Public Domain Krazy Kat

June 29, 2019 7:12 PM

"This page goes into detail on how I used Machine Learning to find hundreds of Krazy Kat comics that are now in the public domain."
posted by the man of twists and turns (20 comments total)

import krazy

I've been there, buddy.

Anyway, always a pleasure to see non-terrible uses of ML!
posted by gwint at 7:30 PM on June 29, 2019 [6 favorites]

Awesome! My first tattoo was a circular Krazy Kat panel. The tattoo hasn't aged nearly as well as the comic
posted by pagrus at 8:03 PM on June 29, 2019

L'il aingil.
posted by delfin at 8:25 PM on June 29, 2019 [6 favorites]

Wowzers. I was just lamenting that my Krazy Kat books got wrecked from a leak at my old apartment and I never replaced them.

For those unfamiliar, Bill Watterson made Calvin and Hobbes thinking it would be like Peanuts characters with Krazy Kat artwork.

Great to read. Thanks!
posted by lkc at 9:36 PM on June 29, 2019 [4 favorites]

I love this person.
posted by shothotbot at 10:10 PM on June 29, 2019 [3 favorites]

I had a cat whose middle name was Ignatz, after Ignatz the mouse.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 11:02 PM on June 29, 2019 [2 favorites]

Thanks for the kind words everyone. I love MetaFilter and it's an honor to have something I made posted here. ❤️
posted by jpf at 11:22 PM on June 29, 2019 [58 favorites]

Obviously the first thing I checked was what the strip was exactly a hundred years ago (near as damit). Isn't that an amazing thing? Modern equivalents have a bunch of set-up and a punch line, but that's just full of (clever) gags. And it's the first one I found, effectively at random.
posted by Grangousier at 3:26 AM on June 30, 2019 [4 favorites]

Great! just 70-80 more years until we can use this to make a truly complete Calvin and Hobbes compilation.
posted by Nanukthedog at 3:38 AM on June 30, 2019 [1 favorite]

Why, Gosh Goodniss!!
posted by jeremias at 5:41 AM on June 30, 2019 [3 favorites]

This is great.

I ended up spending just over $180 on Advanced Training before I realized how much I had spent!

The house always wins!

It seems like some kind of morphological properties would be able to separate comic-like images in general vs walls of text. I wonder if the trained AI was detecting Krazy Kat comics in particular, or comics in general?
posted by haemanu at 8:30 AM on June 30, 2019 [2 favorites]

This is wonderful. Thanks for posting.
posted by wittgenstein at 8:34 AM on June 30, 2019 [1 favorite]

Thank you!! I went to the first one, from 1916. I'd read it before, as it turns out, but the huge zoom is terrific. Looking forward to working my way through these, the vast bulk of which will be new to me.

Also, in perhaps a sign of changing levels of cultural literacy, the comic was bordered by a short humorous piece by a "J.J. Leibson" (possibly Jacob J. Leibson, author of the 1903 Purim comedy Too Much Haman and likely the author of this 1913 proto-Molesworth schoolboy piece reprinted in Oral Hygiene?) that sets five Jacobean playwrights (Shakespeare, Marlowe, Kyd, et al.) at the Mermaid Tavern in a sort of comedy of anachronism, as the 20th-c. English-spouting barmaid tries to get the group to pay for their drinks. Hard to imagine that sort of thing framing a newspaper comics page nowadays, but it's also getting harder to imagine a newspaper comics page nowadays.
posted by the sobsister at 10:16 AM on June 30, 2019 [6 favorites]

Fantastic.

There is a semi-annual computer vision challenge on recognition of comic characters.
posted by GeorgeBickham at 1:31 PM on June 30, 2019 [3 favorites]

It seems like some kind of morphological properties would be able to separate comic-like images in general vs walls of text. I wonder if the trained AI was detecting Krazy Kat comics in particular, or comics in general?

This is a great question! Thanks for asking!

One of the shortcomings of modern day machine learning tools is that there's no way of knowing what patterns the model is picking up on, though it seems like progress is being made towards tools which can help us get more understanding of what a neural network is "doing" - in particular, I really like the paper Deep Neural Networks are Easily Fooled:High Confidence Predictions for Unrecognizable Images. This paper really helped me get a better intuitive feeling for how neural networks "work".

I bring this up, because the best answer I can give to this question comes from the intuitive feeling I got from training the image classifier:

• I trained the image classifier on thumbnails, so the the neural network only had small data sets to work with.
• Krazy Kat was pretty distinctive among the other contemporary comics: It wasn't constrained to a fixed panel layout; it had complex art with lots of stippling, dark spots, shading, etc; it was usually on a newspaper page by itself, not with other comics; and so on.
• That said, when I did get false positives, they were comics that were so close in style to Krazy Kat that I couldn't tell from the thumbnail either, so I had to check the full size comic myself. From what I could tell, these false positives had large sploches of whitespace which weren't constrained to a series of rectangles.

posted by jpf at 1:42 PM on June 30, 2019 [10 favorites]

Thanks for the write up and your answer! Also liked that you show how much work has to go into data downloading, cleaning, etc before you can do the actual training.
posted by haemanu at 2:04 PM on June 30, 2019 [1 favorite]

Favritted, because any day that inkludes the Beloved Kat is a heppy day. Putty nice Officer jpf, putty nice I must say for a fack.
posted by valetta at 3:24 PM on June 30, 2019

Pretty impressive but lets see you try to run it with Mary Worth.
posted by sammyo at 4:30 AM on July 1, 2019

George Herriman was some kind of genius all right, and let me make a shout out for his collaboration with Don Marquis, Archy and Mehitabel.

"Kittens? What kittens?"
posted by BWA at 8:35 AM on July 1, 2019 [3 favorites]

In the foreground, Kat, pup and mouse perform mystic schtick while behind them houses, hills and landscapes melt and shrink to the vanishing point.

'The mind reels, the intellect stands abashed...'

With this, jpf joins the Celestials and henceforth the honorific appellation Mefi's own shall precede his handle and name. As in Mefi's own Joel Franusic. This is treasure.

So let it be said, so let it be written down.
posted by y2karl at 12:06 PM on July 1, 2019