Lot 6102: HERRIMAN, GEORGE. 1880-1944.

Original illustration, pen and ink on stiff paper, 25 x 15 1/2 inches, May, 16, 1943, being a 20-panel Krazy Kat Sunday strip, framed, some light finger-soiling, but excellent.

Krazy Kat first appeared in 1913 in the William Randolph Hearst newspaper, the New York Evening Journal. The comic strip, which was set in Coconino County, Arizona, Herriman's vacation home, mixed Herriman's native Creole dialect with alliterative and rhyming word play, absurdist humor, social commentary, and a recurring motif of a mouse who throws a brick at a cat. The strip became a favorite of Hearst's, who furnished Herriman with a lifetime contract and insisted that the strip run in all of his papers, regardless of its uneven popular reception. The literary world showed more enthusiasm with cultural critic Gilbert Seldes and poet E.E. Cummings both writing essays exploring the strip. It is now considered among the very best comic strips of all time.
The above strip finds Ignatz Mouse on trial for brick throwing. The scales of justice are perverted when Ignatz hires Hoot Zoot Soot, the Mesmeric Marvel, to hypnotize the judge to rule in Ignatz's favor. After Ignatz is free, and is extorted by Hoot Zoot to pay an additional fee, he attempts unsuccessfully to hypnotize the brickmaker Kolin Kelly into giving him a brick. Herriman appends the strip at the bottom horizontal panel showing Ignatz being hypnotized to throw a brick at Krazy.
See illustration.