Krazy & Ignatz 1927-1928: "Love Letters in Ancient Brick"

Herriman's color work was indeed wonderful, but as the previous correspondent notes, for two thirds of its run the Sunday KRAZY KAT was in fact black and white, so we've been publishing it in that format.Beginning in mid-2005, after having wrapped up the black and white period with KRAZY + IGNATZ 1933-1934 (which will contain some of the most difficult-to-find and almost-never-reprinted years) we will be releasing the five volumes containing Herriman's color years, starting with KRAZY + IGNATZ 1935-1936 -- in full color.

Regarding the review below: Sunday Krazy Kat strips were not printed in color until 1934, so the strips in this volume (which covers the period from 1927 to 1928) are presented as they were originally published. While there are many pre-1934 strips that were hand-colored by Herriman, they were intended to be personal gifts to fellow cartoonists and not for publication.

Comics do not get much better than Krazy Kat. These new editions have brought me out of mourning for the Eclipse series (the single volumes of which sometimes go for $100+ on e-bay). Plus, these are great looking books and each one is filled with extra info and photographs in the introduction and some cool tidbit in the back (this one has a picture of a wooden Ignatz doll complete with box from the 1920s).Krazy Kat can be classified as art, but hopefully it won't be classified TOO MUCH as art, because it can be appreciated on many levels as well as an artistic one. Krazy's worst fate would be to end up as solely a museum piece for aficionados. Krazy doesn't belong in a museum, he/she belongs in books; which is what makes this series so great. I just wish they could print all of them at once.Krazy Kat works by means of the tension of 3 forces: innocence, evil, and justice. Krazy is the ultimate innocent who, when Offissa Pup pummels Ignatz with his club, merely says "Those two play so well togedda." Ignatz is evil and maybe obsession. His grand purpose in life is to "bean" Krazy with bricks. He sometimes goes to Rube Goldberg extremes to succeed. Offissa Pup is justice which is sometimes just, sometimes political, sometimes personal. In an old daily strip, Offissa Pup grabs Ignatz and says "To the jail, viper!" When Ignatz replies "Why?" Offissa Pup only says "Because it gives me pleasure." Things get more complex because Krazy loves Ignatz and Offissa Pup often insinuates that he loves Krazy. A futile love triangle and battle of good, evil, and justice gets mixed up in a strange salad.It is simply one of the best comics ever produced.

Conceptually, Krazy Kat was so simple -- a cat, a mouse, and a dog apparently caught in a bizarre sort of eternal love/hate triangle. George Herriman's art and writing not only managed to elevate this seemingly limited idea for a comic strip far beyond most of its early 20th-century peers, but to place it in the category of art: a weirdly funny, endlessly imaginative, and timeless masterpiece.Fantagraphics have done an excellent job of reproduction and annotation. The larger format allows you to fully enjoy Herriman's minimalist style, while laughing at the strip's fractured English and visual gags. Chris Ware's cover art for both volumes released so far in this series has also been a real treat, although I personally preferred the cover for the first volume.Krazy Kat can be enjoyed on several levels, but the editors have made certain you can both appreciate the artistic aspects of the strip and have just plain fun reading it. I am also coming to understand Herriman's significant influence on such later masters as Johnny Hart and Charles Schulz.Get in on the ground floor (or at most the second floor) of what will be one of the most important reprint series ever, and seek out the first volume.

The book design and the supplimentary material in this volume are even better than the previous one, which was itself excellent. Herriman's work grows richer with repeated readings and with each newly available reprint--far as I'm concerned, all of Krazy Kat merits the highest possible recommendation to anyone interested in 20th century American art or literature. As with the last volume, these are from an odd period when William Randolph Hearst (his publisher) forced Herriman into a rigid panel format (this was part of Hearst's campaign to promote the strip, which is explained in the 1925-26 book), so Herriman's otherwise imaginative page design is not much in evidence here. Still, Herriman's playful and poetic language, his iconic characters, his weirdly abstracted and wildly shifting backgrounds, his gumbo of native and immigrant American voices and the overarching spirit of the proceedings--sweet, wry, optimistic, humble, curious, inventive as all get out--make this a work with few peers in any medium, a pleasure and inspiration for most who take the time to read a substantial number of the strips (as Krazy Kat is so much a "theme and variations," it really does require some investment of time). The best introduction remains the book about Herriman (by McDonnell, etc.) but one could start anywhere, and this volume does not disappoint.