George Herriman - Herriman and race in his work

Cartoonist, born in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA. A fall prevented him from continuing as a house painter, and he turned to drawing cartoons. His first strip was Lariat Pete, appearing in the San Francisco Chronicle (1903). Becoming a sports cartoonist on the New York Journal (1904), he launched a daily strip, Baron Mooch (1907), replacing it with The Dingbat Family in 1910. The family cat, lurking in bottom corners, eventually evolved into Krazy Kat (1910), whose painful unrequited love for Ignatz mouse was featured for more than 30 years in Hearst's newspapers. Intellectually acclaimed, the strip remained Herriman's work, and died with him.

George Joseph Herriman (August 2, 1880 – April 25, 1944) was an American cartoonist, best known for his comic strip Krazy Kat.

George Herriman was born in a light-skinned Creole of Color family in New Orleans, Louisiana, both of his parents were listed as "mulatto" in the 1880 census. In later life many of Herriman's newspaper colleagues were under the impression that Herriman's ancestry was Greek, and Herriman did nothing to dissuade them of this notion. Ignatz: 1935-1936, Fantagraphics, 2005.)

At the age of 17, Herriman began working as an illustrator and engraver for the Los Angeles Herald newspaper. Over the next few years he did many newspaper spot illustrations and cartoons, and produced several early comic strips, at times producing several daily strips at the same time. Herriman's early strips including Major Ozone, Musical Mose, Acrobatic Archie, Professer Otto and his Auto, Two Jolly Jackies and several others, most of which were only slightly above the average quality of newspaper strips of the time.

Perhaps the first indication of Herriman's unusual creativity and poetical sense of humor which would make him famous surfaced in 1909 with his strip Goosebury Sprig. The following year Herriman began a domestic comedy strip called The Dingbat Family. The cat and mouse strip was then spun off into another strip in 1913, originally Krazy Kat and Ignatz, and then simply Krazy Kat.

Herriman also continued drawing the domestic comedy strip, again named The Dingbat Family, until 1916. From 1916 through 1919 Herriman also drew the daily strip Baron Bean. Herriman would continue to draw other strips in addition to Krazy Kat through 1932.

Krazy Kat, however, was the strip which became Herriman's most famous.

On June 25, 1944, two months after Herriman's death, the last of his Krazy Kat strips was printed. At the time Hearst usually brought in new cartoonists when the artists of a popular strip died or quit, but an exception was made for Herriman, as no one else could take his place.

Herriman and race in his work

Some critics see reflections of Herriman's complex experience of America's racial divide reflected in his work. Eyal Amiran points out in an essay in Mosaic that in some later strips, Krazy and the other characters switch between black and white. The strip's inter-species love triangle has also been described as a "thwarted fantasy of miscegenation" (Heer, ibid) in which "the white (mouse) Ignatz loves to hate Krazy, but only as long as he/she is black. Conversely, in another strip, Ignatz is blackened after hiding in a pipe and Krazy's love for the mouse does not resume until his black face is washed clean.

In another strip published in 1931, an art critic visits and describes Krazy and Ignatz as "a study in black &

Another, earlier cartoon of Herriman's, Musical Mose (1902) features a black man who tries, unsuccessfully, to impersonate a white man declaring, in dialect, "I wish mah color would fade", a possible example of Herriman mocking himself, as Heer points out.