Reviews for Krazy Kat: The Comic Art of George Herriman

The average rating for Krazy Kat: The Comic Art of George Herriman based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-08-27 00:00:00 Suresh Duraisamy Something about Krazy Kat makes me feel woefully inarticulate. It's like I've been given two minutes to draw a picture of a sunset, and all I have is a black crayon. There's something so poetic, so artful, so *right* about Herriman's work that mere words fail to do it justice. Suffice to say, it lives up to its legend. George Herriman was there when comic strips were in their infancy, and he helped to shape them and to expand the boundaries of what was possible on the comics page. In addition to an overflowing bounty of choice daily and Sunday Krazy Kats, there is a wealth of biographical detail about Herriman himself, including samples of his other strips, like The Family Upstairs and Baron Bean. Herriman had a knack for artistic layouts. His Sunday pages were a symphony of form and color. Combine that with a playful, expressive line, and an almost jazz approach to language and idiom … suffice to say that Krazy Kat was truly one of a kind. These pages remain as fresh and vivid as the day they were drawn. Needless to say, Krazy Kat is always highly, highly recommended!

Review # 2 was written on 2015-09-30 00:00:00 Marco Perez 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.