Enter Krazy Kat! And, With that, the Briefest Meditation on Race in America

Enter Krazy Kat! And, With that, the Briefest Meditation on Race in America August 22, 2016

George Herriman

George Herriman was born on this day in 1880. The Wikipedia article on him says his creation Krazy Kat was “more influential than popular.” And that’s probably so. But I adored the strip. And in the years since Herriman’s death his recognition as a major figure in the advancement of the comic has become a critical tidal wave. Modern cartoonists from Charles Schulz to Art Spiegelman, Robert Crumb and Bill Patterson have all acknowledged his influence.

Herriman was a black Louisiana Creole born in New Orleans. At ten the family moved to Los Angeles. He went to work as an engraver and illustrator right out of High School. He started publishing cartoons by 1901, quickly developing many of the themes we consider standard for comic strips.

Herriman developed the character Krazy Kat in 1910 for the strip the Dingbat Family. Krazy was featured in a strip starting in 1913. The Wikipedia article tells us the strip “was noted for its poetic, dialect-heavy dialogue; its fantastic, shifting backgrounds; and its bold, experimental page layouts. In the strip’s main motif, Ignatz Mouse pelted Krazy with bricks, which the naïve, androgynous (the artist would interchangeably refer to Kat as “he” or “she.”) Kat interpreted as symbols of love. As the strip progressed, a love triangle developed between Krazy, Ignatz, and Offisa Pupp.”

Unlike the fate for too many, Herriman’s genius was recognized by the publisher William Randolph Hearst who gave the artist a lifetime contract with his King Features Syndicate, guaranteeing him a living and freedom to do his work, even though he lack a significant popular following.

Among the small things I love about the Krazy Kat strips as a native Californian who also has lived in Arizona for some years was the backgrounds are filled with Southwestern and Mexican allusions, and in fact the strip takes place in a surrealistic Coconino county, which in our universe is the part of Arizona with Flagstaff. It doesn’t hurt for me that Herriman also illustrated Don Marquis’ Archy & Mehitabel.

Sadly in his lifetime he was ambiguous about his racial heritage, and largely “passed” for white. He was sometimes referred to as “the Greek.” But, the Wikipedia article tells us “Sociologist Arthur Asa Berger made Herriman’s mixed-race heritage known in 1971. While researching for Herriman’s entry for the Dictionary of American Biography, Berger discovered the cartoonist’s race was listed as “colored” on his birth certificate obtained from the New Orleans Board of Health. The 1880 census for New Orleans listed his parents as “mulatto”. Krazy Kat

“On reading this, African-American poet Ishmael Reed dedicated his 1972 novel Mumbo Jumbo to “George Herriman, Afro-American, who created Krazy Kat”. Herriman came to be identified as Black or Creole in comics literature, including his first book-length biography, Krazy Kat: The Comic Art of George Herriman (1986), while the ‘Greek’ label stuck with some biographers, and was used by Bill Blackbeard in his introductions to the Krazy and Ignatz volumes in the early 2000s. Later research at the New Orleans Public Library by writer Brian Nelson showed that Herriman’s maternal grandmother was born in Havana, Cuba, that all his relatives were listed as “mulatto” on the 1890 census, and that Herriman may also have had Spanish or Native American ancestry.”

For me really only important in that in our time and place it is critical that we acknowledge the contributions of people of African descent as such. They’ve been marginalized, abused, and demeaned for too long. Herriman’s decision to pass a sad example of the abuse that has shadowed African Americans to this day.

That Herriman was one of the creative geniuses at the dawn of our contemporary culture, someone in whose debt we all live, but had to mask this essential part of who he was, only makes this reality more poignant.


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