...[an] engaging, revealing biography ... 72 years after his death Herriman and Krazy Kat are a footnote in our popular culture. Tisserand's book just might change that by bringing back into the conversation not only Herriman's remarkable artistic creation but his extraordinary, very American life story ... As befits its subject, Krazy is a gorgeously designed book. It incorporates not only dozens of Herriman's cartoons (Krazy Kat and many others) but elements in page design and numbering that reflect his style ... 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.
...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 ... Beyond social niceties and a bit of scatology, however, his letters (transcribed here, perhaps more for scholars than the general reader) leave little evidence behind of whatever deeper matters drove him ... Still, 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.
...a splendid, sympathetic full-length biography ... Tisserand tracks Herriman from project to project, giving readers a surprisingly exciting picture of a talent steadily maturing ... The free-flowing nature of that work is a difficult thing to capture in prose, and this biographer surely does it about as well as it can be done, taking readers inside the constantly-shifting landscapes of Herriman's work at its peak ... Tisserand has now given readers a wonderful companion volume to that iconic artwork.
... a fine new biography ... In many biographies the ancestral chapters are a snooze. Here, though, they are absolutely riveting ... Perhaps Mr. Tisserand left out [certain] speculations because he didn’t believe them or felt that they would detract from the story of the great unspoken fact of Herriman’s existence—his blackness.
...a fascinating and frustrating biography ... Absent any direct commentary on Herriman’s dual identity, Tisserand promises to sift through the cartoonist’s work to parse his relationship to race...Though Tisserand does a truly exhaustive job detailing Herriman’s private and public lives, the promised analysis of race in his vast catalog of Krazy Kat cartoons is more fleeting than intricate. It feels scattershot even when he identifies potentially relevant material ... I wonder if a critic more sensitive to the nuances of race would have found more fodder in the Krazy Kat catalog than Tisserand. That said, Krazy is absolutely an essential companion to any deep dig into Herriman’s work.
...one of the best books of the year ... Author Michael Tisserand is great on the New Orleans of Herriman's birth. And he wants to tell this life through the lens of race...Krazy Kat transcends all, and Tisserand's book lets go of the race issue after a while - just for the story. It's one of the best true stories told in 2016.
...[a] deeply researched and brilliantly written book ... 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. Tisserand has done meticulous research as well. Herriman's contradictions and complexities are unpacked through a thoughtful and sympathetic examination of the multiple cultural contexts in which he lived and worked, from Creole New Orleans to booming New York, up-and-coming Los Angeles and the sublime deserts of Arizona. Herriman's large family and his legion of friends are depicted with insight, depth and precision.
One of the major feats of Tisserand’s research was to simply collect Herriman’s 1896–1944 body of work so that he could read it, and he has made some remarkable discoveries in the course of his research ... now, in the light of Tisserand’s groundbreaking book, Krazy Kat can finally be read as a work by an artist rooted in a specific time and place with a specific point of view of that time and place ... Within Coconino’s shifting locales, days and nights, and genders, we can now glimpse traces of Herriman’s hidden life.
At times Tisserand’s book moves slowly, especially in the first 100 pages, when he describes seemingly every cartoon and comic strip that Herriman drew, as he hops from newspaper to newspaper and coast to coast, slowly moving toward the creation of Krazy Kat ... Tisserand paints a fascinating picture of early 20th-century newspaper offices and the growing importance of cartoonists to cover the news and provide commentary. He also writes knowledgeably of race relations ... But Herriman remains an enigma throughout the book, shown as a cutup who performed in a minstrel show and who liked to hang with his fellow cartoonists. Readers do not get inside his head, and Tisserand does not delve deeply into his private life ... He primarily tells Herriman’s story through the prism of his profession and, save for a few letters, through the only written record he left behind — his comics.
