Krazy Kat: The Comic Art of George Herriman Book

This book is great, especially for the student of comics history, interested in comics origins. Herriman is one of the greats, one you have to know, who did a lot of comics over the years, but is best known for Krazy Kat, begun as a strip in 1913, and championed and funded by no less a comics sugar daddy than William Randolph Hearst (yes, the tyrant loved comics and insisted on them in all his syndicated newspapers, so a few comics artists and cartoonists made a living with his support for decades), got a life time contract from him to continue the strip until his death in 1941. Strips/cartoons about cats and mice and dogs were and are in many ways the stuff of comics, or central to the enterprise, a way to make people laugh and a way to comment on the human condition and social issues. But this animal schtick began back then, more than a hundred years ago with him and others. But this is a narrative that depends on something bizarre (and funny--strange but funny)--a masochistic mouse and a cat--beaned strip after strip by bricks the mouse throws--who sees the mouse's attentions as love. There are plenty more bizarre things, too, and more bizarre, to our sensibilities, which I like.

Herriman loved the southwest and sets his strips often in the desert. They are not conventionally drawn, sometimes very sketchy, with idiosyncratic and linguistically complex dialogue--Herriman liked dialects of all kinds--and are at times goofy, and at other times just surreal. Sometimes hard to read, decipher. Sometimes the humor, decades later, is lost on me.

This edition is 1999, the text having been written in 1986, a loving scholarly and archival tribute by Patrick McDonnell, Karen O'Connell and George Riley de Havemon, who write biographical essays, and essays about his art, not just Krazy Kat. And lots of strips that would otherwise be lost. So we have them to thank.

Black Rat and Little Tommy Lost by Clyde Closser, among others, pay tribute to Herriman in their comics. Worth checking out, comics history fans.