Probably the most oft repeated gag in comix history--Ignatz mouse
bouncing a brick off love-sick Krazy Kat's noggin. Yet it never grew
old.
On Sunday, June 25, 1944 the full page color comic Krazy
Kat made its last appearance in American Newspapers ending a thirty-one year run as a stand-alone strip. That was exactly two months since the death of the odd, surrealistic strip’s creator, George Herriman on April
24 at the age of only 63.
Krazy
Kat had amused and mystified the
public for generations. Many
simply did not know what to make of it, or Herman’s regular defiance of conventions of both comic form
and substance. In fact, it regularly polled among the least popular Sunday strips with the public and more than one local editor fervently wished that it would
be canceled and replaced with
something more to the popular. But it had what we now call a strong cult following including intellectuals, artists,
writers, political dissidents, and Bohemians.
Most important, Krazy Kat had the enthusiastic backing of publishing Tycoon William Randolph Hearst, who loved the
strip. It was a strange relationship—Hearst, a tyrannical
autocrat with a knack for using cheap populism
to cover reactionary politics,
and Herriman, a mulatto journeyman
cartoonist with anarchic tendencies. But Hearst so adored the strip that he
ran it in all of his newspapers and
signed Herriman to a life-time contract guaranteeing
complete creative control with his King Features Syndicate.
Herriman was born in New Orleans, Louisiana on August
20, 1880 to a mulatto Creole family. He came from a long line of free people of color in the city and
was raised with Creole French as his
first language even at that late date.
Some of his ancestors were
said to be active abolitionists and
his father, a tailor, was a
community leader.
For some reason when George was 10
years old the family moved to Los
Angeles where he was educated at and graduated from the Catholic boys’ school St.
Vincent’s Academy. While attending
school he worked with his father in a tailor shop and as a baker’s helper. But his passion was art. Largely untaught, the boy spent his free time sketching.
He was light skinned enough to pass
for white, which he did after leaving home and started working. His somewhat kinky hair was generally hidden by the hats he almost perpetually wore.
His racial identity was not
an absolute secret—close friends
knew and associates sometimes guessed.
But after he married a white woman, his hometown sweetheart Mable Lillian Bridge, in 1902 it became
necessary to keep the secret guarded more closely. He was listed as Caucasian on his death
certificate.
Herriman got his break almost before
he knew it. Fresh out of high school in
1897 he sold a drawing of the Hotel
Petrolia in Santa Paula to the Los
Angeles Herald. That led to a $2
a week job as an engraver in the art department. He filled out this meager salary by
getting spot assignments from the
paper for occasional advertising art
and even for political cartoons. He also began to freelance work for other publications.
But Herriman smelled better
opportunities in New York City,
the epicenter of the American publishing industry. In
1900 he hopped a freight and headed east.
What Herriman found at first was hard
times. He found work as a Coney Island carnival barker, but no
sales for his drawings. Then one of the
country’s premier humor magazines,
Judge began picking up his
stuff. He published 11 pieces there in
1901 and began experimenting with the then new
multi-panel format of the comic strip.
By the end of the year Herriman was
having success placing strips with newspaper syndicates, including Pulitzer’s, the Philadelphia
North American Syndicate’s first comic supplement,
and his first Sunday color comics with the T. C. McClure Syndicate. With this early success, he
abandoned Judge and submissions to
other magazines to concentrate on the rapidly expanding opportunities in
newspaper comics.
George Herriman's early Musical Mose strip
featured a Black protagonist who searched for acceptance by trying to
pass with various European identities, always with disastrous results.
It mirrored the light skinned New Orleans Creole's own life as he passed
for white.
In 1902 he launched Musical Mose, his first strip with continuing
characters for Pulitzer’s. The strips main character was a Black musician who often tried to pass
for other ethnicities to get ahead, inevitably leading to discovery and humiliation. His characterizations of Mose and other black
characters used the common stereotypes
of the time—Black faces with big pop
eyes and thick white lips. It was the caricature drawn from minstrel
show black face. But his story line, which mirrored his own
experience, was warm and sympathetic and the dialect dialogue often
was near poetry. The same year he
began two more successful strips, Proffesor Otto and his Auto, and the
kid hero strip Archy Acrobat.
By the end of the year Herriman was famous and financially secure enough to marry and bring Mable to
New York. He also became one of the
first cartoonists to garner serious critical
attention from the highbrow set
when poet La Touche Hancock penned an article in The
Bookman called The American Comic and Caricature Art
wrote, “Art and poetry is the characteristic of George Herriman. Were his
drawings not so well known one would think he had mistaken his vocation.”
Herriman and his bride Mable. After their marriage he had to
completely hide his racial background to avoid running afoul of
anti-miscegenation laws.
Comic
strips and Sunday features came and went in those early years. They were never meant to be eternal. If they ran their course of popularity or if
Herriman simply became bored with them they were canceled, and a
new strip would replace them the next day.
Working for various syndicates he produced strips in all kinds of genres—strips about sailors, cowboys,
a domestic,
and Major Ozone’s Fresh Air Crusade for the World Color Printing Company.
He
also got work as an illustrator at
the New
York World where his work accompanied local news commentary, then at New
York Daily News where he did an even greater variety of work, including
for the first time sports illustration. Then he moved for the first time to a
Hearst paper, the New York American where he was paid “commiserate to his noted
abilities,” which meant very well indeed.
The paper then had no daily comic section, so he was assigned as a
sports cartoonist. Soon he was
considered among the best in that highly specialized business. But a change of editors at the American reduced the use of cartoons in
the sports section in favor of more photographs
so in 1906 Herriman left the paper and returned to Los Angeles with his
wife.
Herriman as a sports cartoonist. Any modern baseball fan will recognize the same behavior.
Back
home he was able to continue to send his work to World Color. He added two more Sunday strips to Major
Ozone and began to contribute to the Los Angeles Times as a freelancer. But he was soon back in the Hearst fold as
the Los
Angeles Examiner’s principal cartoonist.
His work regularly appeared on the front
page and throughout the paper.
Circulation soared. Herriman was
so busy, and well paid, that he let his World Color contract go and stepped
away from comic strip work for nearly three years except for a very short lived
sports themed strip in 1907. In 1909 he
was back with the free loader strip Barron
Mooch for Hearst and came back to World Color with two Sunday strips Alexander the Cat and Daniel and Pansy the latter was his first all-animal
strip. For the Examiner he
experimented with teen girl strip
and then came out with a cigar chomping
duck, a margin figure in some
of his earlier sports cartoons. Gooseberry Sprig featured an all
avian cast and some of the
characters would be incorporated into the Krazy Kat universe.
In 1910 Herriman was recalled to New York to work
on Hearst’s other paper there, New
York Evening Journal once again as a sports cartoonist. Within week of arrival, he launched a new
domestic strip, The Dingbat Family featuring
the frazzled father E.
Pluribus Dingbat. After
a few months Herriman tweaked the
strip and renamed it The Family
Upstairs focusing on Dingbat’s constant frustration with his noisy and annoying upstairs neighbors who were never seen.
For the full page Sunday strip, Hearst wanted to
save the bottom row of panels so that local papers could sell advertising there
if they could. To fill that space for
the papers that did not run the ad, Herriman created a mini-strip in which the upstairs neighbor’s pet, called simply Kat was
tormented by a nameless mouse. In a few short weeks the mouse first bonked Kat in the head with a brick. Sometime later Kat kissed the sleeping
mouse revealing for the first time an unrequited
love for the tormentor. The bare
bones of greatness were now in place.
The basement
strip soon became so popular that it began to take up all of the panels on
the bottom half of the Sunday page. In
the summer of 1912 Herriman sent the Dingbats on an extended summer vacation
and the sub-strip took over the entire page as Krazy Kat and I. Mouse. The Dingbats returned but the summer
replacement was so popular that Krazy Kat became an independent daily
strip in October of 1913. Herriman had
finally found enduring characters and an enduring strip.
A comic love triangle--Krazy Kat loved Ignatz despite being beaned
almost daily, Offssa Pupp loved Krazy Kat and tried to protect him/her
from the mouse who was a defiant anarchist who could never be controled.
It took some time for Krazy Kat to evolve into its most familiar
form. But from the beginning the basic elements
were there. Krazy Kat was from the
beginning oddly either gender neutral or
able to freely switch from male to female.
Herriman used pronouns for
both sexes interchangeably. Sometime Krazy Kat acted in ways that seemed
feminine, other times not. In any case he/she was lovesick over Ignatz a mouse that not only spurned
the affection but sought every opportunity to knock Krazy Kat out with a
brick. Offissa
Pupp, a
police dog rounded out the main
character triumvirate. He sought to protect Krazy Kat from Ignatz,
sometimes preventing assaults, other times hauling the offender to his jail. As the strip progressed Offissa Pupp fell
in love with Krazy Kat who remained oblivious
of the obvious crush.
From
this simple, repeated situation, a world slowly developed. Dialogue was written phonetically in a peculiar accent that was never quite identifiable
but sounded to some as close to Yiddish
accented New York English. Others
thought it mimicked his New Orleans Creole accent called Yat. Here are some examples:
A fowl konspirissy – is it pussible?
Can you unda-stend a Finn, or a Leplender, or a
Oshkosher, huh?
there is a heppy land, fur, fur a-wa-ay
The characters, especially
Krazy Kat, often launched on long soliloquies
that had to be squeezed into cramped dialogue balloons or exchanged philosophic
observations and whimsy. It was the poetic content of the dialogue
that struck and attracted many sophisticated admirers.
The southwestern landscape of Coconino County.
Visually from the beginning
Herriman had his cast, filled out with walk-ons by a variety of supporting
characters, many of them borrowed from earlier strips, performed against changing backgrounds of potted trees, odd building, pyramids, and temple like structures. At
first the setting seemed vaguely urban,
as befitted the strip’s New York roots. But in 1913 after visiting and becoming enthralled with the landscapes of New Mexico including the Enchanted
Mesa, the Monument Valley,
and high dessert Coconino County he
explicitly set the story in his own fictional Coconino County and the background reflected the mesas, and cliffs, adobe buildings
with roof tiles, cactus, Navaho pots and blankets,
and Mexican motifs.
After relocating back to Los
Angeles with his wife and family in 1922, Herriman would make annual trips to
the desert country and decorated his mission
style home with Southwestern art and artifacts.
Starting in 1916 Krazy Kat added a full black and white
Sunday page. Herriman was able to break
away from rigid rows of cells. He employed mixed sizes of blocks, unusual shapes, canted sometimes at different
angles. Some people found it chaotic,
but art experts recognized meticulous
composition and dynamic balance.
George Herriman self-portrait with his characters in 1922.
Those same critics recognized
Krazy Kat’s kinship to the evolving European Surrealist movement even before Andre Breton articulated it
in his 1925 manifesto. In the May, 1922 issue of Vanity
Fair, literary critic Gilbert Seldes identified Herriman’s
work with the films of Charley Chaplin in
the widely read and cited article Golla, Golla the Comic Strip’s Art
and expanded on it in his 1924 book The
Seven Lively Arts in which he attacked conservative tendencies that excluded artists in the popular arts, such as Herriman and
Chaplin, from being considered alongside high culture artists. Krazy
Kat got a whole chapter entitled The Krazy Kat That Walks by Himself,
which became famous critical writing on the strip. It was not only the
earliest case of giving legitimacy to the comic strip medium as
art, but it was a pioneering statement on popular art which now receives full serious
attention. Vanity Fair backed up their critic by inducting
Herriman into its Hall of Fame in
the April 1923 issue.
Another sign of highbrow acceptance was Adolph Bolm’s jazz-pantomime ballet written
by composed by John
Alden Carpenter and
performed in New York by the Ballet
Intime. Herriman himself illustrated the libretto and designed the costumes and scenario.
Back in California, Herriman
made friends with his fellow popular artist, Chaplain. It was a mutual admiration society. Herriman presented Chaplain with a color
drawing of him in his Little Tramp
persona. He also had launched a new strip, Baron Bean, in 1916 after the
Dingbats ran its course featuring a down-at-the-heels English aristocrat and his even scruffier valet as they wandered around America, an obvious salute to
Chaplain.
An ad for Mintz's Krazy Kat cartoons which bore little
resemblance to Herriman's conception. He created a Felx the Cat clone
with elements ripped off from Disney's Mickey Mouse as well.
Several different studios
launched Krazy Kat animated short series beginning with
Hearst’s film company in 1916. Herriman
was not involved in any of the projects and apparently had no interest in them,
despite his personal close association with several film figures after his return to Los Angeles. After the John R. Bray Studio films of the early ‘20’ which hewed closely to
Herriman’s style and characterizations, other studios took wide liberties with the material. In 1925 animator Bill Nolan who had worked on the early Felix the Cat shorts,
brought out a series in which Krazy Kat was transformed into a Felix rip-off. After the enormous success of Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse new Winkler studios head Charles B. Mintz, who had
previously stolen Oswald the Rabbit from
Disney, transformed the series again into a cute clone of Mickey complete with a pet dog and look-alike girlfriend. Herriman’s original
version seemed totally lost. Mintz
continued to produce these shorts until he lost control of his studio to Harry Cohn at Columbia.
It was not until decades
after Herriman’s death in 1962 the King
Features authorized a new cartoon series for the syndicated TV market bundled incongruously with Beetle
Baily and Snuffy Smith for a Saturday
morning local TV block, that Krazy Kat was finally brought to
sound film looking and sounding like what Herriman had created. 50 shorts were made at Czechoslovakian and Australian
studios. Penny Philips voiced a feminine Krazy Kat
and veteran voice actor Paul Frees
was Ignatz. The animation was not high
quality, but the cartoons introduced Krazy
Kat to the baby boom generation.
Back in ‘20’s, Herriman
continue to produce new comic strips including Us Husbands and Bernie
Burns. After the latter strip
ended in 1932, he concentrated solely on Krazy
Kat for the newspapers. He did get
one on-going commission for which he did the second most famous work of his
career—illustrating Don Marquis’s
popular Archy and Mehitabel
books.
A column head for Don Marquis's daily Archy and Mahitabel feature.
Also, in 1932 the full page
Sunday strips went color in the Hearst supplements after a short time of being
dropped altogether as an economy move during
the Great Depression. That brought the feature to full
maturity. Herriman reduced the dense cross hatching that distinguished the
black and white strips and took full advantage of a brilliant color palate reflective of the sky
colors, red earth, and Navaho designs of his beloved Southwest.
Otherwise, the ‘30’s were a
rough decade for Herriman. His beloved
wife was killed in an auto accident in 1931. He mourned deeply and never remarried. Then two years later his 30 year old daughter
died suddenly. His own health was not good, perhaps aggravated by an unscientifically
balanced vegetarian diet the
often left him weak. In 1939 he had kidney surgery in 1938 requiring a ten
week post-op recovery during which
time King Features ran old strips. It
was one of the rare interruptions in his grueling production schedule.
On the business side the number of papers carrying Krazy Kat dwindled to just 30, almost all of them Hearst
owned. By contrast a popular
contemporary strip with which it had once successfully competed, Bringing
Up Father, ran in over 3,000 papers.
Herriman realized the syndicate could not recoup the $750 a week
guaranteed in his contract with Hearst, so he voluntarily offered to take a pay cut. Hearst, still a fan, turned him down. The problem was that the lowly educated readership that Hearst papers appealed to did not
understand the sophisticated strips and Sunday pages. And many of Herriman’s devoted fans could no
longer stomach the reactionary Hearst papers and refused
to support them with their nickels.
But he soldiered on into the
40’s although his health was delicate.
He was taken to the hospital in much weakened condition where he was
diagnosed with non-alcoholic cirrhosis
of the liver. He
died leaving a few weeks of un-inked
pencil drafts of the strip and Sunday feature which were finished by other
artists. After they ran out, Hearst
declined to keep the strip alive under another artist, as he usually did. No one could have matched Herriman’s creative
genius.
In 1946 admirer e. e. cummings wrote the introduction
to the first book collection of Krazy
Kat Sunday pages. His original
color renderings were soon selling in New York art galleries for hundreds of dollars each.
Patrick McDonald's collection and appreciation of Herriman's art.
Herriman was cited as a major
influence by generations of cartoonists, even those whose style and content
seemed to have little to do with him like Charles
Schulz. Walt Kelly’s
Pogo, Berkeley Breathed’s Outland
and Opus, and Stephan Pastis’s Pearls Before Swine where the
character Rat resembles Ignatz,
including a tendency to bop other characters in the head were all directly
indebted to Herriman. Patrick McDonald of Mutts
clearly is inspired by Herriman’s drawing style and is the co-author of Krazy Kat: The Comic Art of George Herriman.
But Herriman’s most enduring disciples were the graphic novelist Art
Spiegelman of Maus and the underground
cartoonists of the ‘60’s and ‘70’s especially R. Crumb who has been described as a spiritual descendant.
