Set in a dreamlike portrayal of Herriman's vacation home of Coconino County, Arizona, Krazy Kat's mixture of offbeat surrealism, innocent playfulness and poetic, idiosyncratic language has made it a favorite of comics aficionados and art critics for more than 80 years.

Despite the slapstick simplicity of the general premise, the detailed characterization, combined with Herriman's visual and verbal creativity, made Krazy Kat one of the first comics to be widely praised by intellectuals and treated as "serious" art.

[7] Though Krazy Kat was only a modest success during its initial run, in more recent years, many modern cartoonists have cited the strip as a major influence.

Krazy Kat takes place in a heavily stylized version of Coconino County, Arizona, with Herriman filling the page with caricatured flora and fauna, and rock formation landscapes typical of the Painted Desert.

A Southwestern visual style is evident throughout, with clay-shingled rooftops, trees planted in pots with designs imitating Navajo art, along with references to Mexican-American culture.

The strip also occasionally features incongruous trappings borrowed from the stage, with curtains, backdrops, theatrical placards, and sometimes even floor lights framing the panel borders.

The descriptive passages mix whimsical, often alliterative language with phonetically-spelled dialogue and a strong poetic sensibility ("Agathla, centuries aslumber, shivers in its sleep with splenetic splendor, and spreads abroad a seismic spasm with the supreme suavity of a vagabond volcano"[9]).

Herriman was also fond of experimenting with unconventional page layouts in his Sunday strips, including panels of various shapes and sizes, arranged in whatever fashion he thought would best tell the story.

The interventions of Coconino County's other anthropomorphic animal residents, and even forces of nature, occasionally change the dynamic in unexpected ways.

[10] Public reaction at the time was mixed; many were puzzled by its iconoclastic refusal to conform to linear comic strip conventions and straightforward gags, but publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst loved Krazy Kat, and it continued to appear in his papers throughout its run, sometimes only by his direct order.

[11] Simple-minded, curious, mindlessly happy and perpetually innocent, the strip's title character drifts through life in Coconino County without a care.

[13] On those occasions when Ignatz is caught before he can launch his brick, Krazy is left pining for the "l'il ainjil" and wonders where the beloved mouse has gone.

[15][16] When filmmaker Frank Capra, a fan of the strip, asked Herriman to straightforwardly define the character's sex, the cartoonist admitted that Krazy was "something like a sprite, an elf.

To shield his plans from Officer Pupp, Ignatz hides his bricks, disguises himself, or enlists the aid of willing Coconino County denizens (without making his intentions clear).

Easing Ignatz's task is Krazy Kat's willingness to meet him anywhere at any appointed time, eager to receive a token of affection in the form of a brick to the head.

In 1922, a jazz ballet based on the comic was produced and scored by John Alden Carpenter; though the performance played to sold-out crowds on two nights[21] and was given positive reviews in The New York Times and The New Republic,[22] it failed to boost the strip's popularity as Hearst had hoped.

In addition to Seldes and Cummings, contemporary admirers of Krazy Kat included T. S. Eliot,[23] Willem de Kooning, H. L. Mencken, P. G. Wodehouse,[24] Jack Kerouac,[5] Robert Benchley[25] and artist Paul Nash.

Though the number of newspapers carrying it dwindled in its last decade, Herriman continued to draw Krazy Kat, creating roughly 3,000 comics in total, until his death in April 1944 (the final Sunday page was published exactly two months later, on June 25).

[33] Other Herriman characters appeared in the Nolan cartoons at first, though similarly altered: Kwakk Wakk was at times Krazy's paramour,[34] with Ignatz often the bully trying to break up the romance.

Mintz's Krazy Kat was, like many other early 1930s cartoon characters, imitative of Mickey Mouse, and usually engaged in slapstick comic adventures with his look-alike girlfriend and loyal pet dog.

The King Features shorts of the 1960s were made for television and have a closer connection to the comic strip; the backgrounds are drawn in a similar style, Ignatz was present and once again the reluctant object of Krazy's affection.

Chuck Jones's Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner shorts, set in a similar visual pastiche of the American Southwest, are among the most famous cartoons to draw upon Herriman's work.

[29] Patrick McDonnell, creator of the current strip Mutts and co-author of Krazy Kat: The Comic Art of George Herriman, cites it as his "foremost influence".

Among non-cartoonists, Jay Cantor's 1987 novel Krazy Kat uses Herriman's characters to analyze humanity's reaction to nuclear weapons, Russell Hoban's novel The Medusa Frequency (also 1987) uses a quote from the cartoon in an epigraph ("ZIP... POW...

[7] The first Krazy Kat collection, published by Henry Holt and Company in 1946, just two years after Herriman's death, gathered 200 selected strips.

[66] In 1969, Grosset & Dunlap produced a single hardcover collection of selected episodes and sequences spanning the entire length of the strip's run.

However, owing to the difficulty of tracking down high-quality copies of the original newspapers, no plans for a comprehensive collection of Krazy Kat strips surfaced until the 1980s.

In 1990, Kitchen Sink Press, in association with Remco Worldservice Books, reprinted two volumes of color Sunday strips dating from 1935 to 1937, but like Eclipse, they collapsed before they could continue the series.

In 2002, Fantagraphics began to publish a series of paperbacks – picking up where Eclipse Comics left off – with introductory essays and other bonuses, such as rare artworks and photographs.

The George Herriman Library: Krazy & Ignatz, a series of deluxe hardcovers, whose format is much wider than the one of the previous paperbacks, collects 3 years worth of Sundays per volume.