George Herriman

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George Herriman and some of his fans.

George Joseph Herriman (August 2, 1880 – April 25, 1944) was an American cartoonist, best known for his comic strip Krazy Kat.

George Herriman was born in a light-skinned Creole of Color family in New Orleans, Louisiana, both of his parents were listed as "mulatto" in the 1880 census. In his adolescence Herriman's father moved the family to Los Angeles, California, as did many educated New Orleans Creoles of Color at the time in order to avoid the increasing restrictions of Jim Crow laws in Louisiana. In later life many of Herriman's newspaper colleagues were under the impression that Herriman's ancestry was Greek, and Herriman did nothing to dissuade them of this notion. According to close friends of Herriman, he wore a hat at all times in order to hide his "kinky" hair. He was also listed on his death certificate as "caucasian". (from Jeet Heer's introduction to Krazy & Ignatz: 1935-1936, Fantagraphics, 2005.)

At the age of 17, Herriman began working as an illustrator and engraver for the Los Angeles Herald newspaper. Over the next few years he did many newspaper spot illustrations and cartoons, and produced several early comic strips, at times producing several daily strips at the same time. Herriman's early strips including Major Ozone, Musical Mose, Acrobatic Archie, Professer Otto and his Auto, Two Jolly Jackies and several others, most of which were only slightly above the average quality of newspaper strips of the time.

Perhaps the first indication of Herriman's unusual creativity and poetical sense of humor which would make him famous surfaced in 1909 with his strip Goosebury Sprig. The following year Herriman began a domestic comedy strip called The Dingbat Family. The precursors to the characters of Krazy and Ignatz first appeared in a small, unrelated side comic (begun on July 26, 1910) that ran below "The Dingbat Family". The small comic appeared intermittently before becoming a regular feature of the strip: the main action happening with the human family taking up most of each panel, and an unrelated storyline involving a cat and mouse underneath the family's floorboards taking place in the bottom segment of each panel. This strip was then renamed The Family Upstairs. The cat and mouse strip was then spun off into another strip in 1913, originally Krazy Kat and Ignatz, and then simply Krazy Kat.

Herriman also continued drawing the domestic comedy strip, again named The Dingbat Family, until 1916. From 1916 through 1919 Herriman also drew the daily strip Baron Bean. Herriman would continue to draw other strips in addition to Krazy Kat through 1932.

Krazy Kat, however, was the strip which became Herriman's most famous. It reached its greatest level of popularity in the early twenties,when it inspired merchandise, critical acclaim, and even an interpretive ballet. Over the years it gradually lost readers, and many complained that "it made no sense." However it had an enthusiastic (if relatively small) following among art-lovers, artists, and intellectuals of the era, such as the critic Gilbert Seldes and the poet E. E. Cummings. Most importantly, it was championed by Herriman's publisher, William Randolph Hearst.

On June 25, 1944, two months after Herriman's death, the last of his Krazy Kat strips was printed. At the time Hearst usually brought in new cartoonists when the artists of a popular strip died or quit, but an exception was made for Herriman, as no one else could take his place.

Herriman was the illustrator for the first printed edition of Don Marquis' archy and mehitabel stories.

[edit] Herriman and race in his work

Some critics see reflections of Herriman's complex experience of America's racial divide reflected in his work. Eyal Amiran points out in an essay in Mosaic that in some later strips, Krazy and the other characters switch between black and white. The strip's inter-species love triangle has also been described as a "thwarted fantasy of miscegenation" (Heer, ibid) in which "the white (mouse) Ignatz loves to hate Krazy, but only as long as he/she is black. Conversely, black Krazy loves Ignatz only as long as he's white." Meanwhile, the white police dog, Offisa Bull Pupp, is secretly in love with Krazy, the black cat. Heer highlights one strip in which Krazy leaves a beauty salon covered in white makeup. Ignatz sees Krazy and is in love. Conversely, in another strip, Ignatz is blackened after hiding in a pipe and Krazy's love for the mouse does not resume until his black face is washed clean.

In another strip published in 1931, an art critic visits and describes Krazy and Ignatz as "a study in black & white". Krazy responds saying "he means us: Me bleck, You white" and suggests that the two "fool him. You be bleck and I'll be white" and in the next panel Krazy appears as white while Ignatz appears as black. The critic responds by declaring the transformation "another study in black & white".

Another, earlier cartoon of Herriman's, Musical Mose (1902) features a black man who tries, unsuccessfully, to impersonate a white man declaring, in dialect, "I wish mah color would fade", a possible example of Herriman mocking himself, as Heer points out.

[edit] References

"A cat-and-mouse game of identity: Excerpt: George Herriman played with race in his work and real life" by Jeet Heer, (Toronto) Sunday Star, December 11, 2005 (excerpt from Heer's introduction to Krazy & Ignatz in "A Wild Warmth of Chromatic Gravy": The Komplete Kat Komics 1935 - 1936 by George Herriman (Fantagraphics Books:2005) ISBN 1-56097-690-X ).