the background, in the foreground. What things in hand or clothing does the artist choose to depict? These choices contain what the comic can do or say. Many comics I only know through published collections. There is a bit of serendipity involved there. I either came across them from a friend or read them in a library, probably while I was supposed to be doing something else. The one comic I want to mention today is another I read on the recommendation of old college housemate Dan Searing: Alec by Eddie Campbell [
Eddie Campbell - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia ]. I remember little in particular of this now except that it was a slice of life comic, autobiographically intended. Though, no more rigorously tied to reality than most lives. I remember thinking there was nothing I knew of that compared to it. It neither traded on the ability to exaggerate that comics have, nor limited itself to the structures of something trying to be a story. It seems that the "Complete Alec" I read through has been reconfigured and reissued as a collected set titled the King Canute Crowd . The Canute is a pub - it was a British comic. Alec is a classic every-man His friends, the other characters, vary in temperament. I was a big fan of bands like the Wedding Present at the time and stuff like this; full of romantic english pathos had great appeal to me. There was another series I read by Campbell about the same time called "Doing the Islands with Bacchus." apparently part of a larger set following the lives of a handful of Greco-Roman gods who have survived into the present time. In Doing the Islands Bacchus is imagined lending himself to the working trade as a tourist guide in the Aegean.
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