Word: comic
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...home near Hollywood last week, the gentlest, most poetic of U.S. popular artists laid down his pen at last. George Herriman, 63, creator of the sovereign comic strip, Krazy Kat, died after a long illness. Hundreds of thousands of readers, who knew the love-daft Kat and his curious companions as well as they knew their own dreams, knew little or nothing of their inventor. But as friends and colleagues talked of this modest little man, as he never on earth would have talked of himself, a figure of almost Franciscan sweetness emerged. "If ever there was a saint...
Willie Was Right. Herriman wandered into newspaper cartooning because a fall from a scaffold made house painting too strenuous. He wandered into his greatest comic creations because an office boy named Willie, amused by a casually drawn cat & mouse playing marbles, suggested that Herriman flatly reverse the traditional cat-&-mouse relationship. Once Krazy Kat had made Herriman's fortune (around 1922), he left Manhattan, settled down in the West. For the past 22 years he lived near Hollywood. After his wife's death a decade ago in an automobile accident, he stayed much at home with his daughter...
Poker and Solitude. He was rather a dandy, in a loud way. His favorite sport was poker. He could be a wonderfully entertaining host. William Randolph Hearst loved him. His own close friends were chiefly comic-strip artists - Hershfield, Ru dolph Dirks (The Captain and the Kids}, Jim Swinnerton (Little Jimmy), the late TAD Dorgan (Indoor Sports). His best friend was the late H. M. (Beanny) Walker, Our Gang comedies director...
...throw, while Dogberryish Offisa Pupp, the stolidly distraught embodiment of the Law, tries, and forever fails, to stop the brick. The predicament of the Kat, Ignatz and the Pupp is perhaps the century's wisest, certainly its gayest, fable of the Problem of Evil. Nevertheless, Herriman's comic strip remained simple, popular art whose purpose was to make simple people laugh...
...with Don Quixote and with Pan, Ignatz with Sancho Panza and Lucifer, their creator with Anatole France, the German Expressionists, Charles Dickens. Herriman was praised as draftsman, colorist, creator of magical characters, fantastic inventor, and almost as much-but not perhaps enough-as a writer. In many respects his comic commentary resembles that of Joyce in Finnegans Wake, and Joyce might well have saluted the Herriman line: "Just imegin having your 'ectospasm' running around, William and Nilliam, among the unlimitless etha-golla, it's imbillivibil...