Comics fans, comics historians, and mainstream art critics revere George Herriman today. He was never an especially popular cartoonist during his own lifetime. He created the incomparable Krazy Kat in the early 1920s, drew a dozen or more other strips, and illustrated the Archy and Mehitabel books. The Gumps appeared in nearly 300 papers, Bringing Up Father had 500, and Blondie exceeded 1,000 during the years that Krazy Kat appeared. The Kat and mouse opus, however, had only 48 papers in this country. It remained in print because William Randolph Hearst was a fan and decreed the strip would run in his papers as long as Herriman wanted to draw it.

George Joseph Herriman was bor...