Since this ad came out in 1925, in Kansas, there’s just no way the “designer” wasn’t attempting a cheap, rubberneck ploy with the acronym. By 1922, the presence of the Ku Klux Klan had become so pervasive in the state that Governor Henry Allen said they had “introduced into Kansas the curse that comes to civilized people, the curse that rises out of unrestricted passions of men governed by religious intolerance and racial hatred.”

It’s even stranger when you know that Krazy Kate creator and cartoon pioneer George Herriman was a multi-racial Creole man, whose family were abolitionist “free people of color” from New Orleans. Weirder still when you find out he drew a lot of racist comics of his own.

It’s a fascinating artifact, layered with the sort of contradictions that make American history so strange. Like an Inception of racism. Meta-racism!

Below is an animated 1916 Krazy Kat cartoon, created three years after Krazy Kat began its ran as one of the most popular comic strips in history