Krazy Kat: "Door Mouse" (January 21, 1922)

George Herriman fills this rare full-page Saturday layout with twenty-one panels of deadpan Socratic comedy. A small mouse lugs a free-standing door across the Arizona desert; Krazy Kat — drawn in Herriman's characteristic shifting-background style, where mesas dissolve and reappear between panels for no naturalistic reason — interrogates the object's uselessness in fractured, phonetically spelled dialect. The door then functions serially as bridge, raft, shelter, and table, before finally intercepting one of Ignatz Mouse's bricks aimed at Krazy's skull. That closing gag is the strip's eternal engine. Herriman's speech balloons carry idiosyncratic orthography ('worra worra,' 'lil') that was already influencing how American readers processed vernacular in print. Sunday and Saturday full-page strips like this one — sold to papers as pre-formatted broadsheets — are the direct material ancestors of the comic book: same pagination logic, same recurring cast, same panel-to-panel grammar that later artists would inherit wholesale.