The work of Herriman came into being alongside the progress of the comic as a new artistic language surfacing in the USA at the tail end of the nineteenth century. This new medium brought with it a series of visual discoveries based on the repetition of drawings and patterns which, at this early stage, denoted a major narrative accomplishment. His most popular creation, the comic strip Krazy Kat (1913–1944), lauded by The Comics Journal as the century’s finest comic creation, narrates a love triangle which was repeated over and over during its thirty-year-long publication. The basic premise involved Ignatz, a mouse that hurls a brick at the head of a cat called Krazy, who takes this show of aggression to be a declaration of love, while Offissa Pupp – a dog – attempts to avoid the attacks and imprisons the mouse as a form of punishment.

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