George Herriman
Born in New Orleans in 1880 to a family of Creole ancestry, comic artist George Herriman moved with his family in 1886 to Los Angeles. This move occurred in part to avoid the institutionalized racism and legal discrimination extant in Louisiana in this period. As an adolescent in L.A., Herriman worked a variety of jobs (including as a housepainter, barber, baker, grape seller, mandarin player, and dairy farmer) as he established his comic career; he sold his first sketch to the L.A. Herald at age seventeen, and worked in the Herald’s engraving department before moving to New York around 1900. In New York, he began selling drawings and cartoons to newspapers and magazines such as the New York News, Judge, and Life, and sold his first comic-strip series to New York World beginning in 1902, including Musical Moses (1902), Professor Otto and his Auto (1902), Acrobatic Archie (1903), Two Jolly Jackies (1902), Major Ozone’s Fresh Air Crusade (1904). In 1902, Herriman also married Mabel Lillian Bridge, with whom he had two daughters.
Herriman worked for a variety of journals and papers, producing short-lived series particularly for papers owned by William Randolph Hearst, before generating his acclaimed comic-strip series Krazy Kat, which ran daily between 1913 and 1944. Krazy Kat emerged from an earlier comic series “The Dingbat Family” (later named “The Family Upstairs”) in which Herriman began to introduce a sideshow underneath the main comic featuring a cat and mouse that eventually became Krazy Kat and Ignatz Mouse. Described as melodramatic, surrealistic, experimental, poetic, linguistically innovative, and “wacky,” Krazy Kat quickly generated a popular following across varied cultural sectors. American poet e.e. cummings was one of many writers, musicians, and artists who were excited by the series. In his essay “A Foreword to Krazy” in A Miscellany Revised (1946), cummings describes the comic-strip:
What concerns me fundamentally is a meteoric burlesk [sic]melodrama, born of the immemorial adage love will find a way. This frank frenzy (encouraged by a strictly irrational landscape in perpetual metamorphosis) generates three protagonists and a plot. Two of the protagonists are easily recognized as a cynical brick-throwing mouse and a sentimental policeman-dog. The third protagonist – whose ambiguous gender doesn’t disguise the good news that here comes our heroine – may be described as a humbly poetic, gently clownlike, supremely innocent, and illimitably affectionate creature (slightly resembling a child’s drawing of a cat, but gifted with the secret grace and obvious clumsiness of a penguin on terra firma) who is never so happy as when egoist-mouse, thwarting altruist-dog, hits her in the head with a brick.
Herriman lived with his family in Los Angeles as he continued to pen Krazy Kat in the latter part of his life, though he also regularly visited the American southwest. The canyons, rock formations, mesas, and the painted desert of Coconino County, Arizona inspired the landscape of his comic series (a landscape that became infused with innovative uses of color when color became prominent in newspapers in 1935). The 1930s garnered both personal and professional challenges for Herriman. His wife died in 1934 and one of his daughters died in 1939. While his Krazy Kat series was widely popular in its early years, by the later 1930s the strip maintained more of a cult following, including in its fan base the newspaper mogul Hearst, who supported the comic strip until Herriman’s death in 1944. As per his request, Herriman’s ashes were scattered over the desert in Monument Valley, Coconino County. (BH)
Further reading:
The Comic Strip Library collection