George Herriman was a New Orleans Creole, and the comedy has a laconic Southern charm to its arrangement

Even within poems packed with dross, he’ll find his way to something, to a moment you won’t forget.

It’s like a jungle sometimes . . . He is the savage. He is beastmode, paradoxically subliterate and over-articulate, overspeaking and overlaying official thinking and bien-pensant consideration, hyperfleshed and hypersexed, his self-flagellation and his private inferno conducted in public, like a hacked account spewing up a volcanic, heroic, and unrepentant excess of verb, of notation, of expression, of style without effort, of study without academy, of access without permission, of authority without authorship, of tradition without history, of art without museum, of a past beyond recollection, for a future within no future, and without a plan to get there.