KRAZY: George Herriman, A Life in Black and White
Winner of 2017 Eisner Award for Best Comics-Related Book
A New York Times Notable Book of 2017
A Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Book of the Year, 2017
A Kirkus Best Book of 2017
National Book Critics Circle Finalist and PEN America Finalist
Praise for Krazy
“Krazy is a roaring success.”
— Kirkus Reviews
““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 Reviews (starred review)
“Who was the man behind Krazy Kat? This fascinating biography and guide to the work of the cartoonist, who passed for white, tells the full story.”
– The New York Times
“A wonderful biography of one of our greatest American comic-strip artists … the surreal, Kafkaesque adventures of besotted Krazy Kat and the indifferent Ignatz are examined in this massively researched book as commentary on the artist’s racial identity and the uneasy place of African-Americans in U.S. society in the early 20th century.”
– Joyce Carol Oates
“Michael Tisserand’s lovingly baked brick of a biography is essential for every comics and art lover’s library. 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
“Krazy skillfully returns context to Krazy Kat, revealing that it could have come from no other time or place than during the accelerated rise of the American media empire.... Tisserand’s work is impressive. His seating of Herriman’s achievements among other battling art forms of the time is essential for understanding comics history.”
– Washington Post
“[In] an authoritative new biography of Herriman… Tisserand is one of the first scholars to show us how Herriman’s closeted life, especially his conflicting desire for acceptance and fear of exposure, affected his work.”
– Los Angeles Review of Books
“Tisserand has written the rarest kind of book: scholarship that is accessible and captivating, genuinely fun to read. His prose sparkles, smooth and flowing, rich with metaphor and invention.”
– Chicago Tribune
“Krazy, so rich in anecdote and so warm in affection, succeeds in adding a good deal to the wonder of George Herriman’s legacy – mainly by putting the artist in last place on Earth he liked to be: in the spotlight, center stage.”
– Christian Science Monitor
“... engaging, revealing…. Herriman’s adventures in newspapering in the early years of the 20th century are alone worth the price of the book.... Whether you’re a longtime Krazy Kat fan, as I am, or a new acquaintance, this biography will enrich your knowledge of the Kat and its creator.”
– Tampa Bay Times
“Herriman’s delight in anarchic transformation and gentle subversion had personal roots, as Michael Tisserand reveals in this scrupulously researched, luminously written and eye-opening biography.”
– The Times Literary Supplement
“An absorbing study of a genius with a secret.”
– New Orleans Times-Picayune
“Lucky for us, Michael Tisserand’s formidable new biography, Krazy, is here. Not only do we get a sense of Herriman’s enormous influence but we also learn about this private man’s life and his startling family secret.”
– Esquire
“Tisserand is a thoroughgoing researcher and a great storyteller. He delivers Herriman’s tale with a detective’s precision, rarely intruding on the narrative as he leaves the reader to ask the obvious questions and hang on the razor’s edge of suspense.”
– OffBeat Magazine
“Tisserand's writing is beautifully free of steering; its modifiers rarely push the reader towards a set interpretation. ... Once one has seen Herriman's mutating landscapes and the characters that whirl through it like tumbleweed, 'art' is the word that seems right; Tisserand's account helps us see how right it is.”
– Rain Taxi
“Tisserand decenters whiteness and the pseudosciences used to prop it up without pretending that they aren’t key characters in Herriman’s life, thus humanizing Herriman as a prolific though sometimes indecisive artist with deep-seated insecurities, without condemning him as a tragic mulatto.”
– Know Louisiana
"Michael Tisserand shares his decade-long dive into Herriman's personal papers, surrealistic sketches, and very private life. ... With subtle references to race and power, Krazy Kat traces Herriman's reality. Tisserand's book shades in the details."
– Garden & Gun
“A visionary strip. Who drew it, and wherefrom? Tisserand’s robust research illuminates, without diminishing, the mystery.”
– Roy Blount Jr.
“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
“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
“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
“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.”
– Ben Yagoda
“This is a gripping read at the intersection of pop culture and American history.”
– Publisher’s Weekly
“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