A mouse throws a brick at a cat. The cat loves the mouse. The dog loves the cat and arrests the mouse, Around and around it goes.
On one level Krazy Kat is the simplest of cartoons. Three animals, Krazy the cat, Ignatz the mouse, Krazy’s beloved “Dollin,” and Offissa Pupp, and a minimalist American South-western background of mesas and buttes and Navajo fixtures and fittings. The same thing every time if you wait long enough.
But when it comes to George Herriman’s timeless strip it’s all in the telling. It is about the joyous craft of the drawing, the almost Joycean playfulness of the language, the innovative way the cartoonist breaks up the space (my favourite might be the 1910 full-page strip in which Krazy and Ignatz throw a boulder down a hill to see if a rolling stone gathers moss or not. The panels on the page are set at a 45-degree tilt. Our eye moves down and to the right at the same speed as the rolling boulder.
Herriman’s cartoon, which ran from 1913 until Herriman’s death in 1944, offered a menage a trois of sublimated desire that erupts instead into cartoon violence. It played with ideas of race and sexuality in the most family-friendly form, the American newspaper strip.
“No one,” not even Herriman, knew whether Krazy was a her, a him or an it,” his fellow cartoonist Ed Wheelan once said.
Perhaps no wonder, then, that Krazy Kat was beloved of poets and painters. Among the strip’s admirers were (deep breath) ee cummings, Jack Kerouac, Willem De Kooning, Vladimir Nabokov, and, it is said, Picasso. Charles Schulz was a huge fan. The Navajo zig-zag design on Charlie Brown’s shirt, was, Schulz, told Mutts cartoonist Patrick McDonnell, inspired by Herriman’s strip. “I always thought if I could just do something as good as Krazy Kat, I would be happy.”
But who was the man behind the strip? Michael Tisserand’s new biography of Herriman, Krazy: George Herriman, A Life in Black and White, is an attempt to give us the full picture. It’s an exhaustive account that travels from race riots in New Orleans to forced internment during the Second World War (one of Herriman’s carers was a young Japanese-American who was forced to leave in either 1942 or 1943; his fate is unknown).
It’s a story that takes in the birth of the American comic strip, newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst, Laurel and Hardy and the death of Herriman’s wife in an automobile accident.
But for all these noises off (some of them very loud clearly), the central fact of Herriman’s life is the issue of race and its erasure. As Tisserand writes near the beginning of his book: “Still, the facts seem to be in. George Joseph Herriman was a black man born in New Orleans and raised in Los Angeles. For their own reasons the Herrimans has obscured their identity and ‘passed’ for white.”
Skin colour was often the source of the humour in many of Herriman’s strips. Tisserand notes one particular cartoon story, featuring Baron Mooch, one of Herriman’s Krazy Kat forerunners, which sees the title character blackening up to see a baseball game only to be knocked out by a stray ball and revived by a bucket of water that washes away the burnt cork he used to blacken his face.
“And so Mooch,” Tisserand writes, “starts out as white, then turns black, then turns white again.”
In hindsight, the temptation is to view Herriman’s output through this biographical lens, to see the constant transformations in gender and appearance in the strip as a comment on Herriman’s own social act of impersonation.
And yet Herriman was never considered an African-American cartoonist in his lifetime. “Neither is there any evidence that black readers interpreted anything in Krazy Kat as overtly racial messages,” Tisserand points out.
More than that, the truth is, Tisserand notes, Herriman possibly didn't even know that his family had concealed their origins and he certainly went on to live in white communities, work with white colleagues and marry a white woman.
If anything I could have taken more on this rich seam from Tisserand, how Herriman explored the idea of skin colour through his cartoons.
But then again the sheer scale and depth of this book is a reminder that the life is not the art and the art is not the life.
George Herriman died more than 70 years ago. On the page a brick flies through the air forever.
Krazy: George Herriman, A Life in Black and White, by Michael Tisserand is published by Harper.
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