Showing posts with label Krazy Kat. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Krazy Kat. Show all posts

Tuesday, February 25, 2020

Reading Room P.S.MAGAZINE "Gentle Art of Brick Throwing"

There have been numerous articles interpreting the genius of George Herriman..
...and his most famous creation, Krazy Kat, including this rarely-seen tribute by pop culture historian/movie-tv novelization & comics adaptation author/sci-fi writer and co-creator (w/Gil Kane) of Star Hawks, Ron Goulart!
At the time (mid-1960s), Herriman's ethnic identity was unknown to almost everyone except family, who kept it secret.
Would the article have taken a different slant if Goulart and the audience knew the artistic genius they were celebrating was Black?
Consider that the piece appeared in the same issue (P.S. #1 [1966]) as this article by another noted sci-fi author, Alfred Bester, about the difficulties of Black actors/models getting work in print and TV advertising...
It's interesting to note Bester's comments about the absence of non-stereotyped Black roles in old-time radio and 1930s-40s Black actors' lack of training due to industry-wide prejudice.
(Bester, besides writing Golden Age pulp magazine and comic book stories, was a prolific scripter of dramatic radio shows during the period!)
P.S. was an experiment by Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction editor Ed Furman to expand the publisher's line into the general interest market, using the best of then-current humor and sci-fi writers to do both nostalgic and predictive articles...
...including Jean (Christmas Story) Shepherd, Ray (Martian Chronicles) Bradbury,  Issac (too many to list) Asimov, among others.
Furman was willing to push the envelope...
...but the audience just wasn't there, and the title folded after only three issues.
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Monday, February 24, 2020

Monday Madness KRAZY KAT: the Comic Strip with a Secret!

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...
...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...
“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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