Just finished reading Michael Tisserand's "Krazy," a fascinating biography of George Herriman, the genius behind the “Krazy Kat” comics and a cartoonist who for a half century ensured that fine art and poetry was available six days a week to anyone who a had a dime.
“Krazy Kat” is the tale of a perverse love triangle anchored in violence but executed with such faithfulness and constancy that it becomes one of the great love stories. For thirty years Herriman drew the same plot line daily: Krazy Kat is in perpetual swoon for Ignatz Mouse, who responds to this adoration by hitting Krazy in the head with a brick. Officer Pupp, a bulldog policeman, relentlessly pursues his goal of incarcerating the brick thrower.
With these endless variations on the same theme, Herriman created an art form as iconically American as the 12-bar blues. Herriman’s drawing is justly celebrated as being the apex of cartooning. His economical pen strokes speak volumes. His language is a wild patois of Shakespearean English and minstrel-show slang. After Herriman, who lived in Los Angeles, discovered the Arizona desert, he began to place his characters in a gorgeous landscape of mesas, adobe haciendas, “luffly” clouds, and looming cacti. In his stunning full-page Sunday episodes, Herriman fearlessly experimented with his spatial real estate—optionally telling the story vertically, horizontally, and diagonally—and with bold expanses of blacks and vibrant colors. Younger cartoonists made regular pilgrimages to see Herriman and elicit advice. Herriman was a taciturn man who was self-effacing to a fault, but the one thing he always suggested to his worshippers was to “be original." and Herriman was certainly that. (Krazy Kat's gender was kept purposefully fluid throughout the years, for instance.) Herriman showed that the comic strip had no limits, and in so doing he paved the way for Dr. Seuss, Charles Schulz, Walt Kelly, R. Crumb, and Art Speigelman—all of whom revered “Krazy Kat.”
Tisserand does a marvelous job of recounting the career of a famously reclusive person who tried to leave as few footprints as possible. Tisserand keeps the book interesting and entertaining by giving us vivid accounts of the early days of the comics, the influence they had on silent movies and vice versa, Los Angeles in the ‘20s and ‘30s, and the passion that American artists and intellectuals had for Herriman’s work.
The book also opens a window into an under-investigated aspect of Jim Crow era racism—the American blacks who passed for white. Herriman’s grandparents were all African Americans, and Herriman’s birth certificate lists his race as “colored.” Herriman was raised in the Treme section of New Orleans in a Creole family well-known for being active in Republican politics. His father moved his family to Los Angeles when George was ten and thereafter the Herrimans passed as white. This fact was not publicly known during Herriman’s lifetime. The reality that America’s greatest comic artist was an African American is only now beginning to sink in and take its rightful place as a key part of Herriman’s story. Tisserand does a brilliant job of demonstrating that there are clear clues to Herriman’s racial background in those daily strips. Just another reason to celebrate and be fascinated by “Krazy Kat.” Well worth reading, if only to inspire you to experience, or reacquaint yourself with, Herriman’s brilliant fable.
