Krazy Kat

Jay Cantor's novel borrows the cast of George Herriman's comic strip, Krazy Kat, and uses them to probe the emotional and sexual undercurrents of the atomic era. Herriman's strip ran in American newspapers from 1913 to 1944, and its characters are famously flat, drawn in simple lines and driven by a repeating cycle of affection and cruelty. Cantor makes that flatness the book's central puzzle: how can a writer give depth to figures who exist only as drawings? His answer turns the problem into a mirror, using the characters' two-dimensionality to reflect the mind of a postwar society living under the threat of the bomb.

The novel examines how the nuclear age shaped personality and culture, weaving social satire together with close psychological study. Its tone is darkly comic, and its parodies of the original strip sit alongside a serious inquiry into fear, desire and the damage they leave behind.