Posts
... And Vintage Promotional Art, Bio, Photos
of George Herriman
by Rick Marschall
Recent posts commenced two threads: material from a rare 1917 promotion book for William Randolph Hearst's International Feature Service, one of several syndicate operations under the umbrella of the newly organized King Features. We shared photos and bios of Tom McNamara ("Us Boys"), the cartoonist whose copy we worked from; and of Rudolph Block (Bruno Lessing), the guiding force -- eminence grise, by much evidence -- behind the first 20 years of Hearst's Sunday funnies.
In this post, Yesterday's Papers will share the book's pages devoted to George Herriman. A photograph of the pensive cartoonist, and special art created for the book. He is credited in the text as the creator of Baron Bean, the daily strip that was separate from Krazy Kat -- starring human characters; never a crossover; never appearing in color supplements. It was a wonderful strip, as most of Herriman's creations were, of course, about a latter-day Don Quixote and Sancho Panza pair: delusional fellows drifting in, and further in, to absurd situations. As with all of Herriman's creations, comic obsessions fueled the premises of the daily strip.
I offer apologies -- not that I had anything to do with it -- for the promotional copy the accompanied the artwork. It is more insipid than third-rate public-relations blather. And worse yet, the Hearst writer (perhaps John P Medbury, or K C Beaton, or Jack Lait, or a lesser light) fashioned the inanities in rhyme. Little that would have informed a student of the day... and certainly not scholars of our day.
The other piece is from 11 years later, from a elegantly designed and produced book touting the impressive stable of talent that could be accessed by subscriptions to the New York Journal. The "chief" it highlights is not Block but the Journal's editor William A Curley (who, as an editor in Chicago, had inspired characters in The Front Page) and Hearst's principal editorial writer Arthur Brisbane. The book appears to be a bragging-piece, perhaps issued for distribution at the annual American Newspaper Editors Association (ANPA) convention in New York. "The Journal has twice the circulation of its nearest evening-paper competitor..."; etc.
It is to be noticed that in each photograph of George Herriman he wore his iconic hat. It was once supposed, after his death, that he was embarrassed by kinky hair, leading to a belief that he was partly Black. Some years ago I shared with the comic community a piece of "news" debunking that assumption. The political cartoonist Karl Hubenthal, who knew Herriman, was surprised at that idea, and laughed as he told me that Herriman neither said nor hinted at such a thing, but was rather concerned to conceal, when he could, a wen -- a growth or sebacious cyst on his head that he could not have removed. (And in fact I own several photo portraits of Herriman without a hat.)
I love the fact that as early as 1928, Krazy Kat was already being referred to as "immortal." Surely it is.
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Disappointed Rick by your comments about Herriman’s ‘race’ and his fear of his “nappy” hair being apocryphal. It really isn’t there are many easily accessible images of George without his hat(s) and revealing no such ‘cysts’ and indeed revealing his hair that may have haunted him hence his trying to disguise his mixed race origins at the time hiding in plain sight as ‘The Greek’ as such was his nomenclature amongst pals and his heritage now is totally accepted and is well documented
ReplyDeleteYou ought to be disappointed by your bad punctuation and lack of first-person pronouns. I can wonder why I wrote Partly Black and Kinky Hair and you translated to "race" and "nappy;" what was wrong with my terms? Nevertheless, we know that my friend Michael Tisserand did yoeman's work, digging into Herriman's ancestry. I wonder whether the issue was prompted by some folks' obsession to prove that African blood coursed through his veins. Since it was an issue when I was a kid ('60s) and its reference-clues went back in print the '40s, I dug a little bit too. Not to birth records as Michael did (but old cartoonists who knew Herriman told me he said that in New Orleans, families with swarthy skin -- Mediterraneans, for instance -- could be registered as "colored." More dispositive were facts like the number of Blacks characters, depicted as per the era's stereotypes, that Herriman drew. And I was blessed to know cartoonists who knew Herriman -- all of whom totally disbelieved Herriman was part Black, by knowledge, observation, or his mention: Harry Hershfield, Rube Goldberg, Jimmy Swinnerton, I think Rudy Dirks or at any event his son John. I inherited many photographs and memorabilia from get-togethers at the Wetherill's; and letters and photos (some-close-up studio portraits) (without a hat) from Gretchen Swinnerton, whom George courted; and as I said in my post, Karl Hubenthal. When Karl was young with Hearst in LA, Herriman was an old-timer... but got to know him well. He was astonished and amused at the mixed-race legend. It was the first time I had a heard of a "wen," but he totally discounted any other story.
ReplyDeleteYou are scolding me as a historian because I dissent from "totally accepted" views, which they obviously are not, and well documented -- which I tell you does not equate to "definitively" documented. And do you realize how silly your logic is -- someone who knew Herriman well says he chose to avoid attention to his wen on the back of his head; and you ask about photos of... the back of his head?