George Herriman
George Joseph Herriman (born August 22, 1880 in New Orleans , † April 25, 1944 in Los Angeles ) was an American comic artist and caricaturist . His best-known work is the comic Krazy Kat .
Life
1880-1900
George Herriman was the first child of George Herriman Jr. and his wife Clara, geb. Morel. He had three younger siblings, Henry, Ruby and Pearl. Presumably his parents were of Creole descent ( lit .: McDonnell et al.) Or descendants of Greek immigrants (according to Bill Blackbeard, the editor of the Krazy Kat volumes). In any case, because of their comparatively dark complexions, Herriman's parents were not treated equally by their fellow citizens in the southern states , which included Louisiana . This, combined with the difficult economic situation in the south, may have been the reason that the Herrimans moved to California in 1886 . In Los Angeles , Herriman's father first opened a hair salon and later a bakery.
From 1891 to 1897 Herriman attended St. Vincent's College , a Catholic school for boys. After a short time he broke off an apprenticeship, probably in his father's bakery. Herriman had already started drawing as a child. As a teenager he worked from 1895 for local newspapers as a graphic assistant. He quickly became aware of his talent for drawing, and from 1897 he provided illustrations and caricatures for the Los Angeles Herald . Shortly after 1900 he got his first assignments for the San Francisco Examiner , which belonged to William Randolph Hearst .
The beginnings of Herriman's career coincide with the start of American newspaper comics. 1892 created James Swinnerton with California Bears the first continuous comic strip . From 1895 Richard Felton Outcault's The Yellow Kid appeared . The new series led to a considerable increase in newspaper circulation, which is why editors such as Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer poached the best artists from each other. Against the background of this competition, the new art form developed rapidly. (The English expression for tabloid press , "yellow press", is derived from the comic The Yellow Kid ).
1900-1913
In 1900 Herriman went to New York because the large number of newspapers there promised better publication opportunities. At first he worked as a freelancer for the humorous magazine Judge and a number of daily newspapers. His first half- or full-page comic series included Musical Mose , Professor Otto and Arcobatic Archie (all 1902), Lariate Pete and Two Jolly Jackies (both 1903), Major Ozone (1904), Rosy's Mama (1906), Bud Smith and Zoo Zoo (all 1906), Mr. Proones the Plunger and The Amours of Marie Anne Magee (both 1907), Baron Mooch and Alexander (both 1909). Several of these series appeared in four-color print in Sunday newspaper supplements.
After Herriman had established himself in New York, he married his fiancée Mabel Lillian Bridge in Los Angeles in 1902 and returned with her to New York. The first daughter, Mabel, was born in 1903, the second, Barbara, in 1909. From June 1903 Herriman was permanently employed by New York World . In January 1904 he moved to the New York Daily News and in April of that year to Hearsts New York American . In mid-1905 he returned to Los Angeles, where he worked as a political and sports cartoonist for Hearst's Los Angeles Examiner from early 1906 . He also drew comics here, such as the series Baron Mooch , in which the character Krazy Kat appeared for the first time (a very similar cat was seen in the 1903 comic Lariat Pete ). At the end of 1909, the Gooseberry Sprig series appeared , the protagonist of which would later belong to the staff of the Krazy Kat comics.
William Randolph Hearst, who promoted the comics in his sheets, had become aware of the talent of the young Herriman. In 1910 he was therefore ordered back as a comic artist to the New York headquarters of his newspaper empire. Here Herriman began the series The Dingbat Family in mid-1910 . In this comic about the Dingbat family, a mysterious family who lives above the dingbats gradually took up more space. One after another, the dingbats try to find out who their neighbors are - but without ever seeing them. After a while, the name of the strip was appropriately renamed The Family Upstairs ("The family from above"). In this comic, Herriman introduced other characters - a mouse and a cat who lived under the dingbats and whose stories were told in small panels below the main plot. This is how the couple Ignatz Mouse and Krazy Kat came about.
1913-1922
Krazy cat
In 1913 the cat and mouse finally got their own series. The daily comic strip was initially called Krazy Kat and Ignatz , but soon it was called Krazy Kat . From 1916, full-page stories by the two of them also appeared in the Sunday editions of the Hearst newspapers. Krazy Kat was quickly successful and made Herriman known. In the same year, the first has already been Krazy Kat - Cartoons produced - Herriman Krazy was thus the first animated cat in film history. After the First World War, his readers and admirers included an increasing number of intellectuals and artists such as Dorothy Parker or Ring Lardner . Even Gertrude Stein was the Krazy Kat send comics to Paris, where she reportedly among others Pablo Picasso enthusiastically showed and explained. In 1922, John Alden Carpenter staged a Krazy Kat ballet, and critic and writer Gilbert Seldes declared Krazy Kat the greatest work of American contemporary art in Vanity Fair in 1922 . Vanity Fair then took Herriman into its "Hall of Fame" in 1923. In Selde's article it says: "The daily published comic strip Krazy Kat by George Herriman is for me the funniest, most fantastic and artistically most satisfying work of art that is being created in America today." ( Lit .: McDonnell etc., p. 15)
Herriman's "Coconino County"
Sometime between 1911 and 1916 Herriman first came to Arizona in the area around Monument Valley . The landscape of this barren dry region with its witness mountains and the handicrafts of the local Navajo Indians influenced his work considerably. Not only do place names like Kayenta , Coconino County (a little further south) and many others appear again and again in Krazy Kat ; more significant is the influence of the landscape and the light that shaped Herriman's art of drawing from then on. There were also numerous ornaments inspired by the art of the Indians . Until his death, Herriman visited the remote region at least once a year. Mostly he lived there with his befriended couple John and Louisa Wetherill, who ran a trading post in Kayenta and explored the Navajo culture.
1922-1944
In 1922 Herriman moved back to Los Angeles with his family. Even after the success of Krazy Kat , he drew other series into the 1930s, including Baron Bean , Stumble Inn and Us Husbands . In the second half of the 1920s, the cultural climate in the United States changed. In comics, film and radio, modernist approaches lost their popularity, as did senseless slapstick. The trend was towards more realistic comedies, music films and crime novels - which also had an impact on the comics. Fewer and fewer Hearst newspapers wanted to print Herriman's comics, and in 1934 the Krazy Kat Sunday page could only be found in the New York Evening Journal . The fact that the series was not discontinued entirely was due to the fact that Hearst himself was Herriman's biggest fan. Hearst had given him a lifetime contract, and he kept putting editors to print the strip.
In 1927 and 1935 Herriman illustrated two collections of the archy and mehitabel poems of the Don Marquis, whom he admired . The last few years of his life were overshadowed by health problems and personal tragedies. An arthritis made him increasingly difficult to draw. In 1934 his wife Mabel was killed in a car accident; In 1939 his daughter Barbara died at the age of 30. However, Herriman continued to work on his life's work, Krazy Kat , until his death, with only a few interruptions due to illness .
From mid-1935, the full-page Krazy Kat stories for the Sunday supplements appeared in color (previously ten Krazy Kat pages had already appeared in color in the New York Journal and other Hearst papers in 1922 ). That, and Hearst's instructions, resulted in the series being reprinted in a larger number of newspapers. The last episode appeared on June 25, 1944, two months after Herriman's death. Hearst refrained from having a new draftsman, Krazy Kat, continue as usual with other series - which would hardly have been possible with the graphic and narrative obstinacy of the series. In the year of Herriman's death, Krazy Kat appeared in 38 US newspapers.
Herriman's cause of death was diagnosed as non-alcohol-related cirrhosis of the liver . At his request, his body was cremated and the ashes scattered over Monument Valley .
plant
Motifs
Herriman's early comics differed little from successful series of the time such as The Yellow Kid or Katzenjammer Kids . However, peculiarities soon became noticeable. In Major Ozone, for example, the main character is a health fanatic who wants the freshest air at all costs - which regularly leads to disaster. Such repetitive and varied obsessions would subsequently become a hallmark of Herriman's - for example in the series The Family Upstairs , in which the Dingbat family constantly and unsuccessfully tries to get to see the tenants in the apartment above theirs. Obsessions and rituals also shaped Krazy Kat . Ignatz the mouse always wants to throw a brick at Krazy's head; the policeman Offisa Pupp always tries to prevent this; Krazy always loves Ignatz, and Offisa Pupp always loves Krazy. This all-too-well-known framework leads to great comedy, as Herriman succeeded in finding surprising variants of the same ritualized process again and again, despite the very clear constellation.
Drawing technique and composition
In terms of drawing, Herriman is considered one of the great masters of comics. Not only its lines and hatching are masterful. As can be seen from the originals, he also carried out complex compositions directly with Indian ink , almost without preliminary drawings . With his ingenuity in terms of panel layout , he was a lonely pioneer in his day. Again and again the picture sequences or the frames are broken. It is not uncommon for the frames to be completely abandoned in favor of a very dynamic, sometimes diagonal, sometimes horizontal composition.
language
Herriman's narrative tone dominates many registers, from highly poetic and newspaper language to slang, from numerous dialects, the broken English of different groups of immigrants to various foreign languages (individual characters repeatedly speak Spanish, French or German). All of this is mixed, contrasted and staged very effectively by Herriman. In addition, there is the very own language of the main character Krazy Kat, who always naively corrupts the English language, misunderstands words and accordingly emits an ambiguous mixture of languages in which, similar to James Joyce's Finnegans Wake , the levels of meaning tumble through each other.
effect
Many great comic artists have admired Herriman and identified him as a major stimulus, including Will Eisner , Charles M. Schulz, and Bill Watterson .
“You are giving the reader a blank background, and the reader will have a tendency to add the background from their own imagination or experience. I learned this from one of the comics that influenced me tremendously in the beginning - Krazy Kat . If you look at Herriman's early works, you can see that he had a tremendous instinct for such things. When I looked at it as a kid, I thought, 'Hey, someone knows what they're doing'. "
“Krazy Kat is cranky, has a personality and does not compromise. It's one of the few comic strips that takes full advantage of the medium. There are things that only a comic can do that cannot be achieved in any other medium, not even in animation, and Krazy Kat is kind of an essay on the essence of comics. "
Literary critics such as Umberto Eco assume that Krazy Kat also influenced modern literature and painting that emerged at the same time. The expressionist and surrealist image compositions and the numerous language montages could speak for this. For Gilbert Seldes, Krazy Kat was the only genuine American example of expressionist art as early as 1922 . It is difficult to prove how such influences developed in detail. It is true that artists as diverse as EE Cummings , Jack Kerouac and Gertrude Stein have expressed their admiration about Krazy Kat . Usually, however, such statements are limited to individual quotations (which could be due to the fact that the comic was little respected for a long time). Concrete studies on the influence of Herriman's work on modern literature and painting are still lacking.
Works
Original series
- Musical Mose , 1902
- Professor Otto , 1902
- Arcobatic Archie , 1902
- Lariate Pete , 1903
- Two Jolly Jackies , 1903
- Major Ozone , 1904-1906
- Home Sweet Home , 1904
- Rosy's mom , 1906
- Bud Smith , 1905-1906
- Grandma's Girl - Likewise Bud Smith , 1905-1906
- Rosy Posy - Mama's Girl , 1906
- Zoo Zoo , 1906
- Mr. Proones the Plunger , 1907
- The Amours of Marie Anne Magee , 1907
- Baron Mooch , 1909
- Daniel and Pansy , 1909
- Mary's Home from College , 1909
- Alexander the Cat , 1909-1910
- Gooseberry Sprig , 1909-1910
- The Dingbat Family (at times under the title The Family Upstairs ), 1910–1916
- Krazy Kat , 1913-1944
- Baron Bean , 1916-1919
- Now Listen Mabel , 1919
- Stumble Inn , 1922-1926
- U.S. Husbands , 1926
English language editions
- Baron Bean 1916-1917 . Westport (Conn.) 1977, ISBN 0-88355-640-5
- The Family Upstairs: Introducing Krazy Kat 1910–1912 . Westport (Conn.) 1977, ISBN 0-88355-642-1
- Krazy & Ignatz - The Komplete Kat Komics, Volume One: 1916 . Forestville 1988, ISBN 0-913035-48-3
- Krazy & Ignatz - The Komplete Kat Komics, Volume Two: 1917 . Forestville 1989, ISBN 0-913035-75-0
- Krazy & Ignatz - The Komplete Kat Komics, Volume Three: 1918 . Forestville 1989, ISBN 0-913035-77-7
- Krazy & Ignatz - The Komplete Kat Komics, Volume Four: 1919 . Forestville 1989, ISBN 0-931035-93-7
- Krazy & Ignatz - The Komplete Kat Komics, Volume Five: 1920 . Forestville 1990, ISBN 1-56060-024-1
- Krazy & Ignatz - The Komplete Kat Komics, Volume Six: 1921 . Forestville 1990, ISBN 1-56060-034-9
- Krazy & Ignatz - The Komplete Kat Komics, Volume Seven: 1922 . Forestville 1991, ISBN 1-56060-064-0
- Krazy & Ignatz - The Komplete Kat Komics, Volume Eight: 1922 . Forestville 1991, ISBN 1-56060-066-7
- Krazy & Ignatz - The Komplete Kat Komics, Volume Nine: 1922 . Forestville 1992, ISBN 1-56060-103-5
- The Komplete Kolor Krazy Kat, Volume 1: 1935-1936 . London 1990, ISBN 1-85286-334-X
- The Komplete Kolor Krazy Kat, Volume 2: 1936-1937 . Amherst 1991, ISBN 0-924359-07-2
- Krazy & Ignatz - The Dailies 1918-1919 . Charleston 2001, ISBN 0-9688676-0-X
- Krazy & Ignatz - The Complete Full Page Comic Strips 1925–1926 . Seattle 2002, ISBN 1-56097-386-2
- Krazy & Ignatz - The Complete Full Page Comic Strips 1927–1928 . Seattle 2002, ISBN 1-56097-507-5
- Krazy & Ignatz - The Complete Full Page Comic Strips 1929–1930 . Seattle 2003, ISBN 1-56097-529-6
- Krazy & Ignatz - The Complete Full Page Comic Strips 1931–1932 . Seattle 2004, ISBN 1-56097-594-6
- Krazy & Ignatz - The Complete Full Page Comic Strips 1933–1934 . Seattle 2004, ISBN 1-56097-620-9
Herriman as an illustrator
- Don Marquis: archy and multi-functional . New York 1927
- Don Marquis: The Life and Times of archy & mehitabel . New York 1935
- Don Marquis: archy and multi-functional . New York 1927, 1990, ISBN 0-385-09478-7 (reprint)
German-language editions
Attempts to bring out Herriman's comics in German translation have so far quickly failed; the few volumes that have appeared are limited exclusively to Krazy Kat's reprint . In 1974 the Melzer Verlag tried to provide a small and apparently very arbitrary overview of Herriman's daily and Sunday trips in a 160-page black and white volume. At least the volume contained an introduction to Krazy Kat by EE Cummings, written as early as 1946 . In Carlsen Verlag in 1991 translated two volumes were published the English-speaking Komplete Kolor Krazy Kat -Issue containing the color Sunday pages from the years 1935 to 1937 completely and chronologically; after that the edition was discontinued. The first three volumes of the Komplete Kat Komics were published in the Viennese series “Comicothek” from 1991 onwards , which, also complete and chronologically, contain the black and white Sunday pages from 1916 to 1918; In 1996 this edition was also discontinued. Since then, no further Herriman comics have appeared in German. Apart from the fact that the effort to produce such reprints is comparatively great, but the market for it is small, the main reason for the failure of German-language edition projects is that Herriman's very idiosyncratic, allusive and ambiguous language can hardly be translated satisfactorily - Harald Havas , the translator of the black and white Sunday pages, explains this clearly in his comments in the corresponding "Comicothek" volumes. In case of doubt, lovers of Herriman's comics can fall back on the English originals.
The following volumes have been published in German:
- George Herrimans "Krazy Kat" - A classic from the golden age of comics (translated by Carl Weissner), Melzner, Darmstadt 1974, ISBN 3-7874-0102-4 ; Heyne, Munich 1988, ISBN 3-453-00816-2 .
- Krazy Kat Volume 1: 1935–1936 (edited by Richard Marschall, translated by Wolfgang J. Fuchs), Carlsen, Hamburg 1991, ISBN 3-551-72591-8 .
- Krazy Kat Volume 2: 1936–1937 (edited by Richard Marschall, translated by Wolfgang J. Fuchs), Carlsen, Hamburg 1991, ISBN 3-551-72592-6 .
- Krazy Kat Volume 1: 1916 . Comicothek, Vienna 1991, ISBN 3-900390-49-5 .
- Krazy Kat Volume 2: 1917 . Comicothek, Vienna 1992, ISBN 3-900390-54-1 .
- Krazy Kat Volume 3: 1918 . Comicothek, Vienna 1996, ISBN 3-900390-88-6 .
literature
- Patrick McDonnell , Karen O'Connell, Georgia Riley de Havenon: Krazy Kat. The Comic Art of George Herriman . New York 1986, ISBN 0-8109-1211-2
- Daniela Kaufmann: The intellectual joke in comics. George Herrimans Krazy Cat . Universitäts-Verlag / Leykam, Graz 2008, ISBN 978-3-7011-0127-6 (At the same time, diploma thesis at the University of Graz 2006 under the title: The intellectual joke in comics using the example of George Herriman's "Krazy Kat" ).
- Andreas Platthaus : The first stone. George Herriman and "Krazy Kat" . In: Andreas Platthaus: United in comics. A story of picture history . Berlin 1998, ISBN 3-8286-0064-6
- Gilbert Seldes: The Seven Lively Arts . New York 1924
- Michael Tisserand: Krazy: George Herriman, a life in black and White , New York, NY: Harper, [2016], ISBN 978-0-06-173299-7
Web links
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Herriman, George |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Herriman, George Joseph |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American comic artist and cartoonist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | August 22, 1880 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | New Orleans |
| DATE OF DEATH | April 25, 1944 |
| Place of death | los Angeles |