Passing strange
Cartoonist George Herriman’s life was as unorthodox as his comic strip
Ignatz Mouse: “Hey, this isn’t black coffee!!!” Krazy Kat: “Sure it is. Look unda the milk.” “Krazy Kat,” created by George Herriman, is one of the most influential comic strips of all time. Centered around the iconic love triangle of Krazy, Ignatz Mouse and Offisa Pupp, the feature ran as a syndicated newspaper strip from 1913 to 1944. To a modern audience the strip can be difficult to understand, if not impenetrable. The pacing and sense of humor of 100 years ago feel foreign to current trends. There are references that were common at the time that are lost to us now. The language used is an idiosyncratic patois of nonsense poetry.
The backgrounds, while beautifully rendered, are a constantly changing surreal backdrop. Characters frequently broke the fourth wall, commenting directly on their status as cartoons. The title character, Krazy Kat, was of indeterminate gender, referred to with shifting pronouns, sometimes within the same sentence. As a whole, Krazy Kat was an ongoing challenge to the reader’s perception of definitions and boundaries.
Creator George Herriman was born in New Orleans in 1880. In the latter part of the 19th century his family moved to Los Angeles where his father worked as a tailor and George began his art career, eventually becoming one of the most famous and celebrated cartoonists in history. This is a distinction that would not have been possible if the truth of his life had been known at the time.
In 1971, while researching Mr. Herriman for an entry in the Dictionary of American Biography, professor Arthur Berger discovered a previously unknown fact. On his birth certificate Mr. Herriman was listed as “colored.” It had always been assumed that he was a white man. Mr. Herriman, to use the terminology of the time, “passed for white” his entire life, at a time when his color would have prevented him from many, if not all, of the achievements he is known for.
Author Michael Tisserand engaged in thorough and exacting research into Mr. Herriman’s life. Mr. Herriman was descended from a family of free men of color. He was light-skinned, although he was teased a lot for his nappy hair, leading him to wear a hat most of the time. It doesn’t appear that Mr. Herriman ever set about to perpetuate a deception. In early 20th-century Los Angeles he was simply treated as a white man, and no one questioned it too closely. He married a white woman, bought and rented property that would have been illegal for a black man, and socialized with some of the biggest names in the newspaper and entertainment industries.
Mr. Tisserand offers much more than just a look at the life of George Herriman. His book is a historiography of a very different time. The first part of the book is an in-depth look at the American South in the 19th century, and the changing role and reality of race relations. He traces the growth of newspaper comic strips as well as gives insight into the earliest days of Hollywood. The bulk of Mr. Herriman’s story takes place merely 100 years ago, but a large part of what is revealed in this book is just how different our culture was at that time. The way people spoke, seen in the dialogue of the comics, as well as through personal correspondence, feels foreign to contemporary modes of communication. Their sense of humor, the pop culture that they engaged in, the moments of history they lived, even though they are barely past the realm of living memory, all seem very removed from the present.
The most disheartening aspect of this is that the issues that have changed the least are the ones surrounding race relations. The concept of the Color Line, that arbitrary cultural distinction that makes life different depending on the color of your skin, played a huge role in the world Mr. Herriman inhabited, and with this in mind it is possible to see that it is a theme that ran throughout his work. In spite of his success, George Herriman constantly questioned his worth and his work. It is easy to believe that the circumstances of his life made him constantly aware of being outed as a fraud, of the possibility of losing everything because he was not what people believed him to be.
As an American history “Krazy” is an engaging dissection of a very different time not far distant from our own. As a biography, it is a fascinating look at the life of a genius cartoonist, one who helped invent the rules of comics even as he himself was breaking them.