 |
||||||
|
Opus 187:
Opus 187 (July 17, 2006). Featured this time, by way of a
critique of Jeet Heer’s racial interpretation of Krazy Kat, is my own analysis of George Herriman’s masterpiece, plus the obit that Time ran when the cartoonist died in
1944, but we lead off with the latest scandals perpetrated by editoonists.
Here’s what’s here, in order: NOUS R US —Steve Benson and Mike Luckovich enrage the Ravening Right among their readers, Doonesbury wins awards, and Blondie and other vintage strips win
readership poll; SANDY EGGO —A fond
look at Comicons past; Ideological
Stereotyping of Editoonists; Judge
Parker is better drawn; KRAZINESS —Jeet Heer’s interpretation and how it’s probably wrong, what Herriman was
really doing, and how it means what it means; Herriman obit from Time. And our customary reminder: don’t
forget to activate the “Bathroom Button” by clicking on the “print friendly
version” so you can print off a copy of just this lengthy installment for
reading later, at your leisure while enthroned. Without further adieu—
NOUS R US
All the news that gives us fits.
Esquire magazine, thinking, probably, that if it asked
renegade cartoonist Aaron The Boondocks McGruder to contribute his opinion to a feature about the state of
American black men, he would draw a comic strip, was doubtless dumbfounded when
he responded by sending them a 20-question questionnaire. Two of the questions:
(1) What cost more? Your house or your chain? (2) What is your Katrina status?
a) Displaced by Katrina, or b) Inconvenienced by family displaced by Katrina.
And when Esquire asked McGruder to
comment on his submission, he said: “I don’t explain the jokes. That’s not a good
thing to get into. It is what it is.” And it’ll be in the July issue.
Editoonist Steve Benson of the Arizona
Republic in Phoenix used to inspire irrational ire nation-wide every other
month or so. His cartoon about a student’s death at the University of Texas
football game rally bonfire a couple years ago produced a deluge of e-mail
outrage from all across the land. People objected to his pointing out how
stupid it was to stack bonfire logs the size of telephone poles several
unstable stories high. But Benson has somehow kept himself out of the glare of
national notoriety for the last year. Until June 5, when his cartoon about the
alleged massacre at Haditha in Iraq provoked over 1,350 e-mails of protest. The same tightly-knit group of
up-tight patriots foamed at the mouth down in Atlanta when Mike Luckovich did a cartoon in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution on June 22 that the Ravening Right
decided was an attack on the troops in the field. Newsweek for June 19 lists the religions of various super persons: Spider-Man,
Protestant; the Thing, Jewish; the Hulk, Catholic (lapsed); Daredevil,
Catholic; Captain America, Protestant; and Superman, Methodist. This last, despite the oft-supposed Jewish, based upon his creators’
being of that persuasion, which inspired them to create their own golem, a
supernatural creature that vanquished Jews’ enemies. More at xtra.Newsweek.com
. ... “Cars,” according to USA Today, “cruised to the top spot at the box
office over the weekend” (June 10-11, when it opened), becoming thereby “the
seventh straight No. 1 film for Pixar
Studios, which has yet to make a movie that didn’t become a blockbuster.”
... The state-owned Turkish tv network TRT has banned the Walt Disney animated
cartoon “Winnie the Pooh” because Pooh’s pal, Piglet, is a pig and Muslim Turks regard pigs as unclean. The film
has been shown on other Turkish channels, and the videos are sold in stores.
... According to dailycartoonist.com, a new hardback Frank Cho book, Liberty
Meadows: Cover Girl, will be out in August. In addition to printing all the
comic book covers, it will include sketches that show the development of images
from rough to finished art; merely $24.99. ... In Utah, Salt Lake Tribune editooner Pat
Bagley has released a sequel to his Curious
George Goes to War tome; the new one,
George Is Watching You, is getting a lot of press in the conservative
bastion of Utah, saith dailycartoonist.com. ... Don Reilly, New Yorker cartoonist
for more than 40 years, died of cancer on June 18 at the age of 72. Believing
that “the essence of the so-called gag cartoon is its simplicity and
directness,” Reilly embodied his belief in drawings that looked casually
sketched but were carefully laid out. In the obit at the Los Angeles Times, Mary Rourke wrote: “Typical of professional
cartoonists of his generation, he was a trained artist and thought that such
training was essential for anyone in his profession.” On the current state of
gag cartooning, Rourke quotes Lee
Lorenz, one-time cartoon editor for The
New Yorker: “Younger cartoonists are essentially writers. It’s all about
ideas. They keep the drawing minimal, which is probably a good thing.” Yes, he
said “probably” not “definitely.” Reilly, thanks be, was not a minimalist: his
drawings were simple but expressive, and they dignified the genre as well as
the magazine they appeared in. As a sideline, Reilly, like Lorenz and Arnie
Roth and many of their fraternity, was a jazz musician.
Douglas Wolk at PublishersWeekly.com
says graphic novels were the biggest thing at the just-concluded annual Art
Festival of the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art in New York. Mainstream
publishers, having climbed all over themselves to get on this new bandwagon,
were on hand with their latest titles: among them, Pantheon with its backlist
and a preview of Marjane Satrapi’s latest, Chicken with Plums; Abrams
with Dan Nadel’s Art Out of Time: Unknown Comics Visionaries,
1900-1969; and Houghton Mifflin with Alison
Bechdel’s Fun Home and its new
anthology, Best American Comics 2006.
A prime market for self-publishers, Wolk observes, MoCCA this year was awash
with self-publishers who were “bypassing the traditional pamphlet comic book,
leaping straight to squarebound books from mini-comics or Web comics.” Debuting
at this year’s show was a new packaging and talent management operation,
Kitchen, Lind & Associates, which teams legendary ug tooner and publisher Denis Kitchen (an agent of mine) and
designer John Lind. Initially, they
say, they’ll focus on books for the Young Adult market, “still underserved by
the non-manga genre.” But over-served, perhaps, by manga?
From
Editor & Publisher: The Vietnam Veterans of America will give Garry Trudeau its President’s Award for
Excellence in the Arts on July 14 at the VVA convention in Tucson. Discussing
the alleged anti-military bias in the strip, Doonesbury.com said: “It may
interest—if not confuse—these critics to learn that if Trudeau has such a bias,
the military itself has failed to notice” and goes on to rehearse various ways
the strip has been recognized as exemplary by the Pentagon and military units.
... Doonesbury also won a Max and
Moritz Award as best comic strip at the Comic Salon in Erlangen, Germany. ...
At the Scranton Times-Tribune, Blondie finished first in a
readership poll. The rest of the top five were also “vintage” strips; in order,
they are: Peanuts, The Family Circus,
Beetle Bailey, and Hi and Lois.
Amazingly enough, Mary Worth finished
last in the line-up of 36 strips. I’d like to know the rest of the top ten. Are
there any fresh strips among them? ... Newer strips did better in Eugene,
Oregon, where the Register-Guard polled readers and found that Jan
Eliot’s Stone Soup ranked first,
followed by Zits and For Better or for Worse. Eliot is a
native of Eugene. But then, FBOFW is
coming up on, what?—30? 40 years? It just seems always new and fresh. ... The new Garfield movie, subtitled “A Tale of Two Kitties” (careful how you say that), finished
sixth at the box office on its opening weekend with a mere $7.2 million. In
comparison, “Over the Hedge,” which is still pulling in bucks a month after its
opening, finished tenth with $4.05 million, over half Garfield’s take.
Fascinating
Footnote. Much of the news
retailed in this segment is culled from articles eventually indexed at http://www.rpi.edu/~bulloj/comxbib.html, the Comics Research Bibliography, maintained by Michael Rhode and John
Bullough, which covers comic books, comic strips, animation, caricature,
cartoons, bandes dessinees and
related topics. It also provides links to numerous other sites that delve
deeply into cartooning topics.
SANDY EGGO
Cute,
that spelling, and I, in the fashion of manga fans everywhere, surrender to
cute. Sometimes. Not that I’m a manga fan; I’m just a sometime fan of cute. (In
fact—you may not realize this—those infamous initials of mine? R.C.? They stand
for “Real Cute,” don’t you know. No: not really. Just horsing around here at
the Keyboard of the Intergalactic Rancid Raves Headquarters, as is our wont, on
occasion, this being one of them.) I’ll be in San Diego at the ComiCon
International (as they like to call it), July 20-23. I hope to see you there,
but the chances are slim: mob scenes don’t necessarily foster unpremeditated
encounters between friends and acquaintances, and I won’t have a table in
Artists Alley or an exhibit. So you can’t find me except by appointment or
accident. From time to time, I’ll go sit in the booth of the National
Cartoonists Society, where I may have a book or two of mine for sale and
autographing. But mostly, I’m attending the Con and wandering helplessly
through the massive exhibit hall.
The Con, you may have heard, is nothing like it used to be. If it ever was. By way of soulfully remembering those dear old bygone days, here are a couple pieces of art that were produced one year for the old program booklet—by Dale Messick, famous for her Brenda Starr comic strip (Messick was the first genuinely famous syndicated woman cartooner, as if you didn’t know), and by the late lamented Alex Toth, famous in the accompanying drawing, for Jesse Bravo and the Fox but esteemed throughout the comics universe for the kind of drawing he did, not the characters.
Back in the Con’s early days, for the first decade or so of its
existence, its founder, Shel Dorf,
was actively engaged in the enterprise, and Dorf, a passionate fan of comic strips
and, later, letterer for Milton Caniff’s Steve Canyon, wrote to syndicated
cartoonists as well as funnybook artists and asked them to contribute drawings
for the program booklet. Caniff was usually represented, as you might suspect,
but other syndicated cartoonists also contributed—Messick, f’instance. Back in
those days, newspaper cartoonists were much more in evidence at the Con than
they are these days. Jack Kirby was always there, and Caniff. And then there’d
be special guests, a roster of which always included a few stellar comic strip
’tooners. All year long, Shel wrote to these guys, sending them program
booklets from previous Cons and other detritus he thought might seduce them
into contributing art and, then, coming to the Con themselves. Comic strippers,
you may have noticed, aren’t around the Con much anymore. Shel disengaged from
the Con when Caniff died in 1988: Shel just couldn’t face the old familiar
surroundings that reminded him of Caniff and days gone by. The current
management of the Con hasn’t treated the Con’s founder very well, alas. Nor
have they made any noticeable effort to perpetuate the comic strip strand of
the Con. It languished for years, re-emerging, finally, in the shape of a booth
for NCS, a pretty miserly recognition for the form that gave birth, eventually,
to the comic book genre that, nowadays, flourishes in several manifestations
their originators could not have guessed at. Hollywood has invaded the Con;
monumental money has taken over. But the Con is still the biggest thing in
comics fandom. It disguises itself somewhat by affixing a subtitle to its
name—something about popular culture—but you can still find along the aisles of
the massive exhibit hall a few comic books and some original art and other
signs that cartooning is alive and well. The very size and scope of the
operation make you breathe faster. I missed last year, but I’d gone for almost
ten years before that. The last time, in 2004, I remember thinking on the first
days, “Man—I wish this could go on forever!” And I remember on the last day
thinking, “Man—I wish this thing were over!” Together, the very definition of
“too much”—a quantitative as well as psychological assessment. I’ll probably
react the same way this time, too. And I’m looking forward to it in all its
garish splendor and riot of color and humanity.
Meanwhile, here at Rancid Raves HQ,
our bi-weekly visitations will continue: webmaster Jeremy Lambros will be
posting, on or about July 31, our next installment, which includes a
tantalizing extract from the forthcoming opus, the Milton Caniff biography,
known around here as The Book.
Funnybook Fan Fare
Gemstone’s Walt Disney Comics and Stories begins, with No. 670, to reprint one of my favorite Mickey Mouse tales. Called
here “Love Trouble,” it’s from what I’ve always thought was Floyd Gottfredson’s best period in the
early 1940s when he was rendering Mickey about two heads tall, each
yellow-shoed foot as large as the mouse’s head. The pictures had genuine visual
panache in those years: they shook loose the last vestiges of 1930s comic strip
conventions based upon Mickey’s movie incarnation and launched into an
exuberance of their own. I’ve treasured my trove of the comic books that first
reprinted the newspaper strip. Now, I can see the treasure again, splendidly
reproduced albeit on glossy paper (which I normally don’t like much).
Cagle Laments Ideological Stereotyping
of Cartoonists
Daryl Cagle, as we all know here at
Rancid Raves, operates an online editorial cartoon site www.cagle.msnbc.com and
Cagle Cartoons syndicate, while also working as an editorial cartoonist. Here’s
Cagle’s April 13 blog via Editor
& Publisher:
Unlike
tv pundits, most editorial cartoonists don't conform closely to [liberal] list
A and [conservative] list B. Liberal readers bash me for being conservative
when I draw cartoons supportive of the troops in Iraq, while editors call me
liberal when I bash President Bush for busting the budget. ... I run a
syndicate that distributes the work of about 50 editorial cartoonists to
newspapers across the country. ... The largest, most visible, urban papers tend
to be liberal leaning ... but the vast majority of newspapers are small
suburban or rural, conservative papers. The conservative editors from these
papers complain to us all the time that they want more conservative
cartoonists. ... Most editors quickly classify cartoonists as liberal and
undesirable after glancing at a few cartoons, and the editors don't bother even
looking at further cartoons from liberal cartoonists.
We thought we would try a little
experiment. We started labeling our cartoons “liberal” or “conservative.” The
first thing we noticed was that 80% of the cartoons could not be labeled, such
as cartoons about Katie Couric, Barry Bonds, March Madness, and the death of
Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic. There was no discerning liberal from
conservative cartoons when Anna Nicole Smith went to the Supreme Court, when
high oil-company profits were disclosed, when Muslims around the world were
rioting about Danish Muhammad cartoons, when Hamas won the Palestinian
election, when North Korea and Iran bluster about nuclear weapons, when a new
study tells Americans that they are too fat, and when we all suffer preparing
our income taxes. The recent immigration debate defies classification. ... Jack
Abramoff and Duke Cunningham had no conservative defenders. What is most
noteworthy about our survey is that cartoonists agree about most issues in the
news.
The most common complaints we get
are that too many cartoons criticize the president even when those cartoons are
conservative, such as bashing the president for overspending, or when the
cartoons are bipartisan, bashing the president for FEMA's poor response to
Hurricane Katrina. The other big complaint is that there are too many cartoons
about Iraq—in fact there are fewer cartoons about Iraq now that the story is
old. ... It is our role as cartoonists to bash the people in power; we may be
perceived as liberal just because the president and Congress are run by
Republicans now. During the orgy of Clinton-Lewinsky cartoons, cartoonists
could have been called conservatives—but we weren't. ...
Cagle is mostly correct: editorial
cartoonists ridicule human folly in all its dimensions, and when the targets
are social rather than political, it’s difficult, if not impossible, to discern
“liberal” or “conservative” leanings—just as he says on such issues as Anna
Nicole Smith and Katie Couric. And in the political realm, editoonists’ role
is, as Cagle puts it so eloquently, to bash power, regardless, usually, of the
political persuasion of the powerful. I’m reminded of Bill Mauldin, who said:
“If I see a stuffed shirt, I want to punch it.” From which his advice to
political cartoonists everywhere follows as logically as the day follows night:
“If it’s big, hit it. You can’t go far wrong.” And that is, as I say, mostly
true. It is also true, however, that some cartoonists are unwaveringly
“liberal” or “conservative” when it comes to most political issues. Ted Rall is pretty liberal consistently;
and Glenn McCoy is pretty
conservative consistently. Or maybe they would prefer, as Mike Luckovich does, to be tagged “left of center” and “right of
center” respectively.
Every
spring, a certain amount of grumbling can be heard among so-called “conservative”
editooners who have come to the conviction, lately, that the Pulitzer committee
awards its annual cartooning prize to liberal cartoonists and avoids
conservatives like the plague. Again most recently, a liberal—or, in his terms,
“left of center”—cartoonist, Luckovich, got the prize. It is perhaps inevitable
that liberals win more often than conservatives: there are more liberal
political cartoonists. But conservatives have won. Not counting this year, 3 of
the previous 11 winners have been conservatives: Steve Benson (who was conservative when he won in 1993), Michael Ramirez, and Steve Breen. That, as calculated by
someone more diligent than I, amounted to 27 percent, roughly a quarter of the
winners. And that seems congruent with the actual population of editooners,
roughly 20-30 percent of whom are conservative. So maybe there’s less to
complain of than we might otherwise suppose.
CIVILIZATION’S LAST OUTPOST
One of a kind beats everything. —Dennis
Miller adv.
In The Week for June 23, we learn that
zaftig Salma Hayek believes her
breasts were divinely inflated. As a teenager, she was discouragingly
flat-chested, she says, so she went to “a church that was supposed to do
miracles and I put my hands in holy water and I said, ‘Please God, give me
breasts.’ Within just a few months, she began to swell into her current shape.”
Just shows that you can’t be too careful what you ask for.
COMIC STRIP WATCH
Judge
Parker is blooming with the artistry of Eduardo
Barreto. The appearance of the strip is a vastly improved—better shadowing
(on clothing in the opening panel of 6/23), more individualized backgrounds,
more relaxed-looking figures. He hasn’t got Sam Driver or his wife,
millionairess Abbey Spencer, down pat yet, but I’m sure it’s only a matter of
time. For the first time in a generation, Judge Parker is a pleasure to look
at.
AMID THE LATEST KRAZINESS FROM
FANTAGRAPHICS
What
I was pretty sure would happen—what I feared would happen—has, at last,
happened. George Herriman’s lyric
paean in the art of cartooning has been turned into an allegory about race in
America. Sad but true, and we are diminished thereby. It happened with the
publication last fall of the latest, but one, of Fantagraphics series
reprinting Krazy Kat, entitled Krazy and Ignatz: The Complete Full-page
Comic Strips, 1935-1936 (122 9x12-inch pages in color; paperback, $19.95, a
bargain). In truth, the disaster of which I speak had been perpetrated well
before this otherwise happy volume appeared—in September 2001, it sez here, in
a publication called Lingua Franca. The Fantagraphics book merely reprints the item, an essay by Toronto writer and
comics afficionado Jeet Heer, which attempts, as Heer says, to bridge “the deep
fissure in comic strip studies between fans and academics,” who, Heer alleges,
can’t seem to get it straight about Herriman’s racial identity. Ever since it
was disclosed that Herriman’s birth certificate described him as “colored,”
fans and academics have argued about what “colored” means and what it portends
for the cartoonist’s work if he is, actually, a “mulatto,” as his parents were
described in the 1880 census, and whether that designation qualifies him as African
American and his work as a manifestation thereof. Or not. Or is it all a case
of mistaken identity, as the great cartoonist Karl Hubenthal, who knew Herriman, angrily proclaimed, denouncing
any contention that Herriman was “Negroid.” Used to be, you may remember, that
if one had even a drop of “Negroid” blood in his veins, he’d be
“colored”—African American. So all mulattoes qualified. I don’t think there’s
any question that Herriman was mulatto and therefore, by the old—and even,
contemporary, rule—African American. But I don’t think that makes as much
difference as Heer thinks it does.
The immediate support for the
contention that Herriman was black was found in an article written about him by
his friend and fellow cartoonist, Tad.
Herriman, Tad declared, “always
wears a hat. Like Chaplin and his cane, Garge is never without his skimmer.
Hershfield [fellow cartoonist Harry
Hershfield] says that he sleeps in it.” Additional rummaging around yielded
the intelligence that there were no photographs of Herriman without his hat on.
Advocates of the Black Herriman Theory quickly concluded that Herriman kept his
hat on all the time and was never photographed without it in order to hide his
kinky hair which would, ipso facto, reveal his racial origins. If he was trying
to hide it, then he was also trying to pass for white. Heer buys into this
notion, too.
Some of us, however, have come to
realize that Herriman wasn’t as shy about his kinky (or excessively wavy) hair
as all that. Various laborers in the vineyards of comics history have
unearthed, by now, numerous photographs of Herriman hatless. And he was joshing, fooling around.
The Tad text itself appeared in
an issue of Circulation, a 1920s
in-house publication from King Features. The magazine appeared at irregular
intervals, sent off to newspaper editors hither and elsewhere to promote the
syndicate’s comic strips, and it featured several light-hearted essays by
cartoonists, who mostly joked around about their work, their lives, and the
idiosyncracies of their colleagues, many of whom worked together at
drawingboards in the same bullpen. In these articles, the jokes were more
important than the facts, and, in common with many writers of promotions in
those bygone days, the facts were very often ignored entirely or manufactured
to suit the occasion. Lots of fluff but not much fact. In the same issue as Tad’s piece is one by Jimmy Murphy, the creator of Toots and Casper, which the cartoonist
entitled “Some Inside Dope on a Few of My Fellow ‘Comickers.’” Murphy tells
stories about Rube Goldberg, Billy DeBeck, and Cliff Sterrett. Among the dope
being dispensed is this paragraph:
“Thomas Aloysius Dorgan is the full
moniker of the gent whose drawings are signed ‘Tad.’ There isn’t anybody who hasn’t enjoyed many laughs out
of his ‘Indoor Sports’ and other cartoons. Tad’s
a guy who can paint pictures with a pen. Herriman said so. Tad’s as much at home with boxing
gloves on as he is with a pen in his hand. He swings a wicked right. Herriman
said so, and he knows! Tad’s a
great spendthrift—throws his money away almost as recklessly as Harry
Lauder—Herriman said so.”
We can’t tell for sure what,
exactly, Murphy is talking about, but it’s clear that he’s needling Tad or Herriman, probably both. The
reference to Tad’s “wicked
right,” for instance, seems a little tasteless but well within the realm of
locker room tomfoolery: Tad had
lost four fingers of his right hand in a childhood mishap and learned how to
draw with his left. That’s the in-group part of the prank. For the rest of us,
the comedy seems to have something to do with wearing boxing gloves and, maybe,
wagering. Perhaps Herriman had a bet with Tad, or vice versa, and lost. A little more light, albeit still of a
surpassing dimness, is shed by Tad’s
article and the accompanying cartoon, which depicts Herriman and Tad facing off with boxing gloves. We also took Tad seriously when he implied, in the same article, that
Herriman was Greek: “He looked like a cross between Omar the tent maker and
Nervy Nat,” saith Tad. “We didn’t
know what he was so I named him The Greek, and he still goes by that name.”
Nervy Nat, by the way, was a sort of bum or hobo that resided in Judge humor magazine. Tad also alleges that Herriman came to
New York from Los Angeles in “a side-door Pullman.” Tad was famous for his promulgation of slangy expressions,
and by this one, he means, as he later clarifies, a “box car.” No transport of
luxury at all, “Pullman” notwithstanding. More joshing, but while we ignored
the cross-country ride in a box car, we accepted the Greek appellation, thinking
it was Herriman’s way of explaining his mulatto complexion. Still passing for
white, we thought. Or some of us did. Others of us, Bill Blackbeard first among
them, assumed that Tad was being
purely factual in this little essay of japes and jibes. Herriman, Blackbeard
declared, was Greek. That explained his swarthy appearance. And because he
realized swarthiness was next to mulattoness, he kept his hat on. Or some such
strain of logic.
Probably not. Probably Herriman
wasn’t Greek at all. And in fact, Blackbeard has, at long last, given up on
that proposition: in his introductory remarks in this Krazy and Ignatz volume, he calls Heer’s essay “the definitive work
on the controversial matter of Herriman’s racial mix ... the referential basis
for all future commentary in this area.” Ergo, no more Herriman the Greek.
Once we’ve discarded the mythologies
of the perpetual hat and the Greek ancestry for Herriman, we’re left with his
birth certificate, census reports on the race of his parents, and the place of
birth, New Orleans. Heer persists in the Greek dodge, proclaiming it Herriman’s
way of passing for white. But I don’t agree. I think Herriman wasn’t so much
passing for white as he was ignoring the issue of race altogether. Race was not
his business. His business was cartooning. And he could leave the issue of race
aside because his parents once lived in New Orleans.
They left New Orleans when Herriman
was six years old, so he could not have much direct, personal experience of the
ambiance of the place. But his parents could, and doubtless did. Herriman’s
maternal grandmother, Heer tells us, came from Havana, where she was,
presumably, among the mulatto population. Herriman was born in 1880, and if we
assume his mother was at least twenty at the time, then her mother, the
aforementioned maternal grandmother, would have been maybe forty. So she might
have immigrated to New Orleans before the Civil War. Why come to New Orleans?
Because New Orleans, before the Civil War, was a great place for people of
mixed blood.
The city hosted the “largest cotton
and slave markets in the world” at the time, true (according to Laurence
Bergreen in his biography, Louis
Armstrong); but the city had a considerable reputation for being not only
licentious but multiracial and was “relatively hospitable to Creoles of color
and even some blacks.” Herriman is supposed to have confided to a friend that
he was “Creole” but of mixed blood. Creole is one of those words whose meaning changed over time. Originally, it may
have designated a slave born in his master’s house rather than purchased; it
also was used to distinguish persons born in “the colonies as distinguished
from immigrants” (according to “The Creole Myth” in an afterword by Alan Lomax
to his biography of Mister Jelly Roll,
a noted self-proclaimed “Creole”). Herriman was probably one of the “colored”
Creoles who lived in New Orleans at the end of the nineteenth century—
descendants of “free persons of color” who had intermarried with French,
Spanish, and West Indian stock. Not necessarily a bad thing in 19th century New Orleans. According to Bergreen: “Blacks in New Orleans had more
rights than their counterparts in any other city on the American continent,
even those up north. Black life flourished in New Orleans, and the focal point
for blacks was the Place Congo, later
Congo Square ... one of those cradles of jazz ... where blacks, both slave and
free, mingled, danced, and played their music.”
By the time of the Civil War, the
number of free blacks in New Orleans had been steadily increasing, and
thousands of them “were five or ten generations removed from Africa and
slavery.” They felt, Bergreen says, “more American than African.” Before the
Civil War, then—at the time Herriman’s maternal grandmother may have come to
New Orleans—the city was a desirable destination for blacks, mulattoes, and
Creoles. The city’s “Code Noir” “governed black behavior in public, [but] was actually more liberal than
British or American customs.” It prohibited racial mixing, but the colored
races, if they stayed more-or-less by themselves (“separate but equal”?), could
enjoy a vibrant community life that was personally satisfying.
That all changed in the
Reconstruction after the Civil War. Not at first, but inexorably. Blacks in New
Orleans soon found themselves stripped of their rights. And in 1896 came the
United States Supreme Court decision, the notorious “Plessy vs. Ferguson” case
that denied a Creole named Homer Plessy the right to sit where he wanted on a
train, calling, in effect, for “separate but equal” railroad carriages for
blacks and whites. “Plessy” was the ultimate end towards which Reconstruction
had been tending for thirty years. It supported a Louisiana statute that had
been enacted during the first years of Herriman’s life. And when upheld by the
Supreme Court, it destroyed the relatively carefree days of multiracial life in
New Orleans. Some reacted by leaving; others stayed and, if they could, passed
for white. But even before that, life for mixed blood citizens in New Orleans
had changed for the worse. And that’s doubtless why Herriman’s parents left the
city and went to southern California. Heer assumes they went there because they
could more easily pass for white in Los Angeles. But I suspect they were not so
much going there to pass for white as they were leaving New Orleans where,
nearly overnight, considerations of “race” were becoming more and more
important than they had been. They were escaping a restricted life. Los
Angeles, they surely heard, was being populated by several races—Hispanic,
Asian—and therefore promised to be more hospitable, perhaps, more like New
Orleans had been before Reconstruction and in the earliest post-war years when
race, while it mattered, did not matter enough to severely limit one’s
potential.
Herriman grew up in Los Angeles, not
“passing for white,” I’d say, but, rather, not thinking much about race at all.
His parents, after all, had left New Orleans to avoid racial confrontations, so
why would they teach their son about them in their new milieu? And when young
George turned his talent for drawing to the profession of cartooning, it was
cartooning that governed his thinking, not race. Heer, after agreeing with
those who believe that Herriman is African-American, bolsters his verdict by
alleging that Krazy Kat is a thinly
disguised racial allegory involving a black cat, much abused by a white mouse.
Looking only at the black-and-white daily strips and the first two decades of
the Sunday Krazy, the argument seems
to hold. The Sunday strip was designed for black-and-white publication for much
of its run: it didn’t start to appear in color until June 1, 1935 (which is
precisely the point in its history that this volume resumes the reprinting
project, accounting for the presence of color herein). If we examine the colors
in this volume, Ignatz is not, exactly, “white.” He is, so to speak, “flesh
color.” Orange-pinkish. So is Offissa Pupp. But so is Krazy, at least in
his/her face, which is the only part that’s not black. So making a racial
allegory of the strip stretches contention beyond evidence. (Heer makes other
assumptions that are on somewhat shaky ground: “dozens,” a verbal sport among
blacks, is not about songs; it’s about insults—trading them exuberantly, often
to comedic excess. But this error doesn’t contribute much to a misreading of Krazy Kat, as the racial allegory notion
does.)
In a chapter in a book of mine, The Art of the Funnies, I resist the
temptation to convert Krazy Kat into
a racial allegory because it has the effect of diminishing Herriman’s
achievement as a cartoonist. There are black characters elsewhere in the
Herriman ouevre, and he treated them as most cartoonists of his time treated
racial and ethnic minorities—as figures of fun. Here, then, is the basic clue:
Herriman functioned in the world as a cartoonist, not as a Greek or Creole or
mulatto. The notion of a racial allegory is wrong-headed and imposes upon
simple comedy a sophistication no cartoonist of Herriman’s generation would
foist off on his readers. Moreover, this contention denies Herriman’s essential
nature in favor of a dubious racial identity. He was not so much mulatto as he
was cartoonist, and that’s the essential nature on display in Krazy Kat. And so the strip works better
for me as an example of the supreme artistry of a poet-cartoonist than as a
disguised sermon on race or as an allegory of Herriman’s personal experience of
racial bigotry.
In his 1924 book, The Seven Lively Arts, art critic
Gilbert Seldes called Herriman's comic strip about an allegedly lunatic cat
“the most amusing and fantastic and satisfying work of art produced in America
today. This accolade and the accompanying lengthy analysis of the strip by one
of the foremost critics of the day gave social and artistic respectability for
the first time to the erstwhile “despised medium” of cartooning. It was Seldes
who first analyzed the strip's plot and articulated Herriman's theme.
Like any great work of art, Krazy Kat's thematic complexity is
masked by its seeming simplicity. The plot involves only three characters—a cat
(Krazy), a mouse (Ignatz), and a dog (Offissa Pupp)—but each is doing something
profoundly contrary to its nature. Instead of stalking the mouse, Krazy loves
him and waits for him to assault her; instead of fearing the Kat, Ignatz scorns
her (or him—Krazy is without sex, Herriman explained, like a sprite or elf) and
attacks her repeatedly; instead of chasing the Kat, the dog protects her out of
love for her. This is Herriman's eternal triangle; and each of its participants
is ignorant of the others' passions.
Into this equation, Herriman
introduced a symbol: a brick. Ignatz despises Krazy and expresses his cynical
disdain by throwing a brick at the androgynous Kat's kranium. Krazy, blind with
love, awaits the arrival of the brick (indeed, pines for its advent) with joy
because he/she considers the brick “a missil of affection.” Meanwhile, the dog,
motivated by inclination (his love for Krazy) as well as occupation (he's an
enforcer of law and order) tries to prevent the disorders that Ignatz attempts
to perpetrate on Krazy's bean. Ironically, in seeking to protect the object of
his affection from the assaults of the mouse, Offissa Pupp succeeds in making
his beloved Krazy happy only when he fails to frustrate Ignatz's attack. Luckily,
Offissa Pupp frequently fails in his mission. And Ignatz, perforce, succeeds.
But it is Krazy who triumphs. As Seldes said: “The incurable romanticist, Krazy
faints daily in full possession of his illusion, and Ignatz, stupidly hurling
his brick, thinking to injure, fosters the illusion and keeps Krazy ‘heppy’.”
Hence, Herriman's theme: love always
triumphs. And most of the time, it does so in the strip more by accident than
by design. Over the years, Herriman played out his theme in hundreds of
variations, but there was always the Kat, the Mouse, and the brick. And the
brick usually found its way to Krazy's skull—much to the Kat's content (and
often to Offissa Pupp's chagrin). The acclaimed lyricism of Herriman's strip
arises partly from the seemingly endless reprise of this theme as Seldes first
outlined it. But it arises, too, from the theme itself and Herriman's unique
treatment of it.
For we are all of us lovers, seeking
someone to love and to love us back—and fearing an unrequited outcome. That we
should find humor in a comic strip about love that is requited more by accident
than by intention is something of a wonder. True, there is some reassurance in
the endless victories of love in Krazy
Kat. But the accidental nature of so many of those triumphs cannot but
undermine a little an over-all impulse towards confidence. And hope. And yet we
laugh. Perhaps because we are all of us lovers, and just a little krazy in
konsequence. And so like Herriman's sprite, we persist in seeing only what we
want to see.
By this circuitous route, I’m
embellishing Seldes' interpretation of Herriman's theme. Krazy Kat is not so much about the triumph of love as it is about
the unquenchable will to love and to be loved. Love may not, in fact, always
triumph; but we will always wish it would.
Herriman's paean to love began as a
simple cat-and-mouse game in the basement of a strip called The Family Upstairs, which first
appeared August 1, 1910. The strip had debuted under the title The Dingbat Family on June 20, 1910, but
when the apartment-dwelling Dingbats developed an obsession about the
disruptive doings of their upstairs neighbors, the strip was re-titled
accordingly. Krazy first appeared as the Dingbat's cat. The spacious panels in
which Herriman recorded the daily trials of the Dingbats in their feud with
their neighbors always had some visual vacancy at the bottom, and Herriman
developed the practice of filling that space with drawings of the antics of the
cat (not yet Kat). On July 26, a mouse appears and throws what might be a piece
of brick at the cat. Thereafter, the drama that unfolds at the feet of the
Dingbats focuses on the aggressive mouse's campaign against the cat.
By the end of August, Herriman had
drawn a line completely across the bottom of his strip, separating the cat and
mouse game into a miniature strip of its own, a footnote feud paralleling the
combat going on above. This tiny strip Herriman introduced with the prophetic
caption: “And this,” with an arrow pointing to the strip at the right, “another
romance tells.” And the mouse ends that day's antics by christening his
nemesis: “Krazy Kat,” he growls, somewhat disgustedly. This exasperated
utterance would become the strip's concluding refrain and, eventually, its
title. But for the next two-and-a-half years, the Kat and the mouse carried on
in their minuscule sub-strip without a title, and the mouse didn't acquire his
name until the first days of 1911. On rare occasions, Ignatz and Krazy invaded
the Dingbats' premises, taking over the more commodious panels upstairs for
their daily turn while the baffled Dingbats looked in from below. But it wasn't
until October 28, 1913, that they had a strip of their own.
The machinations of his eternal
triangle (and the brick) preoccupied Herriman throughout Krazy Kat's run. And most of the strips, whether daily or weekend
editions, are stand-alone, gag-a-day productions. But on occasion, Herriman
told continuing stories. Once Krazy was captivated by a visiting French poodle
named Kisidee Kuku. And in 1936, Herriman conducted one of his longest
continuities—a narrative opus chronicling the havoc wreaked by Krazy's
involvement with the world's most powerful katnip, “Tiger Tea.” Mostly,
however, the strip was a daily dose of Herriman's lyric comedy about love.
Herriman's graphic style—homely,
scratchy penwork—remained unchanged through Krazy
Kat's life, but the cartoonist explored and exploited the format of his
medium, exercising to its fullest his increasingly fanciful sense of
design—particularly when drawing the Sunday Krazy. The first “Sunday page” appeared on Saturday, April 23, 1916, running in black
and white in the weekend arts and drama section of Hearst's New York Journal; the full-page Krazy
would not be printed in color until June 1935. But with or without color, the
full-page format stimulated Herriman's imagination, and for it, he produced his
most inventive strips—in both layout and theme, the latter often playfully
determined by the former, as we shall see anon.
While the brick is the pivot in most
of Herriman's strips, the daily strips also reveal him playing with language
and being self-conscious about the nature of his medium. When Ignatz casually
observes that “the bird is on the wing,” Krazy investigates and reports (in
characteristic patois): “From rissint obserwation, I should say that the wing
is on the bird.” Another time, he is astonished at bird seed—having believed
all along that birds came from eggs. In Krazy's literal interpretation of
language there is an innocence at one with his romantic illusion. When Ignatz
is impressed by a falling star, Krazy allows that “them that don't fall” are
more miraculous. Krazy's puns and wordplay were the initial excuse for Ignatz's
assault by brick: the mouse stoned the Kat to punish him/her for what he considered
a bad joke or an unabashed utterance of plain stupidity. From this simple daily
ritual, Herriman vaulted his strip into metaphysical realms and immortality.
Herriman is the first person of
color to achieve prominence in cartooning. Although recognized for his talent
by his peers and by the press and the public in a general way, his stature is
largely a posthumous distinction. During his lifetime, Herriman's work was
esteemed by intellectuals, but their high opinion of Krazy Kat did not translate into circulation: Krazy Kat appeared in very few newspapers, relatively speaking. Ron
Goulart, in his Encyclopedia of Comics, says the strip never ran in more than forty-eight papers in this country. Half
of them were doubtless in the Hearst chain, which numbered about two dozen at
its peak. Hearst loved the strip and insisted that he would keep running it as
long as Herriman wanted to do it, circulation notwithstanding.
By all accounts, Herriman was
self-effacing, shy, and extremely private. After the death of one of his
daughters in 1939 (a mere five years after his wife of 32 years had died),
Herriman became a virtual recluse, confining himself to the livingroom of his
Spanish-style mansion in Hollywood, where he slept on a couch near his
drawingboard. He went out only to take his strips to the post office.
Herriman's race would be of no
particular interest were it not for the unique manifestation he created for
love in his strip: Krazy chooses to take an injury (a brick to the head) as
symbolic of Ignatz's love for him/her, and Krazy is a black cat. While I hate
to see Krazy Kat converted by
well-meaning critics and scholars into an allegory about racial relations (it
would then seem somehow less universal in its message, and we all need its
reassurances, regardless of race), there may have been an unconscious emotional
source in racism for Herriman’s inspiration. He may not have been fully
conscious of the kind of self-hatred that racial prejudice induces in
persecuted minorities, but his subconscious doubtless knew. And on the murkier
levels of the subconscious, self-hatred is associated with guilt, and guilt
requires punishment. And thus the brick, erstwhile emblem of love, becomes the
instrument of punishment. But not altogether: perhaps to Ralph Ellison's
invisible man, even abuse is a form of acknowledgement and is therefore to be
desired if all other forms fail to materialize.
African American scholars see other
artifacts of life in black America in the strip. William W. Cook told me about
the comedy of reversal that Krazy Kat seems
to embody. Among the characters that populated the vaudeville stage were comic
racial stereotypes left over from the days of minstrelsy. A large imposing
black woman and her diminutive no-good lazy husband comprised a traditional
stage pair. The comedy arose from the woman's endless beratings of her husband
and his ingenuity in evading the obligations she urged upon him. Noting Krazy's
color and size relative to Ignatz, Cook sees the large black woman of the
vaudeville stage in the Kat; and in the mouse, the wizened husband. In
Herriman's vision, however, their vaudeville roles have been reversed: with
every brick that reaches Krazy's skull, the browbeaten “husband” avenges
himself for the years of abuse he suffered on stage. And Offissa Pupp is
another vestige of the same vaudeville act: driven to distraction by her
husband's derelictions, the scolding stage wife often concluded her rantings
with the threat: “I'm gonna get the law on you.”
But the strip's central ritual has a
more obvious origin in another vaudeville routine. We see it in Bud Fisher's Mutt and Jeff. The pie-in-the-face punchline. One of the standard
devices in Fisher’s strip was Mutt’s hitting Jeff with whatever was handy every
time Jeff says something seemingly stupid (but usually insightful). Hardly a
week went by without a punch of a punchline. Ignatz's brick-throwing belongs in
the same tradition. Krazy would say or do something silly or idiotically
insightful, and Ignatz would react by braining him with a brick. It was a
commonplace of comedy in those years (and to a large extent, it still is). But
Herriman, as we've seen, gave the slapstick routine a metaphysical significance
it never had on stage. And the lyric lesson came about, I believe, through the
cartoonist's impulse for visual comedy.
The Sunday or weekend full-page Krazy Kat is the fly wheel of the
strip's lyric dynamic. And it was on these pages that Herriman developed and
embroidered the strip's over-arching theme. By the time the weekend strip was
launched, Krazy was five years old. In its daily version, the strip reprised
its familiar vaudeville routine with an almost endless variety of nuance. The
love that this routine obscurely symbolized was only hinted at in the daily
strips. But when Herriman gained the expanded vistas of a full page upon which
to work his magic, his grand but simple theme began to emerge in full flower.
And before too long, the weekend strip was a page-long paean to love—to its
power, to our passionate and unwavering desire for its power to triumph over
all.
I suspect that the gentle theme of
love emerged on the weekend pages almost accidentally. Judging from the
earliest pages themselves, Herriman's driving preoccupation was a playful
desire to fill the space by humorously re-designing it—and while he was about
it, he re-designed the form and function of comic strip art as well. Beginning
with the first weekend page in 1916, we can watch Herriman as he started to
experiment with the form of the medium. Antic layouts were not long in
surfacing. On the very first page, he used irregular-shaped panels, and by
June, some panels were page-wide. In July, he sometimes dropped panel borders
and sometimes used circular panels instead of rectangles; by August, he was
mixing all these devices. And by the end of October, his graphic imagination
was shaping the gags: layout sometimes determined punchline or vice-versa as
page design became functional as well as fanciful.
On September 3, Herriman sets the
scene for an adventure at sea with a page-wide panel suggesting the vast and
vacant reaches of an ocean. Panel borders disappear for much of the page in
order to give emphasis to the unruly waves that toss Krazy and Ignatz about.
Then, for the conclusion, panel borders frame a scene when the sea has grown
calm. On October 15, the entire page consists of page-wide panels. The maneuver
permits Herriman to tell one story about Krazy at the far left of each panel
while unfolding an ironic comedy in counterpoint at the far right. The humor
arises from the simultaneity of the actions.
On May 6, 1917, a top-to-bottom
vertical panel on the right-hand side of the page gives the comic explanation
for the “mystery” outlined in the panels on the left: how could a single brick
from Ignatz bean a katbird, Krazy, and a katfish? The vertical panel allows
Herriman to explain. He shows Ignatz in a balloon over Krazy's head and traces
the path of the brick he drops from the balloon: it hits a passing katbird
first, then Krazy, then falls into the water where it hits the katfish.
That the stories Herriman told on
Sundays focussed on love is largely incidental. Love is the storyteller's
stock-in-trade. Love insinuates itself into most human dramas. In many ways,
all stories are love stories. Love stories find their way into virtually every
other kind of tale. They fit readily into any narrative setting. War stories
have love stories as subplots; so do Westerns and whodunits and every other
kind of narrative. The theme of love is thus universal enough to furnish a
focus for any story. Herriman's sense
of graphic play needed a narrative focal point. Love was the most easily
understood and adaptable organizing device at hand. Herriman seized it, and, by
making it central to an endless comic refrain, he made poetry.
On the weekend pages, Herriman found
room to indulge and develop his fantasy—his visual playfulness, his
inventiveness. His poetry. Here, then, the quintessential Krazy blossomed. And
then the daily strips took up the chorus too, more focussed than they had been
before Herriman had the weekend page to play with. The lyricism of the theme
soon permeated Herriman's week and gave us one of the masterworks of the medium.
But these are the maunderings of the
critical faculty. For the readers (and lovers) we all are, it is probably
enough to know that regardless of the source of Herriman's inspiration, his
Kat, the embodiment of love willed into being, is a comfort to us all—a balm of
wisdom wrapped in laughter. Herriman was not only shy: he was, according to
those who knew him, also saintly. And so was his strip.
Herriman died April 25, 1944, and
his strip, too idiosyncratic for another to continue, ceased with the Sunday
page for June 25. In soaring into metaphysical realms, Krazy Kat had long since achieved immortality, but not, I hasten to
add, as a racial allegory.
Looking at the 1935-36 reprint
volume, I can’t help thinking that the addition of color to the Sunday Krazy at first seemed to inhibit
Herriman’s graphic imagination. He had to add panel borders to serve as color
holds, a static device, which, initially, resulted in some loss of the
free-wheeling aspect of the action. But by the next Fantagraphics volume, just
out, subtitled “Shifting Sands Dusts Its Cheeks in Powdered Beauty” (another
122 9x12-inch pages in color at $19.95, covering the years 1937 and 1938),
Herriman has found his footing in the new format and is dancing around a little
more, insinuating large, page-wide panels into the grid and varying the size of
the smaller ones as well as the number and height of tiers. One of his pages in
August 1938 is, for all practical purposes, just two gigantic tiers, or panels.
The year before, as if trying to free himself of the confinements of panel
borders and regimented tiers, Herriman produced a strip that was one huge panel
with a couple “ears,” tiny panels, at the top, left and right. But after that,
he resumed the regular cadences he’d adopted when switching to color in June
1935. He kept it up for a year, then variations began to slip in, chiefly large
two-tier tall, page-wide panels as the concluding visual of the day’s gag. And
on his last page for 1938, Herriman drops a few panel borders, as if getting ready
to resume his footloose practices of yore.
Footnit: As you may have guessed, much of the foregoing is
extracted from The Art of the Funnies, a
book of mine that you can catch a glimpse of by clicking here.
Collector’s
Corniche
GEORGE HERRIMAN IN 1944
Here,
thanks to the Comic Research Bibliography, is Time magazine’s farewell to George
Herriman—thoughtful, gentle, and heartfelt. Nicely done. Fascinating to see
how Herriman and Krazy Kat were regarded back in those days, long before comics
and cartooning were considered art forms. Some of the descriptions—“love daft,”
“hog-Elizabethan,” a variant of pig Latin, we assume—ring true for the Krazy
universe. The “Problem of Evil,” though, is, I think, off-base. And I’d never
heard the story about little Willie giving Herriman his inspiration: I suspect
that story is an invention, like so much journalistic biographical fodder of
the era, more press agentry than accurate. Here, verbatim, is the Time capsule:
Art Among the Unlimitless Etha
Time: Monday, May 8, 1944
In
his home near Hollywood last week, the gentlest, most poetic of U.S. popular
artists laid down his pen at last. George Herriman, 63, creator of the
sovereign comic strip, Krazy Kat,
died after a long illness. Hundreds of thousands of readers, who knew the
love-daft Kat and his curious companions as well as they knew their own dreams,
knew little or nothing of their inventor. But as friends and colleagues talked
of this modest little man, as he never on earth would have talked of himself, a
figure of almost Franciscan sweetness emerged. "If ever there was a saint
on earth," said warmhearted Harry Hershfield (Abie the Agent), "it was George Herriman."
Willie Was Right. Herriman wandered into newspaper cartooning because
a fall from a scaffold made house painting too strenuous. He wandered into his
greatest comic creations because an office boy named Willie, amused by a
casually drawn cat & mouse playing marbles, suggested that Herriman flatly
reverse the traditional cat-&-mouse relationship. Once Krazy Kat had made
Herriman's fortune (around 1922), he left Manhattan, settled down in the West.
For the past 22 years he lived near Hollywood. After his wife's death a decade
ago in an automobile accident, he stayed much at home with his daughter Mabel,
his dogs, his work.
Herriman believed that animals are
superior to human beings. He would never ride a horse. He tried to be a
vegetarian, had to give it up when he became too weak. To the end of his life
nearly all his ration points for meat went to satisfy the sleek gang of stray
dogs and cats he took care of.
Poker and Solitude. He was rather a dandy, in a loud way. His favorite
sport was poker. He could be a wonderfully entertaining host. William Randolph
Hearst loved him. His own close friends were chiefly comic-strip
artists—Hershfield, Rudolph Dirks (The
Captain and the Kids), Jim Swinnerton (Little
Jimmy), the late Tad Dorgan (Indoor Sports). His best friend was the
late H. M. (Beanny) Walker, Our Gang
comedies director.
Toward "serious" artists
he felt very humble. He used to try painting and, according to Dirks,
invariably underestimated his own work. He never got over feeling that his
$750-a-week salary was more than he was worth, never got over trying to make
each strip a little better than the last. He loved solitude, would often sit
among people for hours without saying a word. The one thing Herriman could
always talk about fluently and without shyness was Krazy Kat.
Minor Master. Herriman was crazy about Krazy Kat. In all his years
of intimacy with him, he never got tired of the Kat. In Herriman's 30-odd years
of work—always wearing his hat and usually improvising fresh from the pen—he
must have drawn something like 1,500 full-page Kats and 10,000 strips. An
amazing number of them are the keenest, dizziest kind of inspiration. Wrote
Critic Gilbert Seldes of Herriman's work 20 years ago: "In the second
order of the world's art it is superbly first rate—and a delight!" Delight
was Herriman's strongest point in a world where most artists had lost it.
Problem of Evil. For Herriman's creatures, neither animal nor human,
the scratchy, tersely subtle drawing, the hog-Elizabethan talk and supralunar
world of Krazy Kat were entirely his own—a new private universe of fantasy,
irony, weird characterization, odd beauty. It looks as simple as daylight, this
illimitably varied, unchanging little comedy about the noble-souled, loony,
amorous Kat who loves to have his bean creased by the brick that malicious
Ignatz Mouse loves to throw, while Dogberryish Offisa Pupp, the stolidly
distraught embodiment of the Law, tries, and forever fails, to stop the brick.
The predicament of the Kat, Ignatz and the Pupp is perhaps the century's
wisest, certainly its gayest, fable of the Problem of Evil. Nevertheless,
Herriman's comic strip remained simple, popular art whose purpose was to make
simple people laugh.
When, some 20 years ago, the
intellectuals discovered Herriman, Krazy Kat was compared with Don Quixote and
with Pan, Ignatz with Sancho Panza and Lucifer, their creator with Anatole
France, the German Expressionists, Charles Dickens. Herriman was praised as
draftsman, colorist, creator of magical characters, fantastic inventor, and
almost as much—but not perhaps enough—as a writer. In many respects his comic
commentary resembles that of Joyce in Finnegans
Wake, and Joyce might well have saluted the Herriman line: "Just
imegin having your 'ectospasm' running around, William and Nilliam, among the
unlimitless etha-golla, it's imbillivibil—"
But Herriman did not hear the cries
of high critical approval. He remained effortlessly unpretentious,
indestructibly innocent. Usually, when the creator of a popular comic strip
dies—or even before—another man can understudy him. But when George Herriman
died, King Features announced no such plan. Herriman left a backlog of Krazy Kat which will keep the strip
running till about the middle of June. When that is over, a unique and
endearing form of art and humor will have left the world.
Under the Spreading Punditry
When you mix red and blue, you get the
purple prose of punditry.
I
didn’t notice this before, but now that Karl Rove is free again, we can expect
the usual homophobic electioneering over the next few months. In fact, as
Garrison Keillor recently pointed out, it’s already begun. He calls it “San
Franciscophobia,” adding: “We’re stuck with a terrible war and a worse
president, and all the GOP can do is scream, ‘Pelosi and her Nancy boys are
coming’? This is pathetic.” The Rove plan, if the past is any predictor of the
future, is to create fear in the electorate about what will happen if the
Democrats gain control of the House and Nancy Pelosi becomes Speaker. Pelosi,
who hails from the City by the Bay—that is, the domicile of untallied thousands
of openly gay people—will undoubtedly legalize gay marriage and thereby unhinge
the linch-pin of civilization, sending us all screaming and jabbering like
monkeys back into the jungle.
It is probably wholly understandable
that the tone-deaf Bush League would send George W. (“Warlord”) Bush to Hungary
to make a speech about democracy on the 50th anniversary of the
Hungarian Uprising. GeeDubya repeated his now familiar mantra: If you stand up
for democracy, the United States will stand with you. No one appeared to notice
the grinding irony of making this statement in that place on the occasion at
hand. In 1956, Hungary was a Soviet satellite state, a Communist puppet. Then,
all at once, anti-Soviet Hungarian “freedom fighters” (I think that’s the first
place we used that term, aristotle) rose up in Budapest, and by the end of the
week, the country was united in an effort to take their nation back from the
Russians. Russian troops withdrew from Budapest and regrouped to crush the
revolt. American newspapers blossomed with photographs of Soviet tanks
thundering through the streets, running down Hungarians. “The streets were
carpeted with the bodies of Budapest’s martyrs,” wrote William Manchester in
his excellent history, The Glory and the
Dream. Hungarian leadership appealed to the U.N. to intervene. The U.S.
introduced a measure to do just that, but the Soviets vetoed it in the Security
Council. U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower spent $20 million on food and
medicine for Hungary and ordered immigration to admit 21,500 Hungarian refugees
to the United States and sent a protest to Russia. The Russians, naturally,
ignored Ike and his protest, saying it was an internal matter and would be
settled with the Hungarians without outside help. At that point, everything
fizzled. The tanks won. And the U.S., the U.N. and the rest of the civilized
world stood idly by and watched. We did not, in other words, stand with the
Hungarians as they stood up for freedom and democracy. We did just about what
we did in Ruwanda and are doing in Darfur. Nearly nothing. Compared to our
expressions of “concern” about Iraq and
its touted WMD, we did absolutely nothing. We sent an army to Iraq; nothing to
Ruwanda. Nearly nothing to Darfur. It’s one thing to celebrate Hungarian democracy
on the 50th anniversary of an uprising that failed. Surely the human
spirit’s aspiration to be free is worthy of commemoration. But it’s quite
another thing to proclaim our willingness to “stand with” any oppressed people
who “stand up” for democracy by shouting it from a podium in the very place
where we did not stand up at all. Time magazine, incidentally, made the “Hungarian Patriot” its Man of the Year for
1956, the first time the magazine used a symbolic group in that capacity.
Well, that’s it. I’m going to stop Bush bashing for the rest of the month. Maybe forever. There’s no longer much point to the exercise: judging from the opinion polls, I’ve succeeded in accomplishing what I set out to do. It’s only a matter of time, now, before the
whole discredited regime is tossed out on its collective can. So it’s time to
move on to some other open sore on the face of civilization.
To find out about Harv's books, click here. |
||||||
send e-mail to R.C. Harvey Art of the Comic Book - Art of the Funnies - Accidental Ambassador Gordo - reviews - order form - Harv's Hindsights - main page |
