Word: herriman
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Your article on George Herriman (TIME, May 8) is a fine tribute to a man who in his chosen field had no peer...
...Herriman was first and foremost an imaginative artist whose charming and sometimes delightfully wacky comedy . . . symbolized a kind of reality one could not escape. Even when Herriman propagandized ... he was unique and wholly captivating: the introduction into his strip of a lonesome dogie who complained of "Old Sir Taxy-Waxy" and all he did to him at the time Hearst so loudly complained of taxation in California...
When, some 20 years ago, the intellectuals discovered Herriman, Krazy Kat was compared 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...
...Herriman did not hear the cries of high critical approval. He remained effortlessly unpretentious, indestructibly innocent...
Usually, when the creator of a popular comic strip dies-or even before-another man can understudy him. But when George Herriman died, King Features announced no such plan. Herriman left a backlog of Krazy Kat which will keep the strip running till about the middle of June. When that is over, a unique and endearing form of art and humor will have left the world...