Review by New York Times Review
in our superficially more enlightened age, the phrase "mixed race" has become the accepted term to describe people with parents of different races. In fact the phrase has become a tool of marketers and brand-conscious celebrities to suggest whatever they're selling is allinclusive, a living embodiment of diversity. Many take great care in, for example, their Instagram biographies to list their hyphenated backgrounds. But there are limits to the term's utility, especially for people with African ancestry. Barack Obama was America's first mixed-race president. His father was Kenyan and his mother a white woman from Kansas. Yet the tawdry racial history of this Republic demanded that he claim blackness as his primary identity because one drop of black blood has always decided your fate in this country. "Mixed race" notwithstanding, an African heritage in America is never just a cool exotic spice; one taste and it becomes all anyone remembers of the meal. This rigid attitude toward race is often enforced by black Americans as fiercely as whites. For them the "mixed race" label, when employed by black people with a nonblack parent or grandparents, seems more a transparent attempt to dodge racial pigeonholing than a heartfelt assertion of identity. Jim Crow, which ended officially in the 1960s, has never been completely dismantled. So attempts to escape its grip, while understandable, create resentment in those unable to slip across the racial boundaries. All of which makes Michael Tisserand's "Krazy: George Herriman, a Life in Black and White" a fascinating and frustrating biography. Though Herriman's "Krazy Kat" comic strip was admired in his lifetime, it wasn't until years after his death in 1944 that his vast influence received widespread critical respect. Herriman's depiction of the tangled relationships among the black cat Krazy, his white mouse tormentor and sometime love interest Ignatz and the bulldog Officer Pupp, set against a desert backdrop in fictional Coconino County (taken from a real area of Arizona), inspired several generations of cartoonists. Charles M. Schulz's "Peanuts," Ralph Bakshi's "Fritz the Cat" and Art Spiegelman's "Maus" ah owe a debt to Herriman's draftsmanship and poetic sense. Schulz got turned on to "Krazy Kat" right after World War II, he said, and it "did much to inspire me to create a feature that went beyond the mere actions of ordinary children." Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seuss), whose animal characters strongly resemble Herriman's, told a biographer, "At its best, the comic strip is an art form of such terrific wumpf! that I'd much rather spend any evening of any week rereading the beautifully insane sanities of George Herriman's Krazy Kat than to sit myself down in some opera house to hear some smiling Irish tenor murdering Pagliacci." The iconoclastic Robert Crumb called Herriman the "Leonardo da Vinci of comics," while the ambitious Spiegelman argued that "Krazy Kat" "crossed all kinds of boundaries, between high and low, between vulgar and genteel." Ah this alone would have made Herriman worth serious study. But then in the early 1970 s, a quarter-century after his death, a birth certificate was found stating that Herriman was born "colored" to Creole parents in that 19th-century hotbed of miscegenation, New Orleans. Clearly his work had to be re-examined. Not to question its genius, but to see how much of it dealt with hiding a huge part of himself in plain sight. He lived as a white man for decades in the surprisingly benevolent employment of William Randolph Hearst, who adored Herriman's art. He married a white woman, Mabel Bridge, and was able to purchase property in Los Angeles areas where racist covenants kept obviously black Angelinos out. "I never saw any indication in pigmentation, facial structure or speech inflection that indicated anything Negroid about George Herriman," his friend and fellow cartoonist Karl Hubenthal said. Among his newspaper colleagues there was a jokey guessing game about his racial lineage inspired by his "knotty" (a.k.a. kinky) hair. Sometimes referred to as George the Greek, he took to wearing hats religiously: Of the 15 photographs "Krazy" includes of Herriman, 12 show him in a hat. Writing the biography of a black person who passed for white in 20th-century America adds an extra layer of difficulty to the detective work any biographer must undertake. This is especially true since Herriman seems never to have addressed his deception in his personal writings or confided his feelings about racial identity to family or friends. He claimed he came from a family of bakers and had worked in his youth as a house painter and carnival barker. In truth he was the great-grandson of Stephen Herriman, a married white boat's captain from Long Island with roots in England, who purchased enslaved workers after settling in Louisiana, and Justine Olivier, a "free woman of color" who engaged in a plaçage relationship in which her lover financially supported her and her two children. Herriman's grandfather George became a successful tailor with a shop in the heart of the French Quarter; his son, George Jr., followed him into the tailoring business. Through the Civil War and the ensuing retrenchment of the freedoms Creoles enjoyed in Louisiana, the Herrimans became prominent in New Orleans's Creole community, joining the Masons and supporting court cases to stem the tide of segregation overrunning Louisiana and the South during Reconstruction. george Joseph herriman, the cartoonist, was born Aug. 22, 1880, in the Creole stronghold of Tremé. Of his childhood, he "usually said he was from California," Tisserand writes. "But it's likely that he grew up with a degree of comfort and stability, even as the adults around him were becoming less sure of their social and economic footing." So in August 1890 Herriman's father purchased tickets for himself, his wife and their four children for a train ride to the promised land of California. Young Herriman was 10 at the time, old enough to be aware of the color line that defined American race relations. At some pointduring this fateful journey west, the Herriman family shifted from "colored" to "white." As his father found work as a tailor with a number of Los Angeles shops, young George attended Catholic school and became attracted to drawing as an adolescent. His assumed nonblack identity, in a sense, probably fed his creativity, since Herriman would spend the rest of his life concocting variations on his origin story. "Once, when a youth, I aspired to become a baker, a kneader of dough, to mold bread and fashion a doughnut or stencil a cookie," he wrote in 1926. "Full of the spirit of adolescence I buried a dead mouse in a loaf of bread once - it found its way into a tough family and not only did I get a sweet trimming but I got the air also____Then I became a cartoonist - as a sort of revenge on the world." Absent any direct commentary on Herriman's dual identity, Tisserand promises to sift through the cartoonist's work to parse his relationship to race. In the first chapter the author asks, "Did this revelation, whatever it was, find its way into his wondrous comics?" Early in his career, as a sports cartoonist for the Hearst newspaper syndicate, Herriman championed the rebellious black heavyweight Jack Johnson. While the Hearst papers' front pages incited racial hatred of the black fighter typical of the time, Herriman, and some of his sports page colleagues, supported Johnson with surprising vigor. Accompanying a January 1909 drawing titled "A Barnyard Study in Black and White," which depicted Johnson as a plantation overlord, Herriman wrote an essay that joked: "The country reverberates with the brave cry of 'The title must come back to the Caucasian.'... They clang their tin armor and puff their age-worn breasts and acclaim themselves Davids ready to crack the dome of somber-hued heavyweight Goliath to bring back our fair title to its home." The day after Johnson defeated the former champ Jim Jeffries, Tisserand notes, Herriman drew a "massive penand-ink minstrel show titled 'Uncle Tom's Cabin - 1910.' It is a fantasy of racial revenge: A grinning, long-limbed Uncle Tom knocks out a tiny Simon Legree. 'Times hab changed Simon,' gloats Tom." Though Tisserand does a truly exhaustive job detailing Herriman's private and public lives, the promised analysis of race in his vast catalog of "Krazy Kat" cartoons is more fleeting than intricate. It feels scattershot even when he identifies potentially relevant material, as with a cartoon published on April 18,1937, in which Krazy Kat encounters a "pale, even unearthly white" baby bear. "Krazy and the bear talk," Tisserand writes, "and Krazy grows confused as to the bear's identity." Krazy discovers the "equatorial bear" has a mother from the South Pole and a father from the North Pole, and that his parents met halfway at the equator. Krazy's parting line is "Happy mittin' on the equator - is all I can say." I wonder if a critic more sensitive to the nuances of race (perhaps Ishmael Reed, who dedicated the magnificent 1972 novel "Mumbo Jumbo" to Herriman) would have found more fodder in the "Krazy Kat" catalog than Tisserand. That said, "Krazy" is absolutely an essential companion to any deep dig into Herriman's work via the many critical books and blogs on comics and, of course, the original "Krazy Kat" cartoons in anthologies and online. 'I became a cartoonist,' Herriman said, 'as a sort of revenge on the world.' NELSON GERGE, is the author, most recently, of "The Hippest Trip in America: Soul Train and the Evolution of Culture and Style."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [January 1, 2017]
Review by Booklist Review
The creator of the comic strip Krazy Kat, George Herriman (1880-1944) was a man of mystery to even his best friends. Small, modest, self-deprecating, ever more reclusive as he aged, Herriman, it developed, had a secret that came to light when in 1971 a researcher found birth records he at first disbelieved that verified the cartoonist was of African American heritage. Herriman had passed as white ever since his father moved the family from increasingly Jim Crow New Orleans to Los Angeles in 1890. Keeping his guard up ever after meant that, during his working life, he never attended family events; never discussed his origins (in fact, said he was a native Californian); and always wore a hat, indoors and out, to cover his kinky hair. That his precautions were justified Tisserand doesn't let us forget, nor does he fail to point out the satiric jabs against racism that Herriman made in his cartooning all along. Meanwhile, Herriman became the acknowledged (by his colleagues, if hardly himself) first-among-equals of the comic strip's golden age.--Olson, Ray Copyright 2016 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Tisserand (The Kingdom of Zydeco) weaves American history, pop culture, and racial politics with biography to elucidate and celebrate the life of cartoonist George Herriman (1880-1944), the creator of the Krazy Kat comic strip. Readers gain a glut of insight into the development of Krazy Kat, and the many ways the character served as an outlet for Herriman to playfully explore the human condition, which Tisserand sets against the backdrop of Herriman's own little-known racial identity. Though Herriman passed as a white man his whole life, he was actually African-American, born during Reconstruction to a Creole family that hid its racial identity by moving from New Orleans to California when Herriman was 10. Tisserand reconstructs Herriman's multicultural background and follows him from his childhood through his apprenticeship in Los Angeles, his big break in New York City, and frequent trips to the Southwest, using these places in their variety to animate Herriman's identity and provide nuance to his growth as a comics artist. This is a gripping read at the intersection of pop culture and American history. (Dec.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Tisserand (The Kingdom of Zydeco) presents a well-researched, engaging biography of George Herriman (1880-1944), creator of the comic strip Krazy Kat. This brilliant but modestly successful strip ran in American newspapers from 1913 to 1944 and influenced luminaries such as Bill Watterson and Charles Schulz. The chronicle begins with the lives of Herriman's great grandparents in New Orleans before detailing Herriman's early years and the family's migration to the Los Angeles area. From there, the author foregrounds Herriman's budding career as a comics writer as he bounced among prominent newspapers and boxing matches, eventually landing in the offices of newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst, who would later become a great champion of Krazy Kat. Tisserand also weaves in the challenges Herriman faced trying to hide his African American lineage-colleagues often teased him because of his "kinky hair" and for a time dubbed him "George the Greek" because he would not discuss his background. At every step, this work brilliantly re-creates the milieu of its subject's life by shading in the historical context. -VERDICT A significant book for comics scholars and those interested in tracing -Herriman's development from novice to master of the medium.-Paul Stenis, -Pepperdine Univ. Lib., Malibu, CA © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A revelatory biography of the influential Krazy Kat creator George Herriman (1880-1944).Set among the desert mesas of Coconino County, Krazy Kat graced the funny pages from 1913 to 1944 and featured the philosophical antics of Krazy and the brick-throwing mouse, Ignatz. Tisserand (Sugarcane Academy: How a New Orleans Teacher and His Storm-Struck Students Created a School to Remember, 2007, etc.) reveals the depths of their age-old rivalry, tracing influences from Cervantes and Othello to minstrel shows and the Jack Johnson vs. Jim Jeffries bout of 1910. Krazy Kat always had a racial angle: Herriman was born a fair-skinned boy to African-American parents and grew up in the Creole community of New Orleans. His complexion allowed him to pass as white, a controversial practice that Herriman carried secretly throughout his life. Though he penned numerous stripse.g., "Us Husbands," "Baron Mooch," and "The Family Upstairs"it wasnt until the publication of Krazy Katin 1913 that he moved toward the life of a celebrated artist, garnering praise from the likes of e.e. cummings and President Woodrow Wilson. Herrimans unique racial perspective allowed him to sneak some remarkably potent themes into his cartoons, many of which were likely lost on his readers at the time: Krazy, for instance, is revealed to have been born in the cellar of a haunted house, in a tale which must never be told, and yet which everyone knows. In another gag, Ignatz flings a mug at Krazy saying its not the black coffee he wanted. Sure it is, Krazy tells him. Look unda the milk. Tisserand elevates this exhaustively researched and profusely illustrated book beyond the typical comics biography. Seamlessly integrating the story of Herrimans life, he executes an impressive history of early-20th-century race relations, the rise of Hearst and the newspaper boom, and the burgeoning cross-continental society life of New York and Los Angeles. Essential reading for comics fans and history buffs, Krazy is a roaring success, providing an indispensable new perspective on turn-of-the-century America. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
