Customer Service Wolf

Three installments from Anne Barnetson's droll comic about the adventures of a lupine bookshop clerk. Having served in that role for many years in an earlier phase of my life I can vouch for its essential accuracy.

Dante on the BRT

His face each downward held; their mouth the cold,
Their eyes express'd the dolour of their heart.

"B.R.T.'s Icy Inferno" (cropped version), an undated original drawing by cartoonist Winsor McCay, inscribed with lines from H. F. Cary's translation of Inferno XXXII. The Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company went belly-up in 1919, a year after the Malbone Street Wreck killed scores of passengers, and the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum believes that the drawing is from the first decade of the twentieth century.

For the New Year

From George Herriman's Krazy Kat, April 23, 1921. Click to enlarge the full strip below.

Source: the Comic Strip Library.

Krazy, alone

I'm not sure of the origin of this panel, which I found on Tumblr with no further credit given. Herriman sprinkled a fair amount of Spanish into Krazy Kat, but the lettering doesn't appear to be his style, so I suspect it's taken from a Spanish-language translation. Spanish adjectives indicate gender, so here the gender-fluid Krazy is unambiguously male. Some rocks in the background.

From the Archives: Krazy Kat

I dust off this piece, which I wrote more than fifteen years ago, in celebration of Michael Tisserand's splendid new biography, Krazy: George Herriman, A Life in Black and White. I've revised a few things slightly to take Tisserand's research into account (but any remaining errors are mine). An excellent two-part Comics Journal interview with Tisserand can be found here and here.

George Herriman was born in New Orleans on 22 August 1880. Like his younger contemporary Ferdinand Joseph LaMothe — better known as Jelly Roll Morton — Herriman was a New Orleans Creole, descended from the city's particular blending of French, Spanish, and African ancestries. Unlike Morton, Herriman left the city at an early age, when his parents moved to Los Angeles, possibly in search of an environment in which the family's ancestry could more easily be erased. From then on the Herrimans silently "passed as white." George Herriman tended to keep his hat on, indoors or out, apparently to conceal his “kinky” hair.

Herriman eventually moved to New York City, where the art of the newspaper cartoon was having its great flowering. In the pages of the city's furiously competing newspapers the work of Winsor McCay, F. W. Outcault, and other brilliant artists had begun to appear, and Herriman soon joined their number. Even in his early strips, with names like Professor Otto and His Auto and Acrobatic Archie, there's no mistaking the originality of his storylines or the excellence of his draftsmanship, and if Herriman's career had ended in, say, 1910, he'd be counted as one of the more interesting cartoonists of the day. But while the careers of some of his peers — such as the prodigiously gifted McCay — would show a gradual decline in originality and technique, Herriman was poised to take a great leap ahead by creating Krazy Kat, the sublime and unaccountable masterpiece of American comic art, which somehow managed to preserve its freshness, wit, and uniqueness from its origins in 1910-1913 until Herriman died, in 1944, with unfinished strips still on his drawing table.

Appropriately, Krazy Kat wasn't really born (such creations exist ab aeterno, waiting to be summoned) but gradually evolved out of the margins of Herriman's other work. According to Krazy Kat: The Comic Art of George Herriman, compiled by Patrick McDonnell, Karen O'Connell, and Georgia Riley de Havenon, the first “beaning” of Kat by Mouse appeared in the foreground of Herriman's strip The Dingbat Family on 26 July 1910, silently upstaging the domestic goings-on behind them. Within a few months the still-rudimentary sketches in the bottom of the panels had been separated into a tiny, parallel strip of their own, providing a kind of commentary on and counterpoint to the main action above. Not until 28 October 1913 did Krazy Kat become a separate feature; although Herriman would continue to draw a number of other strips for years, it was now Krazy Kat which would be forever associated with his name.

So what was it that made Krazy so special? It's premise could hardly be simpler, or — seemingly — less promising. Krazy Kat loves Ignatz Mouse, who for his part loathes the cat, whom he regularly rewards with a beaning with a well-aimed brick. The beanings don't lessen Krazy's affection a whit — in fact Krazy takes the brick as a token of love. Officer (or “Offissa”) Pupp, the third member of the triangle, faithfully dedicates himself to the protection of Krazy's noggin, dutifully hauling Ignatz off to jail to prevent or to punish Ignatz's crime. Such a relatively fixed, repeated plotline was not unusual; McCay's brilliant Little Nemo, as visually ambitious as it was, invariably ended with its namesake tumbling back to his bed, crying out for his parents. (Maurice Sendak's In The Night Kitchen, an affectionate homage to McCay, borrows the storyline.) And while Herriman varied the outcome subtly now and then, and sometimes dispensed with the bricking altogether, the same basic structure remained in place for more than thirty years.

What made Krazy Kat distinct was a combination of things. First, there was Herriman's seemingly limitless ability to riff, to invent permutations, extensions, and wrinkles on his theme, and to work into the strip endless gleanings from 20th-century American life. The characters (especially Krazy) speak in an inimitable patois drawn from slang, Brooklynese (“Dissiving” for “deserving”), Yinglish (“Dahlink”), Spanish and French, perhaps the New Orleans dialect called “Yat,” highfalutin jargon — often mispronounced or misused — (“cerulean,” “purveyor,” “somniferous,” “obstikil dillusion”), invented words (“windage,” “adenoiding”), and whatever else filtered into Herriman's ear or fancy. (Herriman's first language, interestingly, was apparently French.) Of course using dialect has been a staple of American comedy since at least Mark Twain, and has often been used to define social distance. There's no condescension or mockery in Krazy Kat's use of dialect, however; on the contrary the strip is a monument to Herriman's enduring fascination with and affection for the mingling voices and possibilities of the mongrel American vernacular. Herriman, like Joyce, was an artist who painted with voices, accents, and neologisms.

Then there's the curious indeterminateness of the strips. Herriman's characters enact their tiny dramas against the stark, surreal moonscape of “Coconino County,” based on Herriman's beloved American Southwest, which he visited often. From frame to frame mushrooms, buttes, pyramids, castles, and trees drift in and out behind the characters, with no attempt at continuity or consistency. Even the gender of the hero(ine) is curiously undefined. Krazy is generally (but not consistently) referred to in the strip as “he,” yet seems to behave as a female in relation to the male Ignatz. When asked about this, Herriman characteristically said he didn't know. In the fanciful freedom of a cartoon strip, something as apparently fundamental as the question of a character's gender could be left blithely unsettled, drifting now one way, now another.

It's tempting (and not new) to try to connect Herriman's casualness about landscape, dialect, and gender with the ambiguousness of his own ethnic background. What evidence there is suggests that Herriman was aware that he had some African-American ancestors and largely kept the fact to himself, not a surprising choice given the personal and professional restrictions endured by African-Americans in his time. It's more than likely that, under the circumstances, Herriman wouldn't have received major newspaper distribution if he had been publicly "outed" as an African-American. To some, no doubt, Herriman's “passing” is dishonest, but given the absurdity of the rigid racial categories then enforced in much of the country, under which “one drop of blood” from an African ancestor was sufficient to distinguish “black” from “white,” who is to say that Herriman's refusal to let someone else define his “race” was the wrong choice? Did Herriman, in his strips, summon the spirit of a more relaxed and fluid conception of American identity?

In the end there simply isn't any accounting for Krazy Kat. A creation so generous, so uncorrupted, so perfectly simple and so infinitely convoluted, should, by logic, never have been able to exist at all, much less survive in the newspapers for more than thirty years. That it did is in part a tribute to William Randolph Hearst, who, whatever his other sins, loved cartoons; in part a tribute to American audiences, who just possibly weren't as dumb as one might think; but most of all it's a tribute to Herriman, who deserves the last word. In 1917 he drew a strip in which Krazy comes upon a ouija board lying on the ground. Told that it divines who one's friends or enemies are, Krazy asks the board “Weeja, weeja, who is it I got for a 'enemies'?” and the board, naturally, spells out I—G—N—A—T—Z. Enraged at this slander, Krazy stomps on the board and walks off in a huff. Ignatz then happens along, finds the mangled board, which turns out to have been his, and correctly assumes that Krazy must be responsible for its destruction. Inevitably, Ignatz's brick strikes Krazy, who then exclaims: “See!! Didn't I tell you he was my friend? That 'Weeja' is a fibba!!!” Herriman ends the strip by addressing the spirits from the otherworld:

“You have written truth, you friends of the 'shadows', yet be not harsh with 'Krazy'. He is but a shadow himself, caught in the web of this mortal skein. We call him 'Cat', we call him 'Crazy' yet he is neither. At some time will he ride away to you, people of the twilight, his password will be the echoes of a vesper bell, his coach, a zephyr from the west. Forgive him, for you will understand him no better than we who linger on this side of the pale.”

Update: Thanks to the good offices and enthusiasm of A Nice Slice of Totoro Shiru, this post is now également disponible en français! Tororo notes that a new multi-volume French translation of Krazy Kat has just been issued, and I'll bet Krazy and the gang are tickled pink about that.

Winsor McCay's Natural History

All of the Little Nemo pages below are from the collections of the Comic Strip Library. Click through the images for the original full-sized versions.




The last pair of images have occasioned rumors about McCay's possible interest in hallucinogenic plants and fungi.

Winsor McCay (II): Unreal City

McCay's work had its limitations. His dialogue is, for the most part, utterly lifeless, and displays none of the dazzling wordplay and pitch-perfect ear for the rich variety of American dialects displayed by his contemporary George Herriman, the brilliant creator of Krazy Kat. And there's no getting around the unfortunate racial stereotype represented by Nemo's sidekick Impie, who with his grass skirt, grunting gibberish, and apelike features actually predated Little Nemo, having first appeared, with his fellows, in McCay's early feature A Tale of the Jungle Imps. Some of the thematic material he worked into the strip -- the dragons, princesses, beasts, and savages -- was drawn from the stock situations and characters of adventure and fantasy stories, even if it's true that later creators (notably Walt Disney) would in their turn draw heavily on McCay for inspiration. Little Nemo debuted just a few years after the first Oz stories, and at its weakest it has some of the same preciousness without any of Baum's talent for spinning out a sustained and coherent narrative. But for imaginative daring, and above all for the originality and vitality of his artwork, McCay had few peers. At his best he leaves clichés and stereotypes behind and brings us into a world that is entirely his own.



The above strip is particularly interesting both for what it is and what it isn't. The surreal menace of buildings that sprout legs and chase the children is perhaps not completely unprecedented (one thinks of Baba Yaga and her house with chicken legs in Russian folklore), but it's unexpected and uncanny nonetheless, and the way McCay slowly draws us into an awareness of what is going on is masterful. But there's something noteworthy about the exterior scenes, which is that they don't show any indication of the cosmopolitan cityscape that, c. 1909, was sprouting up in Manhattan, Chicago, and other great metropolises. Street scenes like this still existed in every large city, of course, as they continue to do in sections of New York City (though the absence of parked cars tips us off that this is not 2009), but there's nothing in the lower eight panels that could not have been drawn, say, fifty years earlier.

But then there is this sequence; fleeing from a pair of red, bearded giants, Nemo and Impie, transformed into giants themselves, are, in a deft bit of visual sleight-of-hand, suddenly carried aloft. They race over farms and suburbs, finally coming to rest in the center of an ethereal city.



In the next panel, which again is brightly illuminated, a crowd gathers around the pair in the heart of what must have been a fairly realistic depiction of Manhattan in McCay's heyday, but as they scale the surrounding buildings and make their way to the harbor one tall structure after another sprouts up, until they are surrounded by a dense forest of skyscrapers that stretches right to the water's edge.





The interesting thing is that the Manhattan skyline that these images suggest -- and surely Manhattan, where McCay worked, was the inspiration -- did not yet exist (and arguably still doesn't). New skyscrapers were being constructed at a rapid clip in various parts of the city, but the New York waterfront still retained a mix of low buildings and high rises. Here, for instance, from the New York Public Library's collections, is a photo of the North River (Hudson) piers, from 36th St. to 48th St., taken just months after McCay's drawing appeared:



We see a few large buildings relatively close to the harbor, but most of them are set well inland, and the immediate waterfront skyline is like a mouth with missing teeth. And only a few years before an Edison photographer had shot this moving picture footage of lower Manhattan, from Fulton Street to the Battery, recording the condition of the other portion of the island that was undergoing rapid modernization:



McCay, a superb draftsman, was perfectly capable of drawing realistic cityscapes. Here's a fine sequence of views of Chicago as Nemo and his companions approach it by airship.



And here, in a bird's eye view, is how Manhattan probably did appear, more or less, in the first decade of the 20th century -- bearing in mind that neither McCay nor likely anyone else would as yet have had the opportunity to actually view at from that angle.



Now it could be argued, and is doubtless true at least in part, that McCay was simple looking ahead and extrapolating when he drew the scene of Nemo and Impie emerging from the columns of towers. But I think it's at least equally true that he had no intention of drawing a literal city, either an existing one or one projected for the decades to come. Instead, he captured the psychological and social effects that the 20th-century city created, the sense of vastness, of totality, it provoked. We are no longer in the Dickensian warrens of the 19th-century metropolis. Seemingly self-created, looming out of all human scale, this new city is neither horrifying nor sheltering, but it will be an inescapable organizing and centering presence in the lives of all who live in it. It will be in cities like this -- not in aristocratic palaces or Rockwellian small towns -- that the course of the years that lay ahead will be determined. The century that he heralds, though McCay does not know it yet, will be a century of cities, of urban high-rises, subways, and expressways, of mass movements and mass production, of Stalinism and Fascism and the bombing of cities from the air, of Beirut and Grozny, and, just beyond its final cusp, of the fall of the Twin Towers.

Winsor McCay (I)

Now that we may have entered the twilight of the newspaper, this may be as good a time as any to look over some souvenirs from what was, at least visually, its Golden Age.

In the course of his career, Winsor McCay (1867-1934) was a pioneer animator, a theatrical impressario, and an editorial cartoonist, among other things, but above all he was one of the supreme visionary geniuses of the newspaper comic, an art form that reached its creative peak a century ago and has -- in all frankness and despite the good work of a number of fine individual creators -- been slowly coasting downhill ever since. Imagine this in your Sunday supplement (click through for a full-sized version):



That's a sample from McCay's best-known strip (and of course the word "strip" doesn't do justice to this elaborate full-page layout), Little Nemo in Slumberland, which ran, on and off and under various names, from 1905 to the late 1920s. (All of the McCay images here are from the wonderful archive maintained at the Comic Strip Library.)

McCay, who was born in 1867 or thereabouts (the original birth records have been lost), had already been drawing cartoons professionally for several years, first in Cincinnatti and later for James Gordon Bennett's New York Herald, when he began Little Nemo. A year earlier he had begun what would become his other important newspaper project, Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend. The two strips would run concurrently for years, and McCay, no slouch, would continue to create other work on a regular basis as well.



Week after week the framing premise of Rarebit Fiend was unchanging: a man, or occasionally a woman, is captured in a horrifying or bizarre predicament, but in the last frame we learn that it's all been a dream, the consequence of the supposedly oneirogenic properties of the Welsh rarebit he or she has rashly consumed before retiring. The genius of the strip lay in McCay's ability to come up with an apparently inexhaustible supply of phantasmagorical variations, as both thematically and artistically he breaks new ground week after week. He plays with the dimensions of the frames, makes sophisticated self-referential jokes (one character is gradually obscured by ink blots from the artist's pen), and provokes an impressive array of unsettling horrors and fears. (The "buried alive" scenario above, of course, recapitulates Poe's nightmarish tale "The Premature Burial.")

One thing that Rarebit Fiend lacked, though, was momentum, for the strip had no narrative progression from week to week. Little Nemo, on the other hand, had a continuing story line, one which, though interrupted at the end of each week's installment, would resume where it had left off in each succeeding episode. McCay couldn't quite let go of the framing device: again we have a dreamer, this time always the same child, who awakens in bed -- or tumbling out of it -- in the last panel. But now there is a guiding narrative: at the strip's inception, on October 15, 1905, Nemo has been summoned by a messenger from King Morpheus of Slumberland, and everything that happens after that, all of his colorful, farflung adventures, will flow inexorably from that first action.

The episode below, however, is an exception, a one-off for the Thanksgiving holiday, which is why the outsized turkey is literally turning the tables, not to mention the whole house, on the human inhabitants. The lake the boy falls into is filled with cranberry sauce.



I'm not the one to provide an overall assessment or description of the riches (and weaknesses) of Little Nemo. Its best years were from 1905 to 1911, before McCay left Bennett's Herald and moved on to work for William Randolph Hearst; thereafter the strip, though still interesting, lost much of its visual daring as it became confined to a fixed grid of identically sized frames.

What I'd like to focus on, though, is just one aspect of Little Nemo at its peak, namely the way McCay imagined and depicted modern urban space. I'll address that in my next post.