An encyclopedic biography illustrated with many examples of George Herriman's work, Krazy by Michael Tisserand (The Kingdom of Zydeco) is also a captivating history and critique of newspaper comic strips and the artists who created them.
The child of French-speaking mixed race Creoles, Herriman was sufficiently light-skinned to "pass" his whole life as a white man. Raised in Los Angeles from age 10, he first applied his drawing skill and quirky humor to newspaper illustration and cartoons. He later launched several syndicated comic strip characters with Joycean names like Pinky Doolittle, Punky Pheetes and Pedesy Fuzzyplace after cutting his cartoon teeth illustrating sports and political events for the New York Evening Journal. When he picked the character Krazy Kat from his Dingbat Family strip to feature in its own comic, he found the perfect vehicle for his skewed humor. Krazy Kat, Ignatz Mouse and Officer Pupp not only tickled the whole country's funny bone, they also won the lucrative loyalty of William Randolph Hearst.
A multilingual combination of vaudeville pratfalls and violence, minstrel show imitation, the optimism and good-heartedness of Chaplin's Tramp, and the Beckettian dialogue of Vladimir and Estragon, Krazy Kat was a precursor of the chaos and upheaval of the 20th century. Herriman's vision, sketches and dialogue influenced the epochal comic strips of Charles M. Schulz and Garry Trudeau. With substantial background fieldwork, Tisserand eloquently demonstrates that this self-effacing, mixed-race high school graduate, laboring for 40 years over a schedule of daily cartoons, became the inspiration of a century of artists, intellectuals, filmmakers and writers. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.