The Secret Creole Who Created America's Greatest Comic Strip
George Joseph Herriman was born in New Orleans on August 22, 1880, into a mixed-race Creole family. His birth certificate classified him as "colored." This fact — which Herriman spent his entire adult life concealing — is the key to understanding both the man and his masterpiece. When his family moved to Los Angeles in the 1880s, Herriman reinvented himself as white, wore a hat at all times to hide his curly hair, and never spoke publicly about his New Orleans origins or his racial background. He carried the secret to his grave in 1944.
And while carrying that secret, he created Krazy Kat — the most critically acclaimed comic strip in the history of the medium, a work that Pablo Picasso admired, that e.e. cummings wrote an introduction for, and that has been called the single greatest work of art ever produced in the American newspaper.
Krazy Kat
Krazy Kat ran from 1913 to 1944, and its premise was deceptively simple. Krazy Kat loves Ignatz Mouse. Ignatz Mouse throws bricks at Krazy Kat's head. Krazy Kat interprets each brick as a sign of love. Officer Bull Pupp tries to arrest Ignatz for the assault. This triangle repeated, with infinite variations, for over thirty years.
What made Krazy Kat transcendent was everything around that simple premise — the surreal desert landscapes of Coconino County, which shifted and transformed from panel to panel; the poetic, invented language that Krazy spoke, a mix of Yiddish, Spanish, French, and something entirely Herriman's own; the philosophical depth of a love triangle that was really about the nature of love itself, about how we choose to interpret the blows that life throws at us.
Critics have read Krazy Kat as everything from a Dadaist experiment to a meditation on racial identity in America. The strip's central question — is the brick an act of violence or an act of love? — resonates differently when you know that its creator was a man who lived his entire life as someone he wasn't, in a country that would have treated him differently if it knew the truth.
The New Orleans Connection
Herriman rarely acknowledged New Orleans, but the city is all over his work. The linguistic playfulness of Krazy Kat — the mixing of languages, the invented dialect, the joy in the sound of words — is pure New Orleans Creole culture. The fluidity of identity that defines the strip — Krazy's gender is never fixed, the landscape is never stable, nothing is quite what it seems — mirrors the experience of a mixed-race Creole navigating the rigid racial categories of early twentieth-century America.
New Orleans in the 1880s was one of the few places in America where the kind of racial fluidity that defined Herriman's family was possible. The Creole community occupied a space between Black and white that existed nowhere else in the country. When the Herrimans left for California, they left that in-between space behind and chose one side of the line. George Herriman spent the rest of his life drawing a comic strip about a character who refused to be defined by anyone else's categories.
Legacy
Krazy Kat was never a popular strip — it survived for three decades largely because William Randolph Hearst loved it and kept it running in his newspapers regardless of readership. But its influence on American art and literature is immeasurable. Every experimental comic, every graphic novel that treats the medium as art rather than entertainment, every cartoonist who uses the form to explore something deeper than gags — all of them owe a debt to George Herriman, the Creole kid from New Orleans who hid who he was and created something no one else could have.
Leave a comment
All comments are moderated before being published.
This site is protected by hCaptcha and the hCaptcha Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.