George Herriman
Krazy Kat (1916)
Distributed by the King Features Syndicate
“For to-night I am a ‘widow’—in a kot-tudge by the sea—”
The language in the second song is heavily accented, and carefully modulated. Herriman writes the word “tonight” as two words, “to-night”, so that we slowly enunciate it and eye the darkness of “night”. We consider what being a “widow” (his quotation marks) means to Krazy. We contemplate the odd spelling of “kot-tudge”, and rather than dismissing it as a quaint English-style cottage, we consider the syllabic invocation of the drudgery of Krazy’s solitary life. Of course, the sea’s presence alleviates Krazy’s abandonment; the sentence continues out to sea with a loose dash rather than ending in a period, just as the sea itself beckons the Kat to venture out in future cartoons, to once again dream of love.
—Taimi Olsen, Krazies… of indescribable beauty: George Herriman’s ‘Krazy Kat’ and E. E. Cummings, in Spring No. 14/15 (2005)