page_title: George Herriman
section_title: 1910–1922: New York again, and Krazy Kat
hierarchical_section_title: George Herriman / Personal history / 1910–1922: New York again, and Krazy Kat
caption_attribution_description: English: Daily Krazy Kat comic strip by George Herriman for December 24, 1917. Krazy kisses a sleeping Ignatz, who then dreams of angels.
context_page_description: George Joseph Herriman was an American cartoonist best known for the comic strip Krazy Kat. More influential than popular, Krazy Kat had an appreciative audience among those in the arts. Gilbert Seldes' article "The Krazy Kat Who Walks by Himself" was the earliest example of a critic from the high arts giving serious attention to a comic strip. The Comics Journal placed the strip first on its list of the greatest comics of the 20th century. Herriman's work has been a primary influence on cartoonists such as Will Eisner, Charles M. Schulz, Robert Crumb, Art Spiegelman, Bill Watterson, and Chris Ware.
  Herriman was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, to mixed-race Creole parents, and grew up in Los Angeles. 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—a medium then in its infancy—and drew a variety of strips until he introduced his most famous character, Krazy Kat, in his strip The Dingbat Family in 1910. A Krazy Kat daily strip began in 1913, and from 1916 the strip also appeared on Sundays.
context_section_description: In 1910, the sports editor of the New York Evening Journal called Herriman back to New York to cover for Tad Dorgan who was in San Francisco covering the "Fight of the Century" between Jack Johnson and Jim Jeffries.  Six days after arriving in New York, Herriman began The Dingbat Family, starring E. Pluribus Dingbat and his family.  Herriman used typed lettering on the strip on July 26, 1910, but quickly went back to hand-lettering. On August 10, 1910, Herriman retitled the strip The Family Upstairs. The original title return after the strip of November 15, 1911, when the Dingbats' building was demolished to make room for a department store and they and their upstairs nemeses parted paths.
  Critics do not regard the strip highly, but it provided the vehicle for a fruitful situation: in the July 26 episode, a mouse threw a brick at the family cat—called "Kat"—which hit the cat on the head.  The antics of this mouse and "Kat" continued to appear in the bottom portion of The Dingbat Family.  Herriman said he did this "to fill up the waste space".  About a month after its first appearance, the "Kat" crept up on the sleeping mouse and kissed it loudly.  The mouse awoke saying, "I dreamed an angel kissed me", while the "Kat" crept away and said, "Sweet thing".
  The gender of "Kat" was unclear from the start.  Herriman experimented with a decision about the character's gender, but it remained ambiguous and he would refer to "Kat" as "he" or "she" as he saw fit. Herriman incorporated unusual details into the mini-strip's backgrounds—cacti, pagodas, fanciful vegetation, or anything else that struck his fancy; this became a signature of the later Krazy Kat strip.  The cast grew and soon included the mainstay character Bull Pupp and characters from the Gooseberry Sprigg strip.  The strip's characters, relations and situations grew organically during its lifetime, encouraged by Herriman's colleagues.
  The cat-and-mouse substrip was gaining in popularity; instead of filling up space in the bottom of The Dingbat Family's panels, it began to occupy a tier of panels of its own. In July 1912, while Herriman had the Dingbats on vacation, Krazy Kat and Ignatz Mouse took over the strip, which was retitled Krazy Kat and I. Mouse for the duration.  On October 28, 1913, Krazy Kat debuted as an independent strip on the daily comics page.
  During the first few years of publication, Krazy Kat's humor changed from slapstick to a more vaudevillian kind.  The shifting backgrounds became increasingly bizarre, presaging things to come.  The strip expanded to a full-page black-and-white Sunday strip on April 23, 1916.  Herriman made full use of his imagination and used the whole page in the strip's layout.  The strips were unlike anything else on the comics page; spontaneous, formally daring, yet impeccably composed.
  Herriman visited Monument Valley in Arizona and similar places in New Mexico and southern Utah, and incorporated the distinct forms of the desert landscape into his strips. The Enchanted Mesa of New Mexico first appeared in Krazy Kat in the summer of 1916.  Herriman may have visited after reading an article by Theodore Roosevelt in 1913, but he may have gone earlier—the desert Coconino County, Arizona, that became the backdrop to Krazy Kat was first mentioned in a 1911 The Dingbat Family strip, though the real Coconino County was located further southwest than Herriman's fanciful version.
  The Dingbat Family finished in 1916 and was replaced by Baron Bean's debut the next day.  The strip's title character, The Baron, was an impoverished English nobleman, a tramp inspired by Charles Dickens and Charlie Chaplin.  He and his valet Grimes would plot ways to get by.  Herriman later introduced the main characters' wives, and after a run as a domestic strip, with occasional appearances of characters from Krazy Kat's world, it ended in January 1919.  It was replaced the next day by Now Listen Mabel, which was about a young man courting a young woman; he would be caught in a compromising situation, which he would try to explain away with "Now listen Mab
caption: Krazy Kat daily strip — Krazy Kat kisses a sleeping Ignatz Mouse, who then dreams of cupids. (December 24, 1917)
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