I loved the romantic triangle of Ignatz, Krazy, and Ofissa Pup when I was a kid, and even had some of the Krazy Kat comics that have always seem to have been in print. Later in life, I discovered
Archy and Mehitabel, and I thereafter thought one of the pairs was copied from the other.
Archy and Mehitabel was a poetic series of comic stories by
Don Marquis (also at
this website), although there wasn't any brick-throwing. Archy was a roach, not a mouse, and Mehitabel was a cat. There was no character like Offisa Pup involved at all.
It turns out that
Archy and Mehitabel and
Ignatz and Krazy Kat actually did parallel each other. Herriman illustrated the original
Archy and Mehitabel books, while Ignatz and Krazy Kat preceded Archy and Mehitabel and were from an older series of comics called
The Dingbat Family. There appears to have been at least some cross-inspiration between the two projects, and both Marquis and Herriman are rightly known as geniuses in their particular bailiwicks of "lit-rich-ah".
There were also several projects that brought Archy and Mehitabel to the stage and screen. One of Mel Brooks' first major projects was his writing for
Shinbone Alley, which ran on Broadway during theater season in 1957.
Archy was a poet and epigrammatist, and here are
a few pearls of his cockroachly wisdom:
live so that you
can stick out your tongue
at the insurance
doctor
procrastination is the
art of keeping
up with yesterday
old doc einstein has
abolished time but they
haven t got the news at
sing sing yet
don t cuss the climate
it probably doesn t like you
any better
than you like it
prohibition makes you
want to cry
into your beer and
denies you the beer
to cry into
i once heard the survivors
of a colony of ants
that had been partially
obliterated by a cow s foot
seriously debating
the intention of the gods
towards their civilization
the bees got their
governmental system settled
millions of years ago
but the human race is still
groping
Not bad for a cockroach, huh?
--p!