'George Joseph Herriman" (August 22,1880-April 25,1944)

Was an American cartoonist best known for the comic strip Krazy Kat (1913-1944).More influential than popular,Krazy Kat had an appreciative audience among people in the arts.Gilbert Seldes' article "The Krazy Kat Who Walks by Himself" was the earliest example of a critic from the high arts giving serious attention to a comic strip.The Comics Journal placed the strip first on its list of the greatest comics of the 20th century.George work has been a primary influence on cartoonist such as Will Eisner,Charles M.Schulz,Robert Crumb,Art Spiegelman,Bill Watterson,and Chris Ware.He was born in New Orleans,to Mulatto Creole parents,and grew up in Los Angeles.After he graduated from high school in 1897,he was employed in the newspaper industry as an illustrator and engraver.He moved on to cartooning and comic-strips a medium then in its infancy-and drew a variety of strips until he introduced his most famous character,Krazy Kat,in his strip The Dingbat Family in 1910.A Krazy Kat daily strip began in 1913,and from 1916,also appeared on Sundays.The strip was noted for its poetic,dialect-heavy dialogue;its fantastic,shifting backgrounds;and its bold,experimental page layouts.In the strip's main motif,Ignatz Mouse,would pelt,Krazy with bricks,which the naive,androgynous Kat would interpret as symbols of love.As the strip progressed, a love triangle developed between Krazy,Ignatz and Offisa Pupp.George lived most of his life in Los Angeles,but made frequent to the Navajo deserts in the southwestern U.S.He was drawn to to the landscapes of Monument Valley and the Enchanted Mesa,and made Coconino County the location of his Krazy Kat strips.His artwork made much use of Navajo and Mexican themes and motifs against shifting desert backgrounds.He was a prolific cartoonist who produced a large number of strips and illustrated Don Marquis's books of poetry about Archy and Mehetabel,an alley cat and a cockroach.Newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst was a proponent of George and gave him a lifetime contract with King Features Syndicate,guaranteeing George a a comfortable living and an out let for his work despite its lack popularity.He was born to George Herriman,Jr. in New Orleans.He came from a line of French-speaking Louisiana Creole Mulattoes who were considered free people of color,and were reportedly active in the early abolitionist movement.His paternal George Herriman Sr.,owned a tailor shop on Royal Street in New Orleans.His maternal grandmother was born in Havana,Cuba.The family attended the St.Augustine Catholic Church in New Orleans'Treme neighborhood.When he was ten,he and his father moved to Los Angeles,where he grew up south of downtown near main street and Washington Boulevard.His father worked there as a tailor,and,for a time,as a baker.George attended the Catholic boys' school St.Vincent's Academy.He worked as a barber with his father while, in school,though he pined for the opportunity to make art.Soon after graduating in 1897,he sold a sketch of the Hotel Petrolia in Santa Paula to the Los Angeles Herald.This landed him a $2-per hour job there as an assistant in the engraving department,where he occasionally did drawings for advertisement and political cartoons.When he was 20,George sneaked aboard a freight train bound for New York City,hoping his chances as an artist would be better there.He was unsuccessful at first,and survived by working as a barker and billboard painter at Coney Island,until one of the leading humor magazines of the day,Judge,accepted some of his cartoons.Between June 15 and October 26,1901,eleven of his appeared in that magazine's pages,in the heavily crosshatched style of the day.He often used sequenial images in his cartoons,as in the emerging comic strip medium.On September 29,that year,his first real comic strip were published,one in the Pulitzer chain of newspapers on a non-contractual, one-shot basic and another on a continuing basis in the Philadelphia North American Syndicate's first comic strip supplement.His first color comic strips appeared in the T.C.McClure Syndicate beginning October 20.His success with these syndicated strips convinced George to give up on magazines submissions.For the Pulitzer papers on February 16,1902,he began his first strip that had continuing character,Musical Mose.The strip featured an African-American musician who impersonated other ethnicities,only to suffer the consequences when discovered by his audience.Professor Otto and his Auto,about a terrifyingly dangerous driver,followed in March,and Acrobatic Archie,a "kid strip"with a child protagonist,first appeared in April.With his future as a cartoonist seemingly assured,George traveled back to Los Angeles to marry his childhood sweetheart and returned with her to New York.In November 1902,issue of the literary magazine The Bookman George wrote of his profession self-deprecatingly,while poet La Touche Hancock,in an article in that issue titled "The American Comic and Caricature Art" and poetry is the characteristic of George Herriman.Were his drawings not so well known one would think he had mistaken his vocation.His work was increasing in popularity,and he occasionally had front-page,full-color strips for the Pulitzer supplements,such as Two Jolly Jackies,about two unemployed sailors,which began in January 1903.George began drawing the cowboy strip Lariat Pete in September for the McClure syndicate after two Jolly Jackies ended.In June,he employed by the New York World.There, George illustrated Roy McCardell's commentaries on local events,beginning June 28 and running to the year's end.He still produced syndicate work, such as Major Ozone's Fresh Air Crusade for the World Color Printing Company beginning January 2,1904.Another of his obsessive character,the Major traveled the world in an unsuccessful search for the purest air and spouted poetic dialogue.Major Ozone was so popular that it was soon given the supplement's front page.The same month,George moved from the World to the New York Daily News,where he was given a larger quantity and variety of work,including cartoon reporting on sports and politics.In illustrating a series of articles written by Walter Murphy called Bubblespikers.Rudolph Block hire George for the Hearst papers with "a salary commensurate with his talents," starting April 22 at the New York American,which ran no daily comic strip at the time.George drew sport cartoons in an office alongside Frederick Burr Opper,James Swinnerton,and Tad Dorgan who was popularly known as "Tad" and was considered a star at another Hearst paper, the New York Evening Journal.Tad &George were often assigned to cover the same sporting events and became close friends.In 1924,Tad called George "one of the best sporting artists in the world"and regretted that George no longer did that kind of work.George continued with Hearst until June 1905 when he left the paper,possibly because of the news editor's unsympathetic attitude to cartoonist.He returned to Los Angeles in the latter half of 1905.In California,George continued to mail in work to the World Color Printing Company.He revived Major Ozone and produced Grandam's Girl-Likewise Bud Smith,which he combined from two earlier strips,and a two-tiered children's strip,Rosy Posy,-Mama's Girl.He began to work with the Los Angeles Times on January 8,1906,before returning to Hearst that summer.Accompanying a front-page illustration in Hearst's Los Angeles Examiner,George unannounced as "the examiner's cartoonist"on August 21.His artwork began to appear on nearly every every page,resulting in greatly increased sales for the newspaper.In October,he stopped working for World Color.Following the success of Bud Fisher's daily strip A.Mutt,which debuted in late 1907,George began a similarly sports-themed daily strip that December called Mr.Proones the Plumber.The strip was not as successful as Bud's and it ceased to appear after December 26.His next comic strip appeared in October 1909 with the World Color Printing Company-Alexander the Cat and Daniel and Pansy,which both appeared in color.Daniel and Pansy was George first strip to feature an all-animal cast.This was followed in the Examiner on December 20 by the short-lived Mary's Home from College,a precursor to the "girl strips" such as Cliff Sterret's Polly and Her Pals and John Held Jr.'s Merely Margie,and on December 23 by Gooseberry Sprig,about an aristocratic,cigar-smoking duck who had previously and popularly appeared George sports cartoons.The bird-populated fantasy was a precursor to Krazy Kat,and many of its character reappeared in the later strip.In 1910,the sports editor of the New York Evening Journal called George back to New York to cover for Tad was in San Francisco covering the "Fight of the Century"between Jack Johnson & Jim Jefferies.Six days after arriving in New York,he began the Dingbat Family,starting E.Pluribus Dingbat and his family.George used typed lettering on the strip on July 26,1910,but quickly went back to hand-lettering.Critics do not regard the strip highly,it provided the vehicle for a fruitful situation:in the July 26 episode, a mouse threw a brick at the family cat-called "Kat"-which hit the cat on the head.The antics of the mouse and "Kat"continue to appear in the bottom portion of The Dingbat Family.George said he did this "to fill up the waste space."About a month after its first appearance,the "Kat"crept up on the sleeping mouse and kissed it loudly.The mouse awoke saying,"I dreamed an angel kissed me," while the "kat crept away and said,"Sweet thing.The gender of "Kat" was unclear from the start.George experimented with a decision about the character's gender,but it remained ambiguous and he would refer to"Kat " as "he" or "she" as he saw fit.George incorporated unusual details into the mini-strip's backgrounds-cacti,pagodas,fanciful,vegetation,or anything else that struck his fancy;this became a signature of the later Krazy Kat stip.The cast grew and soon included the mainstay character Bull Pupp and characters from the gooseberry Sprigg strip.The strips characters,relations and situation grew organically during its lifetime encouraged by George colleagues.The cat-and mouse substrip was gaining in popularity;instead of filling up space in the bottom of The Dingbat Family's panels,it began to occupy a tier of its own.In July 1912,while George had the Dingbats on vacation,Krazy Kat's Krazy Kat and Ignatz Mouse took over the strip,which was retitled Krazy Kat and I.Mouse for the duration.On October 28,1913,Krazy Kat debuted as an independent strip on the daily comic page.During the first few years of publication,Krazy Kat's humor changed slapstick to a more vaudevillian kind.The shifting backgrounds became increasingly bizarre,presaging things to come.The strip expanded to a full-page black-and-white Sunday Strip on April 23,1916.He made full use of imagination and used the whole page in the strip's layout.The strips were unlike anything else on the comics page;spontaneous,formally daring,yet impeccably composed.He visited Monument Valley in Arizona and similar places in New Mexicoand Southern Utah, and incorporated the distinct forms of the desert landscape into his strips.The Enchanted Mesa of New Mexico first appeared in Krazy Kat in the summer of 1916.George may have visited after reading an article by Theodore Roosevelt in 1913,he may have gone earlier-the desert Coconino County,Arizona,that became the backdrop to Krazy Kat was first mentioned in a 1911 Dingbat Family strip,the real Coconino County was located further southwestern than George version.Hearst an admirer of Krazy Kat,had given George a lifetime contract with his company King Features Syndicate,which gave George the security to live anywhere he wanted.In 1922,he moved to Hollywood,into a two-story Spanish-style home at 1617 North Sierra Bonita,from where he made frequent visits to the Arizona desert.He developed ties with members of the film industry;he knew Hal Roach studio members Tom McNamara and "Beanie"walker  from their newspaper days.Beanie,George best friend,was the head writer on the Our Gang shorts.In the early 1920s,George occasionally drew his strips at the Roach Studio.He met celebrities,including Will Rogers and Frank Capra,and presented them with hand-colored drawings.He loved Charlie Chaplin's films,and reviewed The Gold Rush in the magazine Motion Picture Classics in October 1925.Autumn 1922 saw the first daily installment of Stumble Inn,the first-non Krazy Kat strip George had drawn since 1919.A verbose strip whose Sundays were often over run with prose,its lead characters were Uriah and Ida Stumble,who rented rooms to an assortment of strange characters.The daily strip was short-lived,the Sunday edition lasted three years.Stumble Inn finished in late 1925,and it was replaced with the domestic strips US Husbands (With Mistakes Will Happen as a "topper" strip),which ran until the end of that year.In 1928,George took over the strip Embrassing Moments,which had begun in 1922 and had been drawn by several cartoonists.The strip eventually became Bernie Burns,in which embrassing moments would happen to the title character.The strip appeared in few papers,and after it ended in 1932,he worked only on Krazy Kat,althoughhe provided illustrations for Don Marquis'popular Archy and Mehetabel,a series of books of poetry about a cat & cockroach.In 1930,George sold his first Hollywood home to a friend and moved his family to 2217 Maravilla Drive,a Spanish-style mansion atop a hill.It was adorned with paintings of Southwest and Native themes,and had a Mexican-style garden paved with flagstones and decorated with painted pots and tropical plants.George later brought the lot across the street and turned into a public park.The 1930s were a period of tragedy for George.On September 29,1931,his wife Mabel died after a car accident,and in 1939,his youngest daughter Bobbie died unexpectedly at 30.After his wife's death,George never remarried and lived in Los Angeles with his cats and dogs.He developed a close relationship with cartoonist James Swinnerton's first wife Louise,with whom he frequently exchanged letters.George underwent a kidney operation in spring 1938,and during his ten-week convalescence King Features reran old Krazy Kat strips.George died in his sleep in his home near Hollywood after a long illness.An incompletely inked penciling of a week's worth of daily strip was found on his drawing board.On his death certificate,the cause of death was listed as "non-alcoholic cirrhosis of the liver" and despite his mixed-race heritage,he was listed as "Caucasian." The New York Journal-American ran a front page obituary.His funeral at Little Church of Flowers at Forest Lawn Memorial Park was attended  by few.Cartoonist Harry Hershified spoke at the funeral,saying,:If ever there was a saint on earth,it was George Herriman."According to his request,his body was cremated and his remains were scattered over Monument Valley.George was described as self-deprecatingly modest,and he disliked being photographed.The New York Journal-American obituary described him as a devoted husband and father,of slight build,mild-mannered and an anonymous contributor to charities.He was generous to his friends,and sold his first Hollywood house,which he brought for $50,000,to a friend for $40,000.Through a private person,he was said to be an entering host to friends.He would sometimes stay silent during social occasions and would often leave the room to wash dishes,which he said enjoyed as it gave him the opportunity to think.His favorite game was poker,which he particularly enjoyed playing with his fellow cartoonist.He had a great love of animals,and had a large number of dogs,and cats,he had five dogs and thirteen cats.He usually kept a vegetarian diet,except when it made him feel to weak,and he refused to ride horses.He so admired Henry Ford's pacifist stance that he would only buy Ford cars.He purchased a new model annually.George married his childhood Mabel Lilllian Bridge in Los Angeles on July 7,1902.They had two daughters:Mabel (May 10,1903-November 13 1962);nicknamed "Tooodles"later "Toots")and Barbara (1909-1939;nicknamed "Bobbie",who had epilepsy.His only granddaughter Dinah (nicknamed "Dee") was born to Bobbie and her husband,author-scriptwriter Ernest Pascal.