George Herriman’s drawings of Archy and Mehitabel brilliantly capture the spirit of their subjects: the inquisitive cockroach and the sassy, brassy alleycat. To many most readers, the drawings are as much a part of Archy and Mehitabel’s charm as Don Marquis’s stories about them.

But Herriman was just one of many artists to capture their magic. Edward Gorey drew Archy and Mehitabel, and so did cartoonists at The New Yorker and Collier’s magazines. Animators drew them in a feature film, and artists today continue to draw inspiration from cockroach and cat.

Here is a look at Archy the cockroach through the eyes and pens and pencils of 10 artists, drawn over the course of nine decades. Scroll further down the page for an up-close look at each of the images. And look for drawings of Mehitabel in a future post.

Click on the thumbnail images below for full-size views:

The very first image of Archy appeared in the New York Tribune on September 11, 1922. The was the day Don Marquis joined the Tribune as its star columnist, and the newspaper took out half-page advertisements in rival dailies, including The New York Times, to brag about its new hire. Marquis had created Archy six years earlier at The Evening Sun and would remain at the Tribune until 1925.

This image accompanied a retelling of Don’s classic story “the lesson of the moth” that ran in Collier’s magazine on June 5, 1926. After Don left the Tribune, he had a weekly column in Collier’s titled “If You Know What I Mean” that ran for one year. Archy, of course, made regular appearances in it. His story of the moth willing to fry himself on a lightbulb was a repeat; it had previously appeared in The Sun in 1922.

The book “archly and mehitabel” had been in print for three years when, in 1930, Don’s publisher, Doubleday Doran, asked what he thought about a new edition with illustrations by George Herriman, who was well on his way to achieving cult status with his weirdly brilliant newspaper comic strip Krazy Kat. Don replied that if it would boost sales, he was all for it. It did, and the rest, as they say, is history. (For more on Herriman and the dust jackets he created for Marquis’s books, check out this recent blog post.)

Collier’s magazine published many of Don’s short stories and poems throughout the 1920s and ’30s, and this image of Archy scuttling away from a tin of insect repellant was part of a rhyming alphabet by Don that appeared in the July 22, 1933, issue.  The alphabet is tremendously funny, and begins, naturally, with the letter A: “a is for Archy, which becomes / a synonym for roaches / an archy neither stings nor hums / but subtly he encroaches / some persons heed him and cry louder / others reach for the insect powder.” View the complete poem here.

This squib appeared in The New Yorker’s “Talk of the Town” column on January 14, 1950, accompanying a story on the death of The Sun newspaper. The magazine noted bitterly that in all the obituaries published by other newspapers, “there was only one mention of the most distinguished Sun man of them all, Don Marquis. The fact that the Sun office was the place where the lower-case Archy, the bug with the soul of a poet, subsisted on stale paste and apple parings and performed his nightly labors on the typewriter keys proved not worth a passing notice. Ah welladay!”

Archy came back to life, gloriously, in 1970 with the release of “Shinbone Alley,” a feature-length animated movie directed by John D. Wilson. It was based on a 1957 Broadway musical of the same, and it featured the voices of Carol Channing as Mehitabel, Eddie Bracken as Archy, and Alan Reed Sr. (“Fred Flintstone”) as Mehitabel’s tomcat boyfriend, Big Bill. It’s an enjoyable movie, with tuneful music and animation nothing like the standard Disney fare of that time.

Any literary character would be thrilled beyond words to be drawn by a master craftsman such as George Herriman, but Archy has the distinction of being drawn by two of the greatest illustrators of the 20th century. That second honor came with the release of the October 1986 issue of The Atlantic magazine, which featured a four-page spread of “lost” Archy stories illustrated by Edward Gorey.

Those lost stories mentioned above had been found by one Jeff Adams, who purchased the contents of an abandoned trunk of Marquis papers. Ten years after the Atlantic spread, Adams published a more robust collection of Archy stories that had never been included it books before. This new book was “archyology,” and it features a new set of illustrations by illustrator and New Yorker cartoonist Ed Frascino. More stories, and drawings followed in 1998 with “archyology ii.”

Some years back, a fortuitous mix of Google search terms revealed a webpage featuring the art of Paul Hosteler, an illustrator in Charlottesville, Virginia. He had posted several pages of unfinished sketches, including one from 2009 with drawings of Archy as a smart, sophisticated cockroach dude — wise and a bit world-weary. This is one of those sketches. Here is a link to Hostetler’s Facebook page.

Another lucky Google search uncovered the art of Isaac Cates, editor of Cartozia Tales, a clever magazine featuring stories by independent cartoonists. (And, oh yeah, Cates is also a Ph.D. poetry and writing lecturer at the University of Vermont). This image of Archy was part of an alphabet drawn in 2012 for his Satisfactory Comics blog.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, here are 10,000 that say Archy is alive and well as his 100th birthday approaches in March 2016 (see my archyFest! page). In fact, Archy has never looked better!

Some of the very best commercial artists of the early 20th century were called in to draw distinctive dust jackets and illustrations for Don Marquis’s books. E.W. Kemble, who illustrated Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” and many of Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus books, also did the cover and inside artwork for Don’s first book, “Danny’s Own Story,” in 1912. Tony Sarg did the cover and inside art for “Prefaces” and “Noah an’ Jonah an’ Cap’n John Smith,” and John Held Jr. did a cover for “The Old Soak” as well as illustrations for several of Don’s feature pieces in The Sun. 

But none compares with the brilliant, iconic drawings for Don’s three Archy books by George Herriman. The creator of the quirky, beloved Krazy Kat comic strip produced 93 illustrations plus dust jackets for “archy and mehitabel,” “archys life of mehitabel” and “archy does his part.” Herriman’s cartoons are an integral part of the books, and we imagine that Archy and Mehitabel look exactly as Herriman drew them., 

Among the three Herriman dust jackets, one stands head and shoulders above the others. The cover for “archys life of mehitabel” is a riot of color and characters that only could have come from the creator of Krazy Kat. In fact, except for Mehitabel herself, none of the characters on the dust jacket are in the book at all; they’re straight out of Krazy Kat’s Coconino County. (Archy, for that matter is nowhere to be seen.)

Few people today have ever seen the dust jacket for “archys life of mehitabel.” The last hardback edition appeared in 1938, and as a rare-books catalog might note, it is “extremely scarce in jacket.”

Click on the photo above to open an enlarged image of George Herriman’s masterpiece. And enjoy.

*  *  *

The back story: Herriman’s covers were not the first to appear on two of the three Archy books. The first edition of “archy and mehitabel” appeared in 1927 with a stunning, minimalist cover by an artist identified only as “J.W.” It was replaced, for one printing only, with 20 thumbnail-size Herriman cartoons in 1930, before a full-size Herriman illustration was put on the cover, also in 1930. It shows Mehitabel in a garbage can, eating a sardine, while Archy types furiously on a small typewriter. This dust jacket  appeared from 1930 to 1943 before it was replaced with another Herriman drawing.

The first-edition cover of “archys life of mehitabel,” in 1933, had a drawing of Mehitabel by the artist “Jay.” It was replaced later that year by the cover above. The final book in the trilogy, “archy does his part,” in 1935, was the only one to have an Herriman drawing on the cover from the first edition through the last (the fourth printing, in 1936). It shows Mehitabel peering through a brick wall at Archy, clearly both at home in Coconino County.

Photos of all the covers will be coming soon.