Sun Aug 22, 2021: George Herriman's Krazy Kat, Praised as the Greatest Comic Strip of All Time, Gets Digitized ...
George Herriman’s Krazy Kat, Praised as the Greatest Comic Strip of All Time, Gets Digitized as Early Installments Enter the Public Domain
in Comics/Cartoons | July 15th, 2019
“As a cartoonist, I read
Krazy Kat with awe and wonder,” writes Calvin and Hobbes creator Bill Watterson in his introduction to
The Komplete Kolor Krazy Kat. The creator of quite possibly the most beloved comic strip of the past thirty years calls
Krazy Kat “such a pure and completely realized personal vision that the strip’s inner mechanism is ultimately as unknowable as George Herriman,” the artist who wrote and drew it for its entire three-decade run from 1913 to 1944. “I marvel at how this fanciful world could be so forcefully imagined and brought to paper with such immediacy. THIS is how good a comic strip can be.”
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ARTS ENTERTAINMENT > BOOKS
This kat was krazy influential, but few knew his creator's secret
"Krazy: George Herriman, a Life in Black and White," tells the story of a cartoonist and the past he kept hidden.
By MiChelle Jones|Special Contributor
9:00 AM on Dec 29, 2016 CST
George Herriman may be the most influential cartoonist you've never heard of, creator of a comic strip that ran for more than 20 years and was read by politicians (President Woodrow Wilson), business leaders (Col. John Astor), and men of letters, including P.G. Wodehouse and then-Harvard students T.S. Eliot and Edward Estlin Cummings (e.e. cummings).
Herriman has also been cited as a source of inspiration and influence by Charles Schulz, Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seuss), Bill Watterson, Art Spiegelman and R. Crumb. Michael Tisserand's
Krazy, a new biography of Herriman, is an in-depth look the cartoonist and his work, particularly his
Krazy Kat comic strip. The book also addresses Herriman's ambiguous racial background, but not to the degree suggested by the clever subtitle,
George Herriman, A Life in Black and White.
"Herriman was never in his lifetime considered an African-American cartoonist," Tisserand writes, "Neither is there any evidence that black readers interpreted anything in
Krazy Kat as overtly racial messages." Over the years Herriman's band of cartoonists and writers joked about his curly hair, even referencing it in their work, but neither they nor his readers were aware of his true racial identity. It was not until his birth certificate was found in 1971, almost 30 years after his death, that he was revealed to have been a Creole black man passing for white.
George Herriman was born in August 1880 in New Orleans' Tremé neighborhood to a family that was well-established in local politics, business and religious life in a city that seemed to tolerate its diversity in ways that might surprise modern readers. When the rules began to change, Herriman's father moved his family across the country and the color line. At this point in the book, Tisserand notes that in fiction at least, the "passing story" follows a familiar arc: "the decision to pass, then the inevitable discovery and ruined lives."
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