thecomicskingdom:

George Herriman was born in New Orleans, of mixed Creole parentage, in 1880.  Like many people of Black ancestry living in the southern part of the US, his family moved to California to escape the oppression of Jim Crow laws. 

Herriman began his career as a cartoonist while living in Los Angeles, but he soon moved to New York, where he also painted carnival billboards and sometimes worked as an amusement barker at Coney Island.    

His first repeating comic character appeared 1901.  Musical Mose focused on the exploits of Mose, a black musician struggling to find work. 

(scan originally from Stripper’s Guide)

Mose dealt with race more explicitly than much of Herriman’s later work, though issues of race, ethnicity, class, and identity were often an undercurrent of his cartoons throughout his career.  Even though Herriman kept his racial heritage under wraps (literally, some say, by wearing a hat to cover his hair) during his life, Creole culture and language played an enormous role in his work, and racial identity and experience informed many of the stories he told in comics over the years.  

While Mose only ran very briefly, Herriman created a number of comic strips over the years before beginning a series called The Dingbat Family in 1910.  

(scans of The Dingbat Family from IgnatzMouse.net)

In The Dingbat Family, (which was renamed to The Family Upstairs, and then re-renamed to The Dingbat Family later on), the exploits of their family cat, Krazy, and Ignatz, the mouse who lived in their apartment, could be seen in the lower edge of the comic strip, which Herriman saw as a filler to use up the extra space.   

On Tuesday, August 9, 1910, Ignatz threw a brick at Krazy for the first time:

By 1913, Ignatz and Krazy would leave the Dingbats behind for their own strip, which would become one of the most influential and beloved comics of all time, Krazy Kat.  

Here’s a series of Krazy Kat comic strips from this week in 1944, 72 years ago.  George Herriman would pass away in April of that year, leaving us with one of the richest legacies in comics history.

You can find more of Herriman’s work every day on Comics Kingdom