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PROFILES >
"Well, here's the old man's picture. Any fella with a face like that should keep it a secret from the public, and I can't see how you're going to get any circulation publishing mushes like that. Once, when a youth, I aspired to become a baker, a kneader of dough, to mould bread and fashion a doughnut or stencil a cookie. Full of the spirit of adolescence I buried a dead mouse in a loaf of bread once - it found its way into a tough family and not only did I get a sweet trimming but I got the air also. In another bakeshop, I thought it cute to salt the doughnuts instead of the accustomed sugaring. Wam!! Stars and everything - out on the pavement again - a good baker at large. Another shop; and I slit a 200 pound sack of flour over a four foot five inch baker - we barely got him out alive, when we did, looking like a pose plastique, he took away the last remnant of ambition out of me. Then I became a cartoonist - as a sort of revenge on the world.
We're doing stuff for Mr. W. R. Hearst, but don't let him know
anything about it. Oy, if he should know! And if you want to know
it, we love the desert - the dry (notice Dook, not a Chicago Desert,
dry) old Desert, and that's where you will find us - when the last
drop of ink is out of our bottle and the pen snaps." Resources: Reviews: |
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ESSENTIAL READING: |
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"Despite the predictability of the characters' proclivities, the
strip never sinks into formula or routine. Often the actual brick
tossing is only anticipated. The simple plot is endlessly renewed
through constant innovation, pace manipulations, unexpected results,
and most of all, the quiet charm of each story's presentation. The
magic of the strip is not so much in what it says, but in how it
says it. It's a more subtle kind of cartooning than we have today...
Krazy Kat was not very successful as a commercial venture, but it
was something better. It was art." "In Krazy Kat the poetry originated
from a certain lyrical stubbornness in the author, who repeated his
tale ad infinitum, varying it always but sticking to its theme. It
was thanks only to this that the mouse's arrogance, the dog's unrewarded
compassion, and the cat's desperate love could arrive at what many
critics felt was a genuine state of poetry, an uninterrupted elegy
based on sorrowing innocence." "At first glance, George Herriman's long running strip seems
quaint and antiquated, full of half realised characters, and Herriman's
art may be a half-step behind the visual bravado of Feininger's
or McCay's. But to immerse yourself in Krazy Kat,
to yield to Herriman's looping verbal rhythms and lovingly depicted
desert background, to experience his perfectly realised triptych
of unspoken and unconsummated love, yields a very, very different
result. Herriman's creation is not only great comics, with a wonderful
command of the medium's possibilities and strengths, but it is
also great art - an affecting exploration of some of life's most
basic issues in a way that enlightens and thrills." "Herriman's panels convey an irrepressible sense of movement and
incorporate distinctly surreal touches, such as the thronged mushrooms
that 'rise to feast in florid fungushood', blooming like umbrellas
under a cheese-slice moon." |
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| SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY: | ||
Books: |
Krazy
& Ignatz 
The
Comic Art Of George Herriman