ABSTRACT
Krazy Kat has gained the attention of critics when Summerfield Baldwin wrote his appreciation "A Genius of the Comic Page" for Cartoons Magazine. Where nineteenth-century American comic strips were fascinated with unmasking social appearances, Krazy Kat presents the process of unmasking as continual and constitutive of comics reading. Ultimately, the ongoing shift off-beat within the strip creates a melancholic form. This melancholy is not so much a matter of consistent tone—though the strip is in part defined by a "touch of irony and pity," as the critic and early champion of the comics Gilbert Seldes called it—as it is a way of designing the strip so that objects of desire remain present but slightly out of reach. Krazy Kat had little obvious direct influence on high modernism, except on John Alden Carpenter's 1921 "jazz pantomime" based on the strip, for which George Herriman created the background scenario and the illustrations for the program, and on E.E. Cummings poetry.
