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Krazy: George Herriman, A Life in Black and White is now on the shelves of better bookstores everywhere! Sign up on Michael’s mailing list for special Krazy events!

Krazy has been named a finalist in both the National Book Critics Circle Awards for Biography and the PEN America/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography! Krazy also has been selected as a Kirkus Best Nonfiction Book of 2016 and as one of Vanity Fair‘s “Must-Read Books of the Holiday Season”!

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)

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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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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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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