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George Herriman was acclaimed in his day, but his black Creole heritage wasn’t discovered until a generation after his death.
In this 1939 color panel, the zeitgeist of Krazy Kat is laid out simply: Ignatz Mouse won’t stop lobbing bricks at the oblivious Krazy Kat, while Officer Pupp dreams of putting Ignatz in jail for good. Behind them is one of Herriman’s trademark surreal Southwestern landscapes, which always seemed in constant motion.
The most influential pioneering cartoonist in American newspaper history was a black man. And until 1970, no one ever had suspected. HERRIMAN’S LIFE HAD BEEN EXPLORED ONLY PIECEMEAL UNTIL MICHAEL TISSERAND TOOK AN INTEREST. A fan of comics and
cartoons, Tisserand — a former Gambit editor — had planned to do a cover story for the paper on Herriman and his legacy when Hurricane Katrina hit and the levees failed. Weeks later, when he was able to get back into Gambit’s offices, Tisserand found that floodwaters had come to the very top of his desk but not overtopped it, and that his preliminary research sat there, intact. That was the beginning of a nearly 10-year research odyssey that culminates this month with the publication of Krazy: George Herriman, A Life in Black and
White (Harper Collins, $35), an exhaustive look at the cartoonist and how he expressed himself through Krazy, a crudely drawn, lovesick black cat that was both male and female, depending on what the strip called for. “Krazy Kat has racial implications we’re still trying to grapple with and understand as a country,” Tisserand says. Tisserand was living in Chicago when he saw the touring exhibit Masters of American Comics, which included some of Herriman’s work. That, along with his initial research, inspired Tisserand to write a book proposal. “Once I had the contract I had no idea how to do the book,” he says. “But I felt a need to write New Orleans history. This was 2006 [one year after Hurricane Katrina]. Our understanding of our home here needs to be continually deepened.”
That proved to be more tenuous than might be thought. Though Herriman was born in New Orleans, his family left for California when he was young, and in later years he traveled back and forth from Los Angeles to New York, never returning to his hometown. The backgrounds of the Krazy Kat strips are distinctly Southwestern, drawing from Herriman’s memory of the mesas and canyons of Arizona. Only Krazy’s odd patois — which Tisserand describes as “Elizabethan English, German, Creole, newspaper slang and more that I’m still trying to identify” — bears any obvious relation to New Orleans. The strip itself is deceptively simple: Krazy is a dimwitted cat who pines for Ignatz, a perpetually grouchy mouse who lives only to clock Krazy with an endless supply of bricks. (Krazy mistakes each painful brick as a token of Ignatz’s love: “Lil Aingil!” Krazy exclaims.) Meanwhile, a third character, Officer Pupp, schemes to put the violent Ignatz in jail; in later years, Pupp develops a crush on Krazy, setting up a constantly thwarted love triangle. This simple setup inspired many other cat-mouse pairs, from the obvious like Tom and Jerry, Herman and Katnip and The Simpsons’ Itchy and
Scratchy (“I think it’s hard for any cat-and-mouse comic not to be in the shadow of Krazy,” Tisserand says) to the less obvious; Tisserand points out that Charlie Brown’s endlessly botched attempts to kick a football in Peanuts were taken directly from a Herriman panel where Ignatz snatches away a ball. Both Charlie Brown’s crush on the Little Red-Haired Girl and Lucy’s love of the oblivious Schroeder echo Krazy’s fruitless pursuit of Ignatz. After reading Krazy Kat, Tisserand says, “Charles Schulz said very specifically that he needed to make a strip about more than just the funny antics of little children.” Then there are Ren and Stimpy, the gonzo 1990s dogand-cat pair of the TV show of the same name, whose own gender fluidity is a direct reflection of Herriman. Of Ren and Stimpy’s violent and often gross antics, Entertainment Weekly wrote, “Comic-strip aficionados will recognize that R&S’s unfulfilled attraction is a cruder echo of the one between George Herriman’s Krazy Kat and Ignatz Mouse.” Like Krazy and Ignatz, the two occasionally have a domestic relationship (even sharing a bed), and like Krazy, the moronic Stimpy — who adores Ren completely — is PAGE 19