There are a number of reasons to be excited about the Vancouver Art Gallery’s upcoming KRAZY! exhibit. The show opens next Saturday (May 17) and features more than 600 pieces of work, drawn from comics, anime, cartoons, and video games. But there’s another cause for rejoicing. Drive over the Granville Street Bridge, say, and you’ll see dozens of bright blue banners advertising the show, each featuring an image of one of the greatest characters of all, Krazy Kat.

Sprung from the imagination of cartoonist George Herriman in the second decade of the last century, Krazy Kat is the star of a comic strip whose artful surrealness, invented language, and Zen-like repetition of its one gag (mouse throws brick at cat, cat mistakes assault for affection) have influenced the culture to this day.

“It’s definitely the jumping-off point for so much of what’s happened,” says VAG senior curator Bruce Grenville. “It doesn’t matter whether it’s visual art or comics or even video games—George Herriman and Krazy Kat pop up. And it’s a part of the character of the work—an upsetting of the norms.”

The ambitious, wide-ranging exhibit pulls together pieces ranging from early-20th-century cartoons by Herriman and Winsor McCay (Little Nemo in Slumberland) to graphics from Spore, a much-anticipated video game by Will Wright, creator of The Sims. (The full array is on display in the show’s colourful catalogue, published by Douglas & McIntyre.)

To help fashion KRAZY!, Grenville gathered together experts in the various fields. Feature film director Tim Johnson (Antz, Over the Hedge) curated the animated-film portion; Kiyoshi Kusumi and Toshiya Ueno, critics and theorists, put together a sampling of manga and anime (Japanese comics and animation, respectively); and Wright was in charge of the video-game angle.

Reached at his office in San Francisco, Wright says he tried to represent most of the major genres of games. His selection includes preproduction sketches and models from basic arcade-style examples like Pac-Man and Super Mario World, pioneering turn-based strategy games such as Sid Meier’s Civilization and first-person shooter Quake, and his own groundbreaking work.

One common feature of the disciplines in KRAZY!, as Wright sees it, is that they are all still evolving. “Especially things like manga, which is very much in a growth phase creatively. They’re hitting more varied demographics and much more interesting themes. Manga have diversified in ways comics never quite did. Games are very much in this kind of creative explosion, both in the variety of people playing games and also with technology, where we’re able to create more and more interesting worlds for players to explore.”

For the comics portion of the exhibit, Grenville recruited graphic novelists Art Spiegelman and Seth as cocurators. Reached at home in Toronto, Seth admits that when he came out of a meeting at Spiegelman’s New York studio, the creator of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Maus had shot down just about all the names on his curatorial wish list.

“Art’s a pretty forceful guy,” recalls Seth, whose best-known works include Clyde Fans and It’s a Good Life If You Don’t Weaken. “By the end of that weekend, I think I’d thrown that list of mine in the garbage.”

The agreed-upon criteria reduced the field to cartoonists who, Seth says, “were working from an obsessional need to work with comics—not just guys who were professionals, but people who re-created the comics language for their own work.”

Many of those chosen are unusual for a comics-based show, he explains. While some, like Harvey Kurtzman (Mad) and Lynda Barry (Ernie Pook’s Comeek), are mainstays, others like Jerry Moriarty and Justin Green haven’t received the acknowledgement they deserve. Green, with his 1972 comic Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary, was one of the first cartoonists to introduce autobiography to comics. Later, writers and artists like Harvey Pekar, Joe Matt, and Seth himself were hugely influenced by this development. “That’s a pretty mind-boggling story,” says Seth of Binky Brown. “It pretty much blew my mind when I first read it. So it’s exciting to have his [Green’s] work in the show.”

As much a comics historian as a creator, Seth admits feeling some ambivalence about the idea of his time-tested, beloved Krazy Kat rubbing figurative shoulders with the commercially based newbie Pac-Man. Computer games are pretty much off his radar—the last time he had any kind of interaction with one was sometime in the ’90s, when he played his nephew’s Game Boy.

“It seemed like it was a lot of fun,” he says. “I could see where it’s a very dangerous thing to have. I’m grateful I didn’t grow up with computer games—they seem very attractive. I would’ve wasted an awful lot of time on them—time I wouldn’t have spent drawing.”