George Herriman
Encyclopedia
George Joseph Herriman was an American cartoonist
Cartoonist
A cartoonist is a person who specializes in drawing cartoons. This work is usually humorous, mainly created for entertainment, political commentary or advertising...

, best known for his classic comic strip Krazy Kat
Krazy Kat
Krazy Kat is an American comic strip created by cartoonist George Herriman, published daily in newspapers between 1913 and 1944. It first appeared in the New York Evening Journal, whose owner, William Randolph Hearst, was a major booster for the strip throughout its run...

.

Early life

George Herriman was born in a light-skinned, Creole
Louisiana Creole people
Louisiana Creole people refers to those who are descended from the colonial settlers in Louisiana, especially those of French and Spanish descent. The term was first used during colonial times by the settlers to refer to those who were born in the colony, as opposed to those born in the Old World...

 African-American family in New Orleans, Louisiana
New Orleans, Louisiana
New Orleans is a major United States port and the largest city and metropolitan area in the state of Louisiana. The New Orleans metropolitan area has a population of 1,235,650 as of 2009, the 46th largest in the USA. The New Orleans – Metairie – Bogalusa combined statistical area has a population...

. Both of his parents were listed as "mulatto
Mulatto
Mulatto denotes a person with one white parent and one black parent, or more broadly, a person of mixed black and white ancestry. Contemporary usage of the term varies greatly, and the broader sense of the term makes its application rather subjective, as not all people of mixed white and black...

" in the 1880 census
Census
A census is the procedure of systematically acquiring and recording information about the members of a given population. It is a regularly occurring and official count of a particular population. The term is used mostly in connection with national population and housing censuses; other common...

. In his adolescence, Herriman's father moved the family to Los Angeles, California
Los Angeles, California
Los Angeles , with a population at the 2010 United States Census of 3,792,621, is the most populous city in California, USA and the second most populous in the United States, after New York City. It has an area of , and is located in Southern California...

, as did many educated New Orleans Creoles of color at the time in order to avoid the increasing restrictions of Jim Crow laws
Jim Crow laws
The Jim Crow laws were state and local laws in the United States enacted between 1876 and 1965. They mandated de jure racial segregation in all public facilities, with a supposedly "separate but equal" status for black Americans...

 in Louisiana
Louisiana
Louisiana is a state located in the southern region of the United States of America. Its capital is Baton Rouge and largest city is New Orleans. Louisiana is the only state in the U.S. with political subdivisions termed parishes, which are local governments equivalent to counties...

. In later life, many of Herriman's newspaper colleagues were under the impression that Herriman's ancestry was Greek
Greeks
The Greeks, also known as the Hellenes , are a nation and ethnic group native to Greece, Cyprus and neighboring regions. They also form a significant diaspora, with Greek communities established around the world....

, and Herriman did nothing to disabuse them of this notion
Passing (racial identity)
Racial passing refers to a person classified as a member of one racial group attempting to be accepted as a member of a different racial group...

. According to close friends of Herriman, he wore a hat at all times in order to hide his "kinky" hair. He was listed on his death certificate as "Caucasian
Caucasian race
The term Caucasian race has been used to denote the general physical type of some or all of the populations of Europe, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, Western Asia , Central Asia and South Asia...

".

Career

At the age of 17, Herriman began working as an illustrator and engraver for the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner
Los Angeles Herald-Examiner
The Los Angeles Herald Examiner was a major Los Angeles daily newspaper, published Monday through Friday in the afternoon, and in the morning on Saturdays and Sundays. It was part of the Hearst syndicate. The afternoon Herald-Express and the morning Examiner, both of which had been publishing in...

, and over the next few years did many newspaper spot illustrations, observational and political cartoons, and produced several early comic strip
Comic strip
A comic strip is a sequence of drawings arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often serialized, with text in balloons and captions....

s, at times producing several daily strips at the same time. Herriman's early strips included Major Ozone, Musical Mose, Acrobatic Archie, Professor 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 Gooseberry 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 that began 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 1920s, 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
Gilbert Seldes
Gilbert Vivian Seldes was an American writer and cultural critic. He was editor and drama critic of The Dial. He also hosted the NBC television program The Subject is Jazz....

 and the poet E. E. Cummings
E. E. Cummings
Edward Estlin Cummings , popularly known as E. E. Cummings, with the abbreviated form of his name often written by others in lowercase letters as e.e. cummings , was an American poet, painter, essayist, author, and playwright...

. Most important, it was championed by Herriman's publisher, William Randolph Hearst
William Randolph Hearst
William Randolph Hearst was an American business magnate and leading newspaper publisher. Hearst entered the publishing business in 1887, after taking control of The San Francisco Examiner from his father...

.

Herriman was also the illustrator for the first printed edition of Don Marquis
Don Marquis
Donald Robert Perry Marquis was a humorist, journalist, and author. He was variously a novelist, poet, newspaper columnist, and playwright. He is remembered best for creating the characters "Archy" and "Mehitabel", supposed authors of humorous verse.-Life:...

' archy and mehitabel
Archy and mehitabel
Archy and Mehitabel is the title of a series of newspaper columns written by Don Marquis beginning in 1916. Written as fictional social commentary and intended as a space-filler to allow Marquis to meet the challenge of writing a daily newspaper column six days a week, archy and mehitabel is...

stories.

The 1930s were a period of tragedy for Herriman. On September 29, 1931, his wife Mabel died as the result of an automobile accident. In 1939, his daughter Bobbie died unexpectedly at age 30. He never remarried, choosing to live in Los Angeles with his cats and dogs.

Death

He died in his sleep on April 25, 1944. His cause of death was listed on his death certificate as "non-alcoholic cirrhosis of the liver". According to his request, his ashes were scattered by airplane over Monument Valley
Monument Valley
Monument Valley is a region of the Colorado Plateau characterized by a cluster of vast sandstone buttes, the largest reaching above the valley floor. It is located on the northern border of Arizona with southern Utah , near the Four Corners area...

, Arizona
Arizona
Arizona ; is a state located in the southwestern region of the United States. It is also part of the western United States and the mountain west. The capital and largest city is Phoenix...

.

On June 25, 1944, two months after Herriman's death, the last of his completed Krazy Kat strips, a full-page Sunday, was printed. An incompletely inked pencilling of six daily strips was found on his drawing board at the time of his death. At the time, Hearst usually brought in new cartoonists when the artists of a popular strip quit or died, but an exception was made for Herriman, as no one else could take his place.

Friends and biographers described him as a solitary man who gave generously to charity, loved his family and enjoyed a good game of poker.

Identity in Herriman's work

Herriman's work has been analyzed by numerous critics and theorists. Some see reflections of Herriman's complex experience of America's identity in his work. His surreal and shifting settings are a background to changing ethnicity and gender of the central characters. 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 love triangle
Love triangle
A love triangle is usually a romantic relationship involving three people. While it can refer to two people independently romantically linked with a third, it usually implies that each of the three people has some kind of relationship to the other two...

 has also been described as a "thwarted fantasy of miscegenation
Miscegenation
Miscegenation is the mixing of different racial groups through marriage, cohabitation, sexual relations, and procreation....

" in which "the white (mouse) Ignatz loves to hate Krazy, but only as long as he/she is black. 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. 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. However, this interpretation is somewhat invalidated by Herriman's insistence that Krazy wasn't female – he saw Krazy as a "pixie
Pixie
Pixies are mythical creatures of folklore, considered to be particularly concentrated in the areas around Devon and Cornwall, suggesting some Celtic origin for the belief and name.They are usually depicted with pointed ears, and often wearing a green outfit and pointed...

", beyond gender or sexuality.

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 is white while Ignatz is black. The critic responds by declaring the transformation "another study in black & white".

An earlier cartoon of Herriman's, Musical Mose (1902) features a black man who tries to impersonate a white man declaring, in dialect, "I wish mah color would fade", might be an example of Herriman mocking himself.

Strip bibliography

Year Strip
1902   Musical Mose
Professor Otto and his Auto
Acrobatic Archie
1903 Two Jollie Jackies
Lariat Pete
1904 Major Ozone's Fresh Air Crusade
Home Sweet Home
Bubblespikers
Bud Smith
1906 Mr. Proones the Plunger
Rosy Posy, Mama's Girl
Zoo Zoo
Grandma's Girl
1909 Baron Mooch
Mary's Home from College
Gooseberry Sprig
Alexander the Cat
Daniel and Pansy
1910 The Dingbat Family/The Family Upstairs  
1913 Krazy Kat
Krazy Kat
Krazy Kat is an American comic strip created by cartoonist George Herriman, published daily in newspapers between 1913 and 1944. It first appeared in the New York Evening Journal, whose owner, William Randolph Hearst, was a major booster for the strip throughout its run...

1916 Baron Bean
1919 Now Listen Mabel
1922 Stumble Inn
1926 Us Husbands
Mistakes Will Happen
1928 Embarrassing Moments
1930 archy and mehitabel
Archy and mehitabel
Archy and Mehitabel is the title of a series of newspaper columns written by Don Marquis beginning in 1916. Written as fictional social commentary and intended as a space-filler to allow Marquis to meet the challenge of writing a daily newspaper column six days a week, archy and mehitabel is...


Reprints

Several reprints have been done of Krazy Kat
Krazy Kat
Krazy Kat is an American comic strip created by cartoonist George Herriman, published daily in newspapers between 1913 and 1944. It first appeared in the New York Evening Journal, whose owner, William Randolph Hearst, was a major booster for the strip throughout its run...

. The most comprehensive one has been Fantagraphics, which is reprinting all the Sundays and will soon do all the dailies.

Fantagraphics plans to do all of Herriman's other strips over the next few years.
  • Herriman's Humans: The Complete Stumble Inn and Us Husbands ISBN 1606991515 (May 2009, Hardcover)

External links

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