Rediscovering The Koolest Kat of the Jazz Age
By Bill Sasser
Spring 2019
Art+Design Magazine
A gender-shifting black cat, a brick hurling white mouse, and a bulldog cop forever enforcing order on their anarchic love triangle seems a spare frame to hang perhaps the greatest American comic strip. Yet such was the genius of New Orleans-born cartoonist George Herriman, whose poetically subversive Krazy Kat, with its subtle commentaries on race, drew from his own conflicted and secret identity—for all his adult life Herriman was a Creole person of color, “passing” as white.
“Herriman put more of himself, his own life, directly into his work than any other cartoonist up to that point,” explains Michael Tisserand, author of Krazy: George Herriman, A Life in Black and White (Harper Collins, $35). “When Herriman started his career, if his true racial identity was known he would have never worked for a national newspaper. He couldn’t have married his wife, he couldn’t have bought the house where they lived in Los Angeles.”
First seeing print in 1913, Krazy Kat was published by the Hearst newspaper chain over a 31-year run that spanned the Jazz Age, the Great Depression, and World War II. Within its often spare panels critics have found strains of surrealism, Dadaism, and premonitions of post-modernism. The strip was praised for a philosophical bent and a linguistic patois that could read like jazz improvisation. Inspired by visits to Arizona, Herriman set Krazy Kat in mythical Coconino County. His Southwestern landscapes shift behind characters from panel to panel, regardless of plot or action, wordlessly upending cartooning convention while creating an ineffable Zen quality.
If Herriman silently struggled to hide who he was, his outrageous feline character was truly free. A black character who yearns for a white one, Krazy’s gender also keeps changing—in one strip switching four times in a single sentence. “Nothing is quite stable and this theme is seen most persistently with gender identity,” explains Tisserand. “Krazy Kat is male or female or non-binary, which heightens our sense of Krazy’s defiance at being put in any box. At first Herriman tried sticking with one gender, but it didn’t work—he wanted Krazy to be a sprite, an indefinable energy that couldn’t be fully understood.”
In some plot twists, Krazy or Ignatz change color, or swap colors, with ensuing complications. Herriman introduces a new weasel character that in his cartoon market place is worth more as a white weasel than as a brown weasel. Often much of this sailed over average readers’ heads, but the cartoonist’s insistent commentary on race gained new poignancy nearly 30 years after his death. In 1971, a researcher in New Orleans uncovered his birth certificate—Herriman was classified mixed race, or in the parlance of the times, “colored.” Struggling under Jim Crowe, his family moved to Los Angeles in 1890 when he was 10 years-old and thereafter “passed” as white.
Although lauded during his career, no thorough story of Herriman’s life has been told until Tisserand’s biography. A New Orleans writer whose previous book, The Kingdom of Zydeco, immerses readers in the regions’ celebrated Cajun culture and music, Tisserand spent 10 years researching and writing Krazy, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Awards. A documentary inspired by his biography is in the works, directed by Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Jonathan Hock.
“I had to make a narrative, a story of a life, moving through time, but there are large gaps in the record about his personal life,” says Tisserand, who read through hundreds of letters, thousands of comic strips and newspaper articles, and made visits to Arizona to interview still-living family members. “I was careful not to overstate, because I just don’t know how he felt or thought about a lot things.”
Tisserand documents Herriman’s family history and traces their experience in city’s Treme neighborhood—the nation’s oldest enclave of free people of color—and their flight to California. Herriman’s evolution as a young cartoonist in Los Angeles and New York started with such journeyman tasks as illustrating ads and news stories and cartooning major sporting events. Newspaper funny pages were a hot, new medium and he went on to create dozens of strips, drawing inspiration from jazz, vaudeville, and another new art form, film animation. As a young artist in New York he was very much a part of the city’s avant garde scene. All along, Herriman dreamed up elaborate back stories for his family history, calling himself “George the Greek” and wearing a hat to hide his curly hair.
As a sports cartoonist, Herriman followed a national obsession with boxer Jack Johnson, a black man whose success stirred racial tensions as he defeated a succession of white fighters. Outrageously, during some fights Johnson openly mocked his opponents and spectators, imitating the tropes of a minstrel show before knocking out his white challengers. Herriman embraced the minstrel theme: one cartoon from 1909, A Barnyard Study in Black and White, shows Johnson as a cigar-smoking plantation overlord strolling past his lesser pugilistic minions.
Herrimam’s Krazy Kat was deceptively simple. A cat pines for a mouse, the mouse shows thanks with hurled bricks, Offissa Pupp protects the cat. At first the strip was mostly inspired by vaudeville but quickly developed deeper nuances. An intellectual, Herriman made allusions to classical literature and found inspiration in highbrow culture, such as the famous Armory Show of 1913, credited for bringing Modern Art to America. After viewing the exhibit, he drew an eight-panel Krazy Kat strip as homage to Duchamp’s cubist masterpiece Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2.
“With Krazy Kat you don’t see the harshness of his earlier sports cartoons,” says Tisserand. “He’s really trying to understand social identity using metaphors and images, and soon the reading becomes very dense. He was incapable of dumbing anything down.”
Poets T.S. Elliot and E.E. Cummings were dedicated fans, but Krazy Kat was always at the bottom of reader polls. Letters show that he was worried about losing his contract as late as the 1930s, but William Randolph Hearst wanted a highbrow audience, and knew that sophisticated readers considered Herriman a genius.
Creating nearly three thousand cartoons until his death in April 1944, Herriman’s influence spans the 20th Century. Childhood fans included Jack Kerouac, Charles Schulz, Robert Crumb, and Dr. Seuss, who all cited Krazy Kat as an influence on their art. Jazz critic Stanley Crouch and novelist Umberto Echo both published essays on the strip decades after the cartoonist’s death. Michael Stipe of R.E.M. has two Krazy Kat tattoos.
“Krazy Kat feels timeless, and reading it now still feels incredibly vibrant and contemporary—its still fun for me,” says Tisserand, a lifelong comics fan who read Krazy Kat anthologies as a kid in Minnesota. “You have references to historical events, but Herriman plays with major human themes in indirect ways. Krazy Kat is about fate, freedom, the soul, the search for beauty, the threat of evil, about time and the cycle of life and death, some of the deepest meditations on those ideas that I’ve read. He was a giant because he refused to compromise his vision.”
Born of New Orleans, Herriman never returned to his native city. Tisserand’s research found no direct personal comments on his racial identity, though one two-panel strip comes very close: Ignatz Mouse stares into his coffee mug and declares Hey, this isn’t black coffee!!! Off screen, Krazy answers Sure it is. In the next panel he delivers his punch line—Just look under the milk—as the mug flies towards his head. Tisserand also points to this Herriman quote, “The whole ‘life’ complex seems so absurd I simply draw what I see. To me it’s just as sensible as the way it is.”