George Joseph Herriman III (August 22, 1880 – April 25, 1944) was an American cartoonist best known for the comic strip Krazy Kat (1913–1944). More influential than popular, Krazy Kat had an appreciative audience among those in the arts. Gilbert Seldes' article "The Krazy Kat Who Walks by Himself" was the earliest example of a critic from the high arts giving serious attention to a comic strip. The Comics Journal placed the strip first on its list of the greatest comics of the 20th century. Herriman's work has been a primary influence on cartoonists such as Elzie C. Segar, Will Eisner, Walt Kelly, Charles M. Schulz, Robert Crumb, Art Spiegelman, Bill Watterson, and Chris Ware.
Herriman was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, to mixed-race Creole parents, and grew up in Los Angeles. After he graduated from high school in 1897, he worked in the newspaper industry as an illustrator and engraver. He moved on to cartooning and comic strips—a medium then in its infancy—and drew a variety of strips until he introduced his most famous character, Krazy Kat, in his strip The Dingbat Family in 1910. A Krazy Kat daily strip began in 1913, and from 1916 the strip also appeared on Sundays. It was noted for its poetic, dialect-heavy dialogue; its fantastic, shifting backgrounds; and its bold, experimental page layouts.
In the strip's main motif and dynamic, Ignatz Mouse pelted Krazy with bricks, which the naïve, androgynous Kat interpreted as symbols of love. As the strip progressed, a love triangle developed between Krazy, Ignatz, and Offisa Pupp. Pupp made it his mission to prevent Ignatz from throwing bricks at Krazy, or to jail him for having done so, but his efforts were perpetually impeded because Krazy wished to be struck by Ignatz's bricks.
Herriman lived most of his life in Los Angeles, but made frequent trips to the Navajo deserts in the Southwestern United States. He was drawn to the landscapes of Monument Valley and the Enchanted Mesa, and made Coconino County the location of his Krazy Kat strips. His artwork made much use of Navajo and Mexican themes and motifs against shifting desert backgrounds. He was a prolific cartoonist who produced a large number of strips and illustrated Don Marquis's books of poetry about Archy and Mehitabel, an alley cat and a cockroach. Newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst was a proponent of Herriman and gave him a lifetime contract with King Features Syndicate, which guaranteed Herriman a comfortable living and an outlet for his work despite its lack of popularity.
George Joseph Herriman was born at 348 Villere Street in New Orleans on August 22, 1880. He was born into a mixed-race family and came from a line of French-speaking Louisiana Creole mulattoes who were considered free people of color, and were reportedly active in the early abolitionist movement. His paternal great-grandfather, Stephen Herriman, was a white New Yorker who had children with Justine Olivier, a free woman of color, and owned a tailor shop on Royal Street in New Orleans. His paternal grandmother was born in Havana, Cuba. His parents were George Herriman, Jr., born in New Orleans, and Clara Morel Herriman, born in Iberville. The family attended St. Augustine Catholic Church
When he was ten, Herriman and his family moved to Los Angeles, where he grew up south of downtown near Main Street and Washington Boulevard. His father worked there as a tailor. Herriman attended the Catholic boys' school St. Vincent's College (now Loyola High School). Soon after graduating in 1897, he sold a sketch of the Hotel Petrolia in Santa Paula to the Los Angeles Herald. This landed him a $2-per-week job there as an assistant in the engraving department, where he occasionally did drawings for advertisements and political cartoons.
1900–1905: Early career in New York
When he was 20, Herriman clandestinely boarded a freight train bound for New York City, hoping his chances as an artist would be better there. He was unsuccessful at first, and survived by working as a barker and billboard painter at Coney Island, until one of the leading humor magazines of the day, Judge, accepted some of his cartoons. Between June 15 and October 26, 1901, eleven of his cartoons appeared in that magazine's pages, in the heavily crosshatched style of the day. He often used sequential images in his cartoons, as in the emerging comic strip medium. On September 29 that year, his first real comic strips were published, one in the Pulitzer chain of newspapers on a non-contractual, one-shot basis and another on a continuing basis in the Philadelphia North American Syndicate's first comic strip supplement. His first color comic strips appeared in the T. C. McClure Syndicate beginning October 20.
His success with these syndicated strips convinced Herriman to give up on magazine submissions. For the Pulitzer papers on February 16, 1902, he began his first strip that had a continuing character, Musical Mose. The strip featured an African-American musician who impersonated other ethnicities, only to suffer the consequences when discovered by his audience. Professor Otto and his Auto, about a terrifyingly dangerous driver, followed in March, and Acrobatic Archie, a "kid strip" with a child protagonist, first appeared in April. With his future as a cartoonist seemingly assured, Herriman traveled back to Los Angeles to marry his childhood sweetheart and returned with her to New York.
In the November 1902 issue of the literary magazine The Bookman, Herriman wrote of his profession self-deprecatingly, while poet La Touche Hancock, in an article in that issue titled "The American Comic and Caricature Art", wrote, "Art and poetry is the characteristic of George Herriman. Were his drawings not so well known one would think he had mistaken his vocation." Herriman's work was increasing in popularity, and he occasionally had front-page, full-color strips for the Pulitzer supplements, such as Two Jolly Jackies about two unemployed sailors, which began in January 1903. He began drawing the cowboy strip Lariat Pete in September for the McClure syndicate after Two Jolly Jackies was ended.
In June, Herriman was employed by the New York World. There, he illustrated Roy McCardell's commentaries on local events, beginning June 28 and running to the year's end. Herriman still produced syndicate work, such as Major Ozone's Fresh Air Crusade for the World Color Printing Company beginning January 2, 1904. Another of Herriman's obsessive characters, the Major traveled the world in an unsuccessful search for the purest air and spouted poetic dialogue. Major Ozone was so popular that it soon was given the supplement's front page. The same month, Herriman moved from the World to the New York Daily News, where he was given a larger quantity and variety of work, including cartoon reporting on sports and politics. In February and March, he had a short-lived continuing character comic strip about domestic life called Home Sweet Home. That spring, he began illustrating a series of articles written by Walter Murphy called Bubblespikers.
Rudolph Block hired Herriman for the Hearst papers with "a salary commensurate with his talents", starting April 22 at the New York American, which ran no daily comic strips at the time. Herriman drew sports cartoons in an office alongside Frederick Burr Opper, James Swinnerton, and Tad Dorgan, who was popularly known as "Tad" and was considered a star at another Hearst paper, the New York Evening Journal. Tad and Herriman were often assigned to cover the same sporting events and became close friends. In 1924, Tad called Herriman "one of the best sporting artists in the world" and regretted that Herriman no longer did that kind of work. Herriman continued with Hearst until June 1905, when he left the paper, possibly because of the new sports editor's unsympathetic attitude to cartoonists. He returned to Los Angeles in the latter half of 1905.
1905–1910: Return to California
In California, Herriman continued to mail in work to the World Color Printing Company. He revived Major Ozone and produced Grandma's Girl—Likewise Bud Smith, which he combined from two earlier strips, and a two-tiered children's strip, Rosy Posy—Mama's Girl. He began to work with the Los Angeles Times on January 8, 1906, before returning to Hearst that summer. Accompanying a front-page illustration in Hearst's Los Angeles Examiner, Herriman was announced as "the Examiner's cartoonist" on August 21. His artwork began to appear on nearly every page, resulting in greatly increased sales for the newspaper. In October, he stopped working for World Color.