Krazy: George Herriman, A Life in Black and White  is out now!  Sign up on Michael's mailing list for special Krazy events!

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January 30, 2017 By Michael Tisserand

KRAZY on the road!

KRAZY hits the snowy Midwest this month! In addition to the events listed below, Michael Tisserand will be appearing at the lovely Next Page Books in Cedar Rapids, at 5 pm Wednesday, February 8.

Filed Under: Events

January 13, 2017 By Michael Tisserand

Farewell to a Mutt

 

 

A listing of President Barack Obama’s statements about race might start with his campaign speech “A More Perfect Union,” when the self-described son of a “black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas” described how the idea that this nation is greater than the sum of its parts is seared into his genetic makeup.

During the presidency, there were the elegant “Remarks by the President on Trayvon Martin,” when Obama imagined aloud how the slain Martin might have been his son, and the deeply felt eulogy for the Reverend Clementa C. Pinckney, slain during the South Carolina church shooting.

Yet history should not neglect the more offhand comment delivered in late 2008 when then President-elect Obama was chatting with reporters about the family’s search for a family pet. At the time, the Obamas were considering adopting a dog from an animal shelter — although, citing Malia Obama’s allergies, they accepted a Portuguese Water Dog from Senator Ted Kennedy.

Said Obama: “There are a number of breeds that are hypoallergenic. On the other hand, our preference would be to get a shelter dog, but, obviously, a lot of shelter dogs are mutts like me.”

Before “mutt” came to mean a mixed-breed dog, it was short for “muttonhead,” which, like the older “sheep’s head,” was an insult meaning an unintelligent person. This was how newspaper readers of the comic Mutt and Jeff would have understood the word.

But Obama didn’t mean that he was a muttonhead. He meant he was a mixed-breed. It was for this reason that cartoonist Patrick McDonnell, a champion of animal shelters, celebrated the statement in his Mutts comic strip, with his canine character “Earl” excitedly announcing that “The president-elect said he was a ‘mutt’ like me!”

It is difficult to remember it now, but for a brief time, Obama suggested a different way to talk about race. In doing so, Obama was following the lead of another mutt — a mutt-poet, actually – named George Herriman.

Herriman — the cartoonist whose character Krazy Kat influenced cartoon animals from Mickey Mouse to Snoopy to Calvin’s Hobbes — was a mixed-race man from New Orleans. Growing up before the turn of the twentieth century in frontier Los Angeles, Herriman and his family self-identified, or “passed,” as white. His parents appear to have chosen this path so that their children might have a good school and a more hopeful future. Yet Herriman’s own feelings about this experience would flood into his cartoon work.

Krazy Kat is the story of a black cat who is under siege by a white mouse named Ignatz, who throws bricks at Krazy — bricks that Krazy considers love letters. A canine sheriff named Officer Pupp harbors his own love for Krazy, and hauls Ignatz to jail for his efforts. All this occurs on a sort of primary American landscape: Monument Valley in northern Arizona and southern Utah, the same parcel of Navajo Nation seen in the cinematic westerns of John Ford.

As the bricks fly, Krazy might change color. So might Ignatz. Gender is also in flux. Krazy is neither male nor female — or perhaps both. Herriman once explained this decision in a comic in which Krazy was given a form to fill out and was asked to specify gender, and Krazy didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings.

It is a feeling that well known to those of mixed race and less than certain gender — which someday we might finally understand to mean all of us. Obama is our first black president and should be honored as such. Throughout the years he served, he endured a particular brand of racist hatred. Yet at the same time, we must recognize that the words we use to shoulder such identities are failing us miserably. “Black” itself is a vestige of the “one drop” rule of racial classification, which carries with it the understanding that any heritage stretching back to Africa is a pollutant. And as George Lipsitz has written, “This whiteness is, of course, a delusion, a scientific and cultural fiction and like all racial identities has no valid foundation in biology or anthropology. Whiteness is, however, a social fact, an identity created and continued with all-too-real consequences for the distribution of wealth, prestige, and opportunity.”

Herriman knew this in his bones. He toyed with allegories of race in comics that had Krazy Kat working in a diner, telling Ignatz the coffee was black if he’ll only look under the milk. In a strip that Herriman published in 1918 on semiotics (it’s worth noting here that Herriman frustrated his readers at least as often as he amused them), he staged Krazy Kat and Ignatz at a table:

Krazy: Why is “Lenguage,” “Ignatz”?
Ignatz: “Language” is that we may understand one another.”
Krazy: Is that so?
Ignatz: Yes that’s so.
Krazy:  Can you unda-stend a Finn or a Leplender, or a Oshkosher, huh?
Ignatz: No—
Krazy: Can a Finn, or a Leplender, or a Oshkosher, unda-stend you?
Ignatz: No—
Krazy: Then I would say, lenguage is that that we may mis-unda-stend each udda.

In the waning days of the Obama administration, it seems everyone — the Finns and the Laplanders, and even the good people of Oshkosh — are “mis-unda-stending” each other more than ever. One of many sad outcomes of this past campaign season’s appeals to racism has been the re-hardening of our social identities, a retreat into old positions. For a fleeting time, it seemed as if this country was ready to be led by a President Mutt, overseeing a mixed nation where colors come and go like shadows in a Monument Valley sunset.

But that would have been just Krazy.

– Michael Tisserand

The version of this essay published in The Daily Beast can be found here.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

December 8, 2016 By Michael Tisserand

New Orleans, New Yorick, New Jerza.

Thank you to everyone who came to Octavia Books for the launch of Krazy, and especially to George Herriman’s cousin John Boutté, who memorably shared his great gift of song to start out the Krazy season. For more information on John’s music, please visit www.johnboutte.com.

After an afternoon of Buster Keaton and Krazy Kat in Chalmette, Michael will be bringing Krazy to New York and New Jersey. Hope to see you there!

mikes-tour-2

Filed Under: Uncategorized

December 8, 2016 By Michael Tisserand

Krazy Hits the Road!

Krazy tours the Midwest this February! Hope to see you there!

If you’d like to have Michael speak to your college or organization, please contact him directly at tisserandnola@gmail.com.

 

Filed Under: Uncategorized

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Krazy: George Herriman, A Life in Black and White

 

Krazy: George Herriman, A Life in Black and White won the 2017 Eisner Award for best comics-related book, and was a finalist in both the National Book Critics Circle Awards for Biography and the PEN America/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography. Krazy was also selected as a Kirkus Best Nonfiction Book of 2016 and as one of Vanity Fair‘s “Must-Read Books of the Holiday Season.”

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Krazy interviews, reviews and feature stories

Radio/Podcasts

The Treatment with Elvis Mitchell

Susan Larson’s The Reading Life

The Dinner Party Download

The Leonard Lopate Show

Mark Lynch’s Inquiry

KRVS’ Apres Midi with Judith Meriwether

Newspapers/Magazines/Websites

The New Yorker

The New York Review of Books

The Los Angeles Review of Books

The Chicago Tribune

The Christian Science Monitor

Tampa Bay Times

The New York Times (review)

The New York Times (recommendation)

The Washington Post

The Philadelphia Inquirer

The Seattle Times

The Boston Globe

Gambit

The National Catholic Reporter

The Wall Street Journal

The Minneapolis StarTribune

Classic Esquire

Print Magazine (2016 Best Of List)

The New Orleans Advocate

The Times-Picayune

L.A. Weekly

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Dallas Morning News

Know Louisiana

The Comics Journal Interview, Part One by Paul Tumey

The Comics Journal Interview, Part Two by Paul Tumey

The Comics Journal Review by Eddie Campbell

The American Scholar

Echobase

Garden & Gun (review)

Garden & Gun (interview)

Yesterday’s Papers

OffBeat

My Spilt Milk

Popsmart NOLA

Uptown Messenger

Multiversity Comics

Comics Beat

Advance praise for Krazy:

“Essential reading for comics fans and history buffs, Krazy is a roaring success, providing an indispensable new perspective on turn-of-the-century America.”
— Kirkus (starred review)

“This is a gripping read at the intersection of pop culture and American history.”
— Publisher’s Weekly

“A visionary strip. Who drew it, and wherefrom? Tisserand’s robust research illuminates, without diminishing, the mystery.”
— Roy Blount Jr.

“Michael Tisserand’s lovingly baked brick of a biography is essential for every comics and art lover’s library. Krazy Kat was highly acclaimed as a work of art generations before almost anyone—Herriman included!—thought of putting ‘comics’ and ‘art’ meaningfully into the same sentence. But beyond this book’s obvious urgency for comics lovers, Tisserand conscientiously explores the enigmatic traces of a great artist’s life hidden in plain sight. He follows the diffident and elusive Herriman’s journey through thickly crosshatched surrealist mesas right into the heart of America’s darkness-the color line that shaped and looped through all of Krazy Kat’s other lines to intersect with so much of America’s culture. Zip! Pow!”
— Art Spiegelman

“George Herriman was a poet in a new visual language. As a man, he was an enigma to match his greatest creation, the sublime Krazy Kat. Michael Tisserand has done a masterful job of illuminating this life lived in the shadowy borderlands of racial identity; along the way he also gives a brilliant overview of the golden years of American cartooning. Krazy is a monumental work of biography about a true American genius.”
— Tom Piazza

“An athletic feat of scholarship and an effort of love—like one of Ignatz’s bricks to the head. Tisserand’s immaculately researched and super-readable biography captures the madcap modernist Herriman and the weird America of surreal racial realities and publishing superpowers that shaped his revolutionary art.”
— Hillary Chute

“A remarkable work documenting how one of the most singular achievements in twentieth-century popular culture came to be. Michael Tisserand has dug deep in the archives and examined George Herriman’s work with ingenuity and insight, emerging with a riveting narrative that wears its impressive scholarship with lightness and grace. Especially revelatory is Tisserand’s probing account of how Herriman negotiated—through Krazy Kat and his other work—the contentiousness and contradictions of race in America.”
— Ben Yagoda

“Krazy is crazy good—a powerful and endlessly entertaining treatment of one of our most original artists. Michael Tisserand has given us a book as bold, brilliant, and beautiful as Herriman’s own body of work. This will surely stand as the definitive biography, one that will be read for generations to come.”
— Jonathan Eig

“For decades I’ve been hoping for a new, experimental African-American voice to emerge in the language of comics, but Michael Tisserand’s Krazy draws back the curtain on the one who’s been with us all along. A true archeological dig through the details of George Herriman’s Creole origins and the racial bigotry his family faced in Louisiana before reinventing themselves in California as white, Krazy reconnects the leads of the greatest comic strip ever to its tragic source, illuminating not only its poetic complexities, but also allowing it to burn as brightly as all of the great art of the twentieth century. Tisserand’s irresistible, rollicking re-creation of the insane world of early newspapering, the unsettled West, and especially our unsettling country proves George Herriman’s individual lyrical voice—an equal, I think, of Baldwin’s, Ellison’s, and Angelou’s—was really asking the saddest single question of all: Why do they hate us so much?”
— Chris Ware

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