Can you name a popular mainstream newspaper comic strip by a Black creator...that ran in the early 1900s?
Yes, this surreal classic strip...
...was conceived, created, and produced by celebrated cartoonist George Herriman...
...was conceived, created, and produced by celebrated cartoonist George Herriman...
...who "passed as white" for his entire life!
As award-winning comics writer/artist designer Chris Ware described in his review for the New York Review of Books of a biography of Herriman...
(You'll see an example of one of those articles, done in the 1960s and with a particularly-ironic context, tomorrow!)
Plus, once Herriman's secret ancestry was revealed, it made clear another aspect of the "funny animal" strip which was long-suspected...
I may be in the minority here, but I really think that most if not all readers of Krazy Kat during Herriman’s lifetime would have had a hard time thinking of Krazy as anything but African-American......George Herriman saw the history of America and its future and wrote it in ink as a dream on paper, and it is a dream that is still coming true.
Wow!
“Recoiling from photographers and brushing off personal questions with elliptical answers and even occasional fabrications, George or “Garge” or “The Greek” always preferred the focus to be on the multivalent, multifarious, and multicultural characters who populated the inner world he made every day with the scratchings of his pen....
...(Michael) Tisserand confirms what for years was hiding in plain sight in the tangled brush of Coconino County, Arizona, where Krazy Kat is supposedly set: Herriman, of mixed African-American ancestry, spent his entire adult life passing as white.Imagine if the newspaper and magazine writers of the early 20th century had known that the wildly-successful comic strip writer/artist they were praising was "colored" or "Negro"?
(You'll see an example of one of those articles, done in the 1960s and with a particularly-ironic context, tomorrow!)
Plus, once Herriman's secret ancestry was revealed, it made clear another aspect of the "funny animal" strip which was long-suspected...
I may be in the minority here, but I really think that most if not all readers of Krazy Kat during Herriman’s lifetime would have had a hard time thinking of Krazy as anything but African-American......George Herriman saw the history of America and its future and wrote it in ink as a dream on paper, and it is a dream that is still coming true.
Wow!
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