When I was putting together my post about George Herriman's
Krazy Kat Specialty Pieces, I came across this piece by
Ron Campbell, who was the director of the Krazy Kat television cartoons. While it's clearly not up to George Herriman's impossibly high standards, it's not a bad-looking piece, and it puzzled me that it looks more like Herriman's classic cartoon strip than the animated series ever did. True, Herriman's line is more frenzied, imparting a vital energy to even static figures. In the specialty drawings, Herriman saturates his landscapes in deep orange often contrasted with black ink, and he usually imparts some color to the ground and even the speech balloons as well. This piece seems just a little off. For example, the overpowering yellow used here seems to be Campbell's own stylistic choice; indeed all the colors are fairly flat and way too bright, almost psychedelic. It's nice as a tribute, but it's not the Kokonino I remember.
The second image here, a Sunday comic strip, goes a long way toward explaining the first:
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Ron Campbell after George Herriman, Krazy Kat Jail Mirage
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From Krazy Kat & the Art of George Herriman: A Celebration by Craig Yoe, Abrams ComicArts, 2011, page
20: May 15, 1938. Credit: KRAZY KAT™ Hearst Holdings, Inc. Courtesy of
Craig Yoe’s collection of Herriman images and ephemera.
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Now it becomes apparent that Campbell copied this from the final panel of a Krazy Kat Sunday strip, and it is perfectly clear how the piece came about and why it appears to capture a few elements of Herriman's classic style. Possibly Campbell used a lightboard to get this drawing started.
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Ron Campbell after George Herriman, Krazy Kat Jail Mirage
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From Krazy Kat & the Art of George Herriman: A Celebration by Craig Yoe, Abrams ComicArts, 2011, page
20: May 15, 1938. Credit: KRAZY KAT™ Hearst Holdings, Inc. Courtesy of
Craig Yoe’s collection of Herriman images and ephemera.
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Note: My post on Krazy Kat specialty pieces remains my most popular post of all time and continues to be updated occasionally as I find more amazing material to include. You can see it all here and I believe you will feel better immediately, if not sooner.
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I'm a big fan of yellow, a much maligned color, there's a lot of yellow prejudice or fear of yellow among the general population. My family shudders when I hang yellow curtains and get out the yellow paint. My two favorite suits have been yellow. You must be brave to wear yellow. Sometimes though, too much yellow can give you a headache. However, though I could go on and on about yellow, it's not what interests me in these clips. It's who threw the first brick, committed the original sin. Takes me back to the Garden of Eden, which incidentally, I was just thinking about this morning before tooning in. We'll never know, will we. We just don't have the facts. There's so much to think about in the sequence of events leading up to the final mirage scene (if it is a mirage). There's so much ground to cover, in just this one strip, it would take days to assimilate and explore all the thought avenues it takes you down and through. I'll say this, it's every bit as good as Kierkegaard and Genesis.
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ReplyDelete"I believe you will feel better immediately, if not sooner"
Forgot to mention - I love that line and it made me feel better, if not sooner, at least immediately.
I certainly don't mean to malign anything as ubiquitous as the color yellow, except to say that the extent of its use here by Ron Campbell is not truly in the beloved tradition of George Herriman.
ReplyDeleteI didn't think for one minute that you were maligning the color yellow and I agree with you that its overbearing presence in Campbell's piece strays far from the tradition. I find Herriman's color scheme comforting, I think that's because it's consistent, can be depended upon. Thank you for pointing out the energy producing quality of Herriman's frenetic lines. It never occurred to me that lines have power, but I can certainly see it, or feel it, when comparing Cambell's scene with Herriman's.
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