There's an award named after one of his characters.

George Herriman was a cartoonist who worked from the 1900s to around 1945 or so. He made a very esoteric comic strip only few people liked and even fewer people understood. Newspaper publisher/tycoon William Randolph Hearst loved his creation: Krazy Kat, and so it ran in syndication in all the papers he controlled.

What was Krazy Kat?

Set in a mythical desert landscape called Coconino County the backgrounds would continually change shape and morph into weird abstract shapes. It was as if you had a crazed stage hand constantly wheeling in and out different backgrounds while the play was in progress.

The main characters:

Zap- POW!

Whenever Krazy's noggin would receive a blow from a brick she'd regard it as a sign of love returned from Ignatz. A good portion of Krazy Kat's storylines involve Ignatz trying to spring himself from prison, or defeat Officer Pup's clever traps to defeat him. Other strips involved groan-worthy puns or mistaken identities. George Herriman worked in a medium so constraining yet his simple style and direct almost blunt choice of rhetoric made it seem Krazy Kat's universe was boundless.

Buy the book.

I do miss the old days of cartoons about a century ago. The rules were still being worked out. A lot more experimentation went into it. Krazy Kat can be viewed online for free in many places, and there's a few books out there too. I would recommend buying the 223 page perfect-bound book put together in 1986 by Patrick McDonnell on Amazon HERE.