George Herriman’s verbally dazzling and visually intoxicating Krazy Kat, which ran from 1913 until its creator’s death in 1944, remains very popular with scholars and comics aficionados. Reprints of the strip have been available in book form for years. But Herriman himself has received nowhere near as much attention as has his greatest achievement.
Michael Tisserand sets out to fill that void in Krazy: George Herriman, a Life in Black and White, an exhaustive and enlightening biography that runs to more than 400 pages, plus notes and an 18-page bibliography. It is the first full-scale biography of a man hailed by some as a genius.
This is a must read for all Krazy Kat fans, not only because of Tisserand’s thoughtful examination of Herriman’s work but also because the author sheds so much light on the elusive artist, a humble, modest man of mixed race.
In fact, the subtitle of Tisserand’s book is as much a comment on Herriman’s ancestry as an acknowledgement that much of his work appeared in black and white. Herriman seemed to go out of his way to hide his roots, which is understandable considering the times in which he lived. While some of Herriman’s early cartoons played up cruel racial stereotypes, which were a staple of many early comics, he used Krazy Kat as a vehicle to attack racism, and to poke fun at its absurdity.
Born in 1880 in New Orleans to French-speaking Creoles, Herriman spent his early childhood there before his family moved to California. “When I learned more about his family, I understood a bit more not just the pressures he must have felt in passing for white, but also the strange, unsettling feeling it must have been to identify with a group of people historically known as Free People of Color, or Mulatto, or Creoles,” Tisserand said in a 2016 interview with The Comics Journal. Herriman hailed from a group “that constantly was seeing its very identity being changed legally and linguistically and culturally.”
Tisserand chronicles the tortuous path of Herriman’s development as a cartoonist, as he bounced between Los Angeles and New York cranking out political and sports cartoons, as well as a long list of short-lived comic strips before (and in some cases after) Krazy Kat saw the light of day. Herriman moved from one employer to the next, and from strip to strip, until he and his Kat finally settled into William Randolph Hearst’s publishing empire.
Tisserand is so meticulous that it’s more than 200 pages into the biography before Herriman finally gives birth, as it were, to Krazy, although the Kat does turn up earlier in some of the many illustrations that Tisserand uses to showcase Herriman’s work.
The basic premise of the strip was straightforward slapstick, starring anthropomorphic animals (there are no humans in Krazy Kat) whose physical humor and eccentric language shared star billing with a kaleidoscope of bold, ever-shifting settings based on Herriman's beloved Southwest.
Krazy, a black cat whose gender shifts back and forth, loves a white mouse named Ignatz, who routinely beans Krazy with a brick. Krazy interprets these assaults as expressions of affection, which further angers Ignatz. Offissa Bull Pupp, the third major character in a strip replete with other animals, loves Krazy and tries to shield him/her from Ignatz. So, a cartoon cat with no fixed gender is routinely attacked by a mouse and protected by a dog. It doesn’t get more original than that.
But that isn’t the half of it. Krazy Kat was anything but simple or formulaic. Herriman broke the mold in many ways, leaving some newspaper readers unimpressed with his unique wordplay, whimsical spelling, and artistic originality. The intelligentsia may have loved Krazy, but the general public’s reaction was decidedly mixed.
Herriman “layered Krazy Kat in visually and verbally dense allegories of fate and free will, good and evil, and reality and illusion,” Tisserand writes. As far back as the 1920s, fans saw the strip as “an emblem of a modern age” because it was “in a state of constant reinvention.” Still, Herriman’s “philosophical musings, literary allusions, restless desert scenery, and enigmatic lead character made for a challenging read.”
Although he was not fully appreciated in his lifetime, hindsight shows that Herriman was an artistic giant. His work has come into its own and now, at long last, Herriman does so as well in this thoughtful, thoroughly researched and well-illustrated biography.
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