A wonderfully written commentary on and collection of Herriman's classic cartoons. A great introduction for those not familiar with Krazy Kat and company, or with Herriman.

I wanted to like this but the cartoons are just too old for my taste. The illustrations are oddly scratchy, the dialogue is hard to read and is out of date, and the sequential storytelling just isn't very good - both the content and the method. I appreciate that this is a very old comic and it went on to influence many other, better cartoonists, but I can't say this is something anyone but academics or niche hobbyists would get anything out of.

Being the very very long running favourite strip of its time , it is undeniably one of the best series of cartoons and I feel lucky to have had a chance to read it.
Artwork is excellent, funny and innovative.
Writing style is Intellectual and literary.
I would have loved it even more, had captions been shorter.
It is a funny read and characters are amazing.
Thanks netgalley and publisher for review copy.

Wow, this was a wild ride! This little taste of Krazy Kat's world makes me want more. Krazy Kat ran from 1913-1944, and was pretty popular with intellectuals, artists, and critics- William Randolph Hearst liked it so much, he gave George Herriman a lifetime contract with King Features Syndicate, and complete creative freedom; e.e. cummings wrote the introduction to the first Krazy Kat book published in 1946; Will Eisner, Art Spiegelman, and Robert Crumb were fans, as well as Charles Schultz, Bill Watterson, and Dr. Seuss, all citing Herriman as a major influence. The strip itself is a real trip- it feels very modern for being so old, it's meta and postmodern, and surprisingly accepting for its time- Krazy is gender fluid, sometimes he, sometimes she (though mostly a gender-neutral "he"), never specified as male or female. The dialogue is strangely poetic, filled with odd dialects and nonsense words, and is mostly about Krazy's unrequited love for Ignatz Mouse, who can't stand Krazy and throws bricks at him constantly, which Krazy interprets as signs of love. The strip is very addictive; I had a hard time tearing myself away while reading it, it just rolled around in my head so pleasantly! I'd definitely recommend this to any comics fan, whether they love comic books or comic strips, as I could see how Herriman's work touched many artists.

#KrazyKatCollection #NetGalley

Krazy Kat loves Ignatz Mouse. Ignatz hates Krazy, and throws bricks at him. Krazy takes this as a sign of love. All the classic cartoons which would come after have equally simple premises, and many of them are quite fucked up, but few were quite this readily susceptible to queer and kinky readings, even before the helpful stork tells Krazy "It is moral support he wants, Krazy. If only some dominant soul would advise him". Topping from the bottom - with bricks! And all of this from cartoon strips published long enough ago that the Great War was still underway – indeed, it's referenced in one of them, where the standard acts of violence move into a phase of trench warfare. The influence on subsequent American cartoons is clear, not just in the simple dynamic subject to endless variations, but in the realisation that as far as backdrops go, deserts spiced with weird geometry work just as well as regular settings, contain way more visual interest without being too busy, and are vastly easier to draw. These facsimiles contain the original newspaper headers - "The New York American – A Paper for People Who Think" – which also feel startlingly familiar, even if attempts at lifestyle branding these days try to be very slightly more subtle. But from the formal experimentation (in one strip the horizon line is subjected to all manner of indignities) to the ambiguous set-up of Ignatz' home life (he is married, not that it seems to slow him down much - at one stage still pursues a bleached Krazy, the classic misunderstanding which would go on to power every Pepe le Pew story; this seems to bother Mrs Ignatz much less than the ongoing business with the bricks, as well it might when you think about it), it really doesn't feel a century old. Sure, sometimes the joke may be a little lost to time: when Officer Pupp is told there's a blind pig in town, how many modern readers will get the joke as it turns out to mean a literal blind pig? But this world of anthropomrphic animals retaining some of their attributes, the fascinatingly off-centre English-ish in which the tales are told, those expressive little faces and movements – all of that is still the common grammar of the form, and instantly comprehensible.

(Netgalley ARC)

O.k., Now I Get It

There are certain seminal works that authors, painters, sculptors, and other creators will refer to when describing their own artistic development. The mix is different for different people, but for many writers and cartoonists one of the works that keeps coming up is George Herriman's "Krazy Kat" strips. This excellent collection helped me understand why.

Right off the bat, while these were published in 1918 and 1919, there is nothing old-fashioned about them. Or at least nothing on the negative side of old-fashioned. I have a certain nostalgia for the old newspaper strips, but a lot of them are almost unreadable, at least in quantity, unless you're something of a historian. I'm thinking of strips like "Bringing Up Father", (aka "Jiggs and Maggie"), which was a contemporary of "Krazy Kat", or of "Joe Palooka" or "Alley Oop". Those last two may have given us a nickname for a punch-drunk boxer and a hit novelty song, but they didn't age well.

"Krazy Kat", though, has not only aged well, but improved with age. The titular hero is gender fluid. Think about that for a second. This was in 1918, and it has taken us a full century to circle back to that simple character concept. The language of the characters is an amalgam of accents, languages, and dialects. The vocabulary is beyond anything you'll find in a newspaper today. The author's asides and marginal observations make this a meta-comic before anyone ever thought of meta anything. And the author is always going for something purer and more universal than simply a punchline.

So, this is a treat and well worth the effort it takes to time travel back to an era that not only allowed but applauded daring and sophisticated comic work like this. A nice find; Ignatz and I give it four bricks.

(Please note that I received a free advance will-self-destruct-in-x-days Adobe Digital copy of this book without a review requirement, or any influence regarding review content should I choose to post a review. Apart from that I have no connection at all to either the author or the publisher of this book.)

When I first started reading this, I did not get it. Only when I came back to it, I realised what I was doing wrong. I was treating it like a more modern comic strip which makes sense, is funny and profound within a second of scanning very few panels. Each of these full-length pieces spans more than five panels on average, and they are not patterned in the same uniform manner throughout. In this regard, I have to mention that the very suave method of commenting on the panels and story progressor by the artist. I found that very hilarious. Reading them requires more time and attention than I gave it the first time around. 

I had not heard of or read these strips before, but they must be popular with people who live in the US. The cast of characters are introduced in the beginning and even with that information, I think more connections can only be made by wading through this collection. Krazy Kat with a propensity for mispronouncing words, more than the other animals is a black cat. He is forever getting hit with a brick by a white mouse, but it does not reduce the effort he puts into making the mouse happy even with no reward. He has people/animals on the lookout for him who sometimes help by preventing the brick-throwing mentioned above. I think I got a lot of the subtle depths in the narrations, but I still had the niggling feeling that there were more hidden beneath the surface as most good comic strips do. This would entertain people who like comic strips and see beyond the primary punch line.

I received an ARC thanks to NetGalley and the publishers, but the review is entirely based on my own reading experience.

Gosh, I love Krazy and I love this book’s focus on keeping things all about Krazy as Herriman intended. The scribble-scratchy drawings and inventive dialogue set against the Coconino backdrop make this volume an instant and perennial favorite.

Any book that manages to parody trench warfare, and to feature plugs for WWI Liberty Bonds, while actually being about the unrequited love a mad cat has for an angry mouse, is on to a winner. Straight reprints of the century-old strip pages (complete with very scratchy lettering) mean this is one for the lover of the history of comics. I can't say it was a keeper for me, but I welcomed the chance to see such ancient output, especially such early form-breaking pieces as the one regarding the horizon line and the tickling.

Krazy Kat is a classic, and a collection was way overdue. Although, the file I got had only one strip, which can't be a basis to rate a book. Still, I know the strip myself, so give it a good mark

Amazing insight into the previous century. Wildy imaginative, deeply funny. A classic that set the standard for syndicated comic strips, and the stage for all of comics and graphic novels to follow.