Krazy in love

George Herriman was born in New Orleans on 22 August 1880. Like his younger contemporary Ferdinand Joseph La Menthe — better known as Jelly Roll Morton — Herriman was a New Orleans Creole, descended from the city's particular blending of French, Spanish, and African ancestries. Unlike Morton, Herriman left the city at an early age (probably around six), when his parents moved on to Los Angeles, possibly in search of an environment in which the family's ambiguous racial status wouldn't be quite such an issue. (Friends later thought Herriman might have been Greek; he was rarely photographed with his hat off, apparently to conceal his “kinky” hair.) His father worked as a barber and, later, as a baker; the young George showed no aptitude for either trade, but on the other hand he had a gift for drawing, and in 1897 he was hired by the Los Angeles Herald as an assistant engraver. (The Herald, owned at the time by Joseph D. Lynch, was acquired years later by William Randolph Hearst, who would become one of Herriman's greatest admirers.)

      Herriman stayed in Los Angeles three years, then left for New York City, where the art of the newspaper cartoon was having its first great flowering. In the pages of the city's furiously competing newspapers the work of Winsor McCay, F. W. Outcault, and other brilliant artists had begun to appear, and Herriman quickly joined their number. Even in his early strips, with names like Professor Otto and His Auto and Acrobatic Archie, there's no mistaking the originality of his storylines or the excellence of his draftsmanship, and if Herriman's career had ended in, say, 1910, he would still be counted as one of the more interesting cartoonists of the day. But while the careers of some of his peers — such as the prodigiously gifted McCay, who eventually moved on to other kinds of work — would show a gradual decline in originality and technique, Herriman was poised to take a great leap ahead by creating Krazy Kat, the sublime and unaccountable masterpiece of American comic art, which somehow managed to preserve its freshness, wit, and uniqueness from its origins in 1910-1913 until Herriman died, in 1944, with unfinished strips still on his drawing table.

      Appropriately, Krazy Kat wasn't really born (such creations exist ab aeterno, waiting to be summoned) but gradually evolved out of the margins of Herriman's other work. According to the superb Krazy Kat: The Comic Art of George Herriman, compiled by Patrick McDonnell, Karen O'Connell, and Georgia Riley de Havenon, the first “beaning” of Kat by Mouse appeared in the foreground of Herriman's strip The Dingbat Family ninety-one years ago today, on 26 July 1910, silently upstaging the domestic goings-on behind them. Within a few months the still-rudimentary sketches in the bottom of the panels had been separated into a tiny, parallel strip of their own, providing a kind of commentary on and counterpoint to the main action above. Not until 28 October 1913, did Krazy Kat become a separate feature; although Herriman would continue to draw a number of other strips for years, it was now Krazy Kat which would be forever associated with his name.

      So what was it that made Krazy so special? It's premise could hardly be simpler, or — seemingly — less promising. Krazy Kat loves Ignatz Mouse, who for his part loathes the cat, whom he regularly rewards with a beaning with a well-aimed brick. The beanings do not lessen Krazy's affection a whit — in fact Krazy takes the brick as a token of love. Officer (or “Offissa”) Pupp, the third member of the triangle, faithfully dedicates himself to the protection of Krazy's noggin, dutifully hauling Ignatz off to jail, sometimes to prevent, and other times to punish, Ignatz's crime. Such a relatively fixed, repeated plotline was not unusual; McCay's brilliant Little Nemo, as visually ambitious as it was, invariably ended with its namesake tumbling back to his bed, crying out for his parents, at the end of each strip. (Maurice Sendak's In The Night Kitchen, an affectionate homage to McCay, borrows the storyline.) And while Herriman varied the outcome subtly now and then, and sometimes dispensed with the bricking altogether, the same basic structure remained in place for more than thirty years.

      What made Krazy Kat distinct was a combination of things. First, there was Herriman's seemingly limitless ability to riff, to invent permutations, extensions, and wrinkles on his theme, and to work into the strip a endless gleanings from 20th century American life. The characters (especially Krazy) speak in an inimitable patois drawn from slang, Brooklynese (“Dissiving” for “deserving”), Yinglish (“Dahlink”), Spanish and French, perhaps the New Orleans dialect called “Yat,” highfalutin jargon — often mispronounced or misused — (“cerulean,” “purveyor,” “somniferous,” “obstikil dillusion”), invented words (“windage,” “adenoiding”), and apparently anything else that may have drifted into Herriman's ear or fancy. Of course using dialect has been a staple of American comedy since at least Mark Twain, and has often been used to define the social distance between the standard English-speaking writer (and presumably reader) on one hand, and, on the other, the depicted dialect-user. There is no condescension or mockery in Krazy Kat's use of dialect, however; on the contrary the strip is a monument to Herriman's enduring fascination with and affection for the mingling voices and possibilities of the American vernacular. Herriman, like Joyce, was an artist who painted with voices, accents, and neologisms.

      Then there is the curious indeterminateness of the strips. Herriman's characters enact their tiny dramas against the stark, surreal moonscape of “Coconino County,” based on Herriman's beloved American Southwest. From frame to frame mushrooms, buttes, pyramids, castles, and trees drift in and out behind the characters, with no attempt at continuity or consistency. Even the gender of the hero(ine) is curiously undefined. Krazy is generally referred to in the strip as “he,” but both in his behavior and in his relation to the other two clearly male members of the triangle, “he” seems to function as a female. (Indeed “he” even campaigns for “Woman Suffrage”). When asked about this, Herriman characteristically said he didn't know. In the fanciful freedom of a cartoon strip, when conceived by a truly unfettered imagination, something as apparently fundamental as the question of a lead character's gender could be left blithely unsettled, drifting now one way, now another, without ever coming to earth.

      It's tempting (and not new) to try to connect Herriman's casualness about landscape, dialect, and gender with the ambiguousness of his own ethnicity. What little evidence there is (and there isn't much) suggests that Herriman was aware that he had some African-American ancestors and largely kept the fact to himself, not a surprising choice given the personal and professional restrictions endured by African-Americans in his time. It is more than likely that, under the circumstances, Herriman would not have been given syndicated newspaper distribution if he had been publicly identified as an African-American. To some, no doubt, Herriman's apparent “passing” for white seems less than honorable; but given the absurdity of the rigid racial categories then enforced in much of the country, under which “one drop of blood” from an African ancestor was sufficient to distinguish “black” from “white,” who is to say that Herriman's refusal to let someone else define his “race” was the wrong choice? Said to have been in person the gentlest of men, hasn't Herriman, in his strips, summoned the spirit of a more relaxed, more fluid, conception of American identity, one that seems to be increasingly apposite today, when our ethnic categories are at once bifurcating and blurring?

      In the end there simply isn't any accounting for Krazy Kat. A creation so generous, so uncorrupted, so perfectly simple and so infinitely convoluted, should by logic never have been able to exist at all, much less survive in the newspapers for more than thirty years. That it did is in part a tribute to William Randolph Hearst, who, whatever his other sins, was devoted to the strip and supported it even when its popularity declined; in part a tribute to American audiences, who just possibly weren't as dumb as one might think; but most of all it is a tribute to Herriman, who deserves the last word. In 1917 he drew a strip in which Krazy comes upon a ouija board lying on the ground. Told that it divines who one's friends or enemies are, Krazy asks the board “Weeja, weeja, who is it I got for a 'enemies'?” and the board, naturally, spells out I—G—N—A—T—Z. Enraged at this slander, Krazy stomps on the board and walks off in a huff. Ignatz then happens along, finds the mangled board, which turns out to have been his, and correctly assumes that Krazy must be responsible for its destruction. Inevitably, Ignatz's brick strikes Krazy, who then exclaims: “See!! Didn't I tell you he was my friend? That 'Weeja' is a fibba!!!” Herriman ends the strip by addressing the spirits from the otherworld:

“You have written truth, you friends of the 'shadows', yet be not harsh with 'Krazy'. He is but a shadow himself, caught in the web of this mortal skein. We call him 'Cat', we call him 'Crazy' yet he is neither. At some time will he ride away to you, people of the twilight, his password will be the echoes of a vesper bell, his coach, a zephyr from the west. Forgive him, for you will understand him no better than we who linger on this side of the pale.”