Word: herriman
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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...
...Herriman believed that animals are superior to human beings. He would never ride a horse. He tried to be a vegetarian, had to give it up when he became too weak. To the end of his life nearly all his ration points for meat went to satisfy the sleek gang of stray dogs and cats he took care...
...loved solitude, would often sit among people for hours without saying a word. The one thing Herriman could always talk about fluently and without shyness was Krazy...
Minor Master. Herriman was crazy about Krazy Kat. In all his years of inti macy with him, he never got tired of the Kat. In Herriman's 30-odd years of work - always wearing his hat and usually improvising fresh from the pen - he must have drawn something like 1,500 full-page Kats and 10,000 strips. An amazing number of them are the keenest, dizziest kind of inspiration. Wrote Critic Gilbert Seldes of Herriman's work 20 years ago: "In the second order of the world's art it is superbly first rate...
Problem of Evil. For Herriman's creatures, neither animal nor human, the scratchy, tersely subtle drawing, the hog-Elizabethan talk and supralunar world of Krazy Kat were entirely his own - a new private universe of fantasy, irony, weird characterization, odd beauty. It looks as simple as daylight, this illimitably varied, unchanging little comedy about the noble-souled, loony, amorous Kat who loves to have his bean creased by the brick that malicious Ignatz Mouse loves to throw, while Dogberryish Offisa Pupp, the stolidly distraught embodiment of the Law, tries, and forever fails, to stop the brick. The predicament...