George Joseph Herriman was an American cartoonist best known for the comic strip Krazy Kat. His work has been a primary influence on cartoonists such as Will Eisner, Charles M. Schulz, Robert Crumb, Art Spiegelman, Bill Watterson, and Chris Ware. He was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, to mixed-race Creole parents.
About George Herriman in brief
George Joseph Herriman was an American cartoonist best known for the comic strip Krazy Kat. His work has been a primary influence on cartoonists such as Will Eisner, Charles M. Schulz, Robert Crumb, Art Spiegelman, Bill Watterson, and Chris Ware. He was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, to mixed-race Creole parents, and grew up in Los Angeles. A K Crazy 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. The Comics Journal placed the strip first on its list of the greatest comics of the 20th century. His first real comic strips were published in the first issue of the C.A.T. magazine on September 29, 1901. He often used sequential images in his cartoons, as in the emerging comic medium of the day, in the crosshatched style of day. He also illustrated Don Marquis’s books of poetry about Archy and Mehitabel, an alley cat and a cockroach, and made frequent trips to the Navajo deserts in the southwestern U.S. His artwork made much use of Navajo and Mexican themes and motifs against shifting desert backgrounds. He 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 father worked there as a tailor. His paternal grandfather, George HerrimAn Sr., owned a tailor shop on Royal Street in New York City. His maternal grandmother was born in Havana, Cuba. His parents were George Sheriman, Jr. and Clara Morel Herrimans, born in Iberville, and his father attended the St. Augustine Catholic Church in New New Orleans’ Tremé neighborhood. He lived most of his life in LA, but made frequent visits to Monument Valley and the Enchanted Mesa in Coconino County, where he drew the strip. When he was 20, Hisriman snuck aboard a freight train bound for New York, hoping his chances as an artist would be better there. 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 and drew a variety of strips until he introduced his most famous character, K crazy Kat, in his strip The Dingbat Family in 1910. The strip was published in one of the Pulitzer chain of newspapers on a non-contract, one-shot basis, and on a continuing basis in the North American Syndicate’s first comic supplement in the 1921 issue of The New York Sun. His last strip was in the 1931 issue of Tribute to the Greats.
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