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November 27, 2023 Krazy Kontexts: Kontrasting Krazy Kat’s Natural Environment

While working on a close visual analysis of a 1919 Krazy Kat comic, I noticed an unexpected juxtaposition as Ignatz Mouse exits the bottom right frame:

According to the ad, Stearns’ Electric Paste also kills “WATER BUGS, RATS and MICE.” I think it’s safe to assume that George Herriman had no awareness, let alone control, of the San Francisco Examiner‘s page layout that or any other week. And yet while I would say that original context is at most secondary, it’s still worthwhile to see Krazy Kat in its intended environment. Later reprints of course only include Herriman’s artwork, eliminating even the typeset title banner that originally appeared above them.

That’s why I appreciate Joel Franusic‘s online archive. His scans include full newspaper pages:

While the textual juxtapositions are intriguing (there was more light verse printed in early twentieth-century newspapers than you might think), I’m most engaged by the pictorial pairings. From the 1916-1919 range I’ve been browsing, they almost inevitably involve advertisements, AKA “Business Notices.”

Some are one-offs, such as the anti-balding treatment endorsed “By an Eminent European Specialist”:

But I was more surprised by the repetition of two products. The first is “Gets-It,” a corn-removal treatment:

The first four ads above include lone figures, usually female, while the next two show couples, one of them dancing. Though not as pleasantly discordant as an anti-mouse product, the happy couples do juxtapose the absurdist romance of Krazy Kat and Ignatz.

And those last two are the most odd. Why invert the figure in a reflecting pool while cropping out most of the body above it? And those giant polka dots on the dress — are they associative representations of the corns? The last is just interesting for its algebraic simplicity.

The final two corn-removal ads depart in two ways: by emphasizing the pain of the corn (rather than the pleasure or ease of its removal), and (in the very last ad) by departing from the naturalistic drawing rules governing all of the other images.

That last one I’d place in what Joseph Witek helpfully identifies as the “cartoon mode,” in contrast to the “naturalistic mode” of the others. The juxtaposition is revealing since Herriman also worked in the cartoon mode, which means the comic’s original pictorial pairings usually produced stylistic contrast.

The art of the comic and the art of the advertisements were rendered according to different visual norms, which in turn created the impression of different visual worlds. When a viewer’s eye crossed the boundary framing Krazy Kat, the leap was conceptually wider than the width of the line.

That contrast effect is even stronger with the second set of ads.

The above two soap ads include black areas, the first for a pair of silhouettes, the second for a seemingly three-dimensional object produced by “white” lines where the newspaper page is visible in thin negative strips and letters.

The soap’s other images are more interesting because they are instead contour drawings that leave most of the page surface visible in internal negative spaces.

The style again contrasts Herriman’s, though the naturalism is relative since the images are highly simplified by not exaggerated — a combination that lacks a consistent term (which is why I refer to it descriptively as “unexaggerated simplification” in The Comics Form).

Visual analysis aside, I’m also really intrigued that the product was advertised to both women and men — specifically to men in the context of the Great War.

Since Cuticura cures dandruff, pimples, cuts, bruises, and gray hair, it might belong in Herriman’s absurdist world of Krazy Kat.

Finally, I’m reprising my favorite ad image for last.

The stylistic flourishes of the background pattern both evoke and contrast Herriman’s abstract backgrounds, revealing a final level of contextual contrast.

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