Nine Lives to Live: A Classic Felix Celebration Book

This book's existence is nothing short of an absolute delight, considering how rare it is to get reprints of the classic Felix the Cat newspaper strips, especially in a volume so comprehensive. This book contains comics from 1923 to 1933, probably one of the most complete lists of Felix the Cat's filmography in print (and my heart breaks when I see just how many Felix the Cat films have been lost to time), and a list of videography and newspaper reprints.

There are places where you can tell that the original copies have been lost and the publishers were forced to make due with old copies with a lot of color bleed, there are stories in this book that have offensive racial caricatures, and the book would've benefited with a little bit more commentary on how these cartoons were made, but this collection is pretty close to hitting perfection as it is that this almost feels like nitpicking.

A large portion of this book also contains the strips for one of Felix's "toppers", Laura. Her strips are a lot more monotonous in nature: Laura the Parrot hears a phrase, does the classic "Felix thinking and walking pose" somewhere else, and then repeats the phrase somewhere inappropriate and gets someone (usually her owner) in trouble. Right before the collection ended, her strips evolved to include more household pets and a small storyline where she's just one in a group of several parrots, but Laura didn't entertain me as much as Felix.

All in all, a very solid collection, and a great glimpse at an era of newspaper comics that has long passed by.