Krazy Kat

weird I have been a Krazy Kat fan since I was a kid, have read tons of collections, seen photos of him, etc. and yet I had never realized before yesterday that he was black.

in the running for the NBA - http://www.nationalbook.org/nba2010_p_youn.html

more details to dig into (& more fun) than John Ashberry's fantasia on Henry Darger, but if you are a big Krazy fan you will definitely enjoy this book regardless of your orientation concerning modern poetry

gah, such a weird combo of loudmouth bullshit and intelligent discussion upthread (was thinking the same after reading that old erykah badu thread on ILM). ilx these days seems so much more civilized, in ways both good and bad. less dumbass flexing, but a lot less unguarded intellectual exploration, too.

particular incensed by ethan's, "i can't stand this wave of shitty indie cartoonists endorsing to their adoring fans which old comics are cool to like..." so fucking myopic and self-centered. i grew up with crazy kat cuz my stepdad (a cartoonist in his heart) had adored herriman all his life. of all the shit he collected, it was the crazy cat stuff that, for teenage me, resonated most immediately and intensely. i think that if you've spent any portion of your life putting pen to paper in hopes of stealing images from other planets, then you can't help but love what herriman did. has nothing to do with what's "cool to like" or whatever. sometimes people just love things, you know?

particularLY

monica youn book sounds intriguing. thanks for the tip MP, will look for it this afternoon...

I don't miss ethan a bit

xp

or momus

i interviewed youn for an article about a KK-related reading she was giving at my university several years ago. i remember nothing about what she was like on the phone (nice, i guess, otherwise i'd remember), but the poetry was decent.

weird I have been a Krazy Kat fan since I was a kid, have read tons of collections, seen photos of him, etc. and yet I had never realized before yesterday that he was black.

You've seen photos of a comic strip character?

he means George Herriman, the creator of Krazy Kat.

and it was in something famously shitty indie cartoonist Bill Watterson wrote that I first heard about Krazy Kat. Though I didn't get to read much of it until Ware and Fantagraphics reissued them, so thank god for indie comics i say.

Ah, okay. Now that I think of it, I remember reading an article about Herriman's racial identity... IIRC he was a light-skinned black man and was able to pass as white for most of his adult life.

(x-post)

[/Tuomas]

Michael Tisserand is working on a book about Herriman's race, which is a complex subject I gather. More here: http://dailycartoonist.com/index.php/2010/10/15/festival-of-cartoon-art-keynote-on-george-herriman/

Yeah, according to this article it didn't even become common knowledge his parents were "colored" until 1971:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/3666365/Herriman-Cartoonist-who-equalled-Cervantes.html

weird I have been a Krazy Kat fan since I was a kid, have read tons of collections, seen photos of him, etc. and yet I had never realized before yesterday that he was black

After all these posts I figure out that you mean George Herriman was black. I thought you meant Krazy was. I just thought I'd whistle past that one. I mean, I was surprised you were this comfy out & out calling Krazy a "he"! Oh, me.

i know monica and heard a reading of that book with matmos performing
dunno if i can recommend the poetry? the music was awesome
i think herriman is generally thought of as mestizo or black depending on what point you're trying to make.

Herriman always seemed like a very mysterious guy to me. I knew he was Creole before this thread but I'm not sure where I learned that.

stonar

all that "tiger tea" i mean really

What else is good in the way that Krazy Kat is?

lionel fyninger's work?

ok...who is that?

I just want to say that I reread my Krazy Kat anthology book a couple months ago and I grew a new found appreciation for Herriman's works. The black and white era has some great art. It's still not a very funny strip (like how Tom & Jerry never had any real laughs for me) but it's a hell of a lot better than Tom and Jerry and much more creative

What else is good in the way that Krazy Kat is?

― Pizzataco Five (admrl), Thursday, September 1, 2011 4:47 PM (11 minutes ago)

I know there are dissenters on ilx, but Richard Thompson's "Cul de Sac".
http://www.gocomics.com/culdesac/

Martin Skidmore loved Krazy Kat, as he says above, and wrote a long and thoughtful piece on Herriman and Modernism late last year, at FA. There's things in it I wanted to argue about with him, a bit, but of course he became ill round about then, and somehow after that there was never the time :(

cliff sterrett's polly and her pals is prob the closest contemporary strip to herriman's style, tho the setting is v. different:

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_lPBRHZBGm-M/SfCV8l5Y-RI/AAAAAAAAA98/qq5cp_iDRPk/s400/sterett_water.gif

pogo by walt kelly has some of the same linguistic play as herriman, tho' it is v. deeply embedded in then-contemporary political satire. fantagraphics will start issuing a complete Pogo later on in the year.

I'm tempted to say Gasoline Alley/Walt & Skeezix after about Year 2.

cartoonistst had much more real estate in the paper in those days

http://i.imgur.com/pj6h1.jpg

adamrl, have you seen the Dan Nadel-edited anthology Art Out of Time: Unknown Comics Visionaries, 1900-1969? That has a nice selection of obscure and often deeply strange early American comic strip, inc a generous slice of a strip called White Boy by Garrett Price (otherwise only found in the similarly excellent Smithsonian Anthology of American Newspaper Strips). Again, to my mind that has some of the same 'feel' as Krazy Kat:

http://lambiek.net/artists/p/price_garrett/price_whiteboy2.jpg

Smithsonian Anthology of American Newspaper Strips)

I had this as a kid!

well you were a very lucky lil latham

there's also the Smithsonian Anthology of Comic Books, which has things like Krigstein's 'Master Race', as reviewed here by Martin Skidmore

http://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2008/09/comics-a-beginners-guide-crimesuspense-thrillers/

xpost-ish:

I picked up The Smithsonian Collection Of Newspaper Comics last weekend for three dollars, beating out my last recordholder for bargain hunting: Kramers Ergot #5 (also three dollars).

Jeez louise, it is a marvel.

yeah i had both of those books as a kid. also COMIX a History of comic books in america, which was dope.

and the Penguin book of comics, another must have.

these are all great great choices for anyone who wants to read more classic comic strips (the two smithsonian books changed my life) but it's interesting that none of them are really much like krazy kat. herriman really is totally sui generis.

I had never heard of lionel fyninger till I went to the Whitney the other day to see the Cory Archangel show and checked out the rest. Lionel's work blew me away. It predates Krazy Kat and Polly and Her Pals (and a lot of other stuff) right? So if you want to know how all kinds of german expressionist modern artwork influences emerged in the american comic strip, maybe we should look at the german expressionist artist who dabbled in american comic strips near their birth? Some of it was very Little Nemo, but it had a more surreal/expressionist Krazy Kat quality.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/fantagraphics/412818782/in/photostream/

I was able to get a copy of the Feininger in the mid-90s from (I think) Bud Plant. Really impressive and odd. It's amazing to look at som nay of those early strips by all sorts of people - before the form was codified it seemed so open to anything. Sure helped to have full pages, but in general the variation is incredible.

i think i have a spare copy of the complete feininger comics book if anyone wants to buy it from me.

I would if I had any money.

Just to return to Feininger for a moment. The history confuses me a bit. Born in New York. Moved to Germany. Started doing political stuff in germany, then comic strips that appeared in american newspapers. Then he was a major player in expressionism, an instructor at Bauhaus. Then after being declared "degenerate" by the Nazi's he moved to NY where he continued to paint. He made a few wooden models for a german toy train company that weren't produced, but kept making them, and one of the best parts of the exhibit at the Whitney is the huge collection of wooden toys he made for his family over 40 years. Trains, little train depots, tiny people that look like they're right out of an early comic strip. Pretty great.

the last strip ran 70 years ago today. can't find it online, but if you've never seen it it's one of the eeriest and most poignant endings to any comic i've ever seen.

I've been slowly making my way through the Sundays chronologically over the past few years but I couldn't resist peeking at the last one and yeah, it's pretty damn eerie! Wish it was online...

Huh, that is pretty eerie/poignant -- kind of follows from the one the week before as well.

found it:

https://c2.staticflickr.com/4/3229/2704014905_1fb85b89c1.jpg