Popular Modernism in the Late Krazy Kat Comics: Industry and Innovation in the Color Sundays

This article reads George Herriman's celebrated Krazy Kat comic as an exemplar of popular modernism, a mass cultural product that works from inside a popular medium to make it new. Analyzing specific color comics Herriman produced between 1935 and his death in 1944, the article illuminates the range of techniques Herriman developed over the strip's final decade as he assimilated for the first time the color protocols of the Hearst newspaper syndicate and retooled his comic's layouts, narratives, and style in response. In time, Herriman articulated a late popular modernist aesthetics characterized by formalism, minimalism, and self-reflexivity.