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Krazy’s “dual personality.”
Krazy and Ignatz: “a study in black and white.”
In Krazy and Ignatz’s world, changing one’s complexion was a prank.
able to switch gender; in one episode, Stimpy becomes pregnant. Eighty years before Ren and Stimpy, though, Krazy was mulling, “I don’t know if I should to take a husband or a wife [sic],” and according to Elisabeth Crocker, who wrote a 1994 essay on the topic, Herriman claimed even he wasn’t sure of Krazy’s gender. This sort of cheerful, anarchic surrealism on the funny pages was unusual in Herriman’s day and wasn’t popular with the public. If not for the backing of a patron — powerful newspaperman William Randolph Hearst — Krazy Kat surely would have gone the way of Herriman’s less successful comic strips, such as The Dingbat Family and Baron Bean. Though intellectuals liked it (both President Woodrow Wilson and poet e.e. cummings were fans), Tisserand reports that in 1944, Krazy Kat appeared in only 44 papers, while Blondie was in more than 1,000. “Krazy Kat always ranked at the bottom,” Tisserand says. “There were letters to the editor that said things like, ‘Tie a rope around that cat and throw it in the river.’ Having a lead character that was both male and female — it affected people the way transgender bathrooms drive people crazy today. It was just unthinkable.” JUST AS UNTHINKABLE, IT SEEMS, WAS THE IDEA THAT A FAMOUS, CELEBRATED CARTOONIST COULD BE BLACK.
Herriman avoided the topic, according to Tisserand (though he listed himself as “Caucasian” on his war papers) and his colleagues knew him variously as having French, Greek or Jewish roots. The secret was so well-kept, according to Stanley Crouch in his essay Blues for Krazy Kat, that not even other black intellectuals suspected; in the 1970s, Ralph Ellison, author of Invisible Man, expressed astonishment that Herriman was “a Negro.” Reading Krazy Kat today with this knowledge adds further dimension to the cartoon, as Krazy (and sometimes Ignatz) changes color from time to time, whether by going into a beauty parlor, getting covered with paint or for no reason at all.
In one multipanel strip, Krazy gets doused with whitewash by a house painter and changes from black to white. Meanwhile, Ignatz sits by a creek and rhapsodizes, “Gosh, I wish a beautiful nymph would come along, and take a bath right now while I’m here. And sure enough, here comes one now — white as a lily, pure as the driven snow.” Of course, it’s Krazy, who emerges from the creek black again — and Ignatz, enraged, clocks the cat with a brick. To modern eyes, Herriman’s creation may seem crude, and Krazy’s strange patois might take some patience, but Tisserand says, “With a little bit of time invested and a little bit of careful reading out loud, the work speaks for itself. … The rest of the strip is poetic. It’s only Krazy [who speaks in a strange manner]. One of my hopes is that this biography — while it’s not needed to appreciate Krazy Kat — will make Krazy Kat accessible to readers. “It also helps to imagine a guy not being sure who he is,” Tisserand adds. “He never came back to New Orleans, he never talked about it; there was a sort of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ about his ethnicity. It would have been a scandal. Even when he was in his late 20s, the newspaper ran stories about people who had ‘Negro blood.’ Herriman is a model of maintaining a stubborn vision despite how people are reacting to your work.” Herriman lived a celebrated, storied life, but despite nearly 10 years of research, Tisserand found a number of mysteries and dead ends in the cartoonist’s life. Those are illustrated — literally — in some of the dozens of cartoons in Krazy, many not seen since their original newspaper publication. “He said sometimes he tries to do what is expected of him, but he just can’t do it,” Tisserand says. “When you see the work he did as a teenager in the Los Angeles Herald — from the very beginning he was going way beyond what’s expected of him.”