Reviews for Nine Lives to Live: A Classic Felix Celebration

The average rating for Nine Lives to Live: A Classic Felix Celebration based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-01-12 00:00:00 Vivian Forr This is an essential purchase for fans of Felix the Cat. As all true fans know, Felix's real glory days were in the silent era, when Pat Sullivan's animation studio produced over a 100 ingenious short cartoons featurng the protean ebony feline. Though Sullivan hogged all the credit, the artist behind the series was Otto Messmer, who also worked on Felix's spin-off newspaper comic strip. He continued with that strip after the cartoons ended in 1930 (due to Sullivan's incompetent management). Editor David Gerstein has compiled a sampling of strips from the early 1920s to the 1930s. It's fascinating to see how Felix changed over a decade, moving from a blocky, snout-nosed design to a sleek look with rubber hose limbs and circular head and torso. Comic-strip Felix is of naturally talkier than his film self, and Messmer's sight gags flow less smoothly when broken up by panels and dialogue, but these strips remain a delight, especially since a couple stories are adaptations of now-lost cartoons (and even re-use art from them). As for the original stories, they take advantage of the format to tell longer tales, often in the sort of gently humorous adventure genre later used by Floyd Gottfredson's Mickey Mouse and Carl Bark's Donald Duck comics. Sadly, Felix's comic strip adventures remain far more obscure than those Disney productions. Gerstein hopes to produce further collections of Felix strips, but so far no publishers have stepped up to the plate. This is a shame, since the Felix comic strip is a genuine classic, not just a spin-off. It belongs in IDW's Library of American Comics. Note: Some of the strips employ racial stereotypes that were exceedingly common during the period. Though unacceptable today, they are not based on racial animus.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-01-16 00:00:00 Andy Rogers 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.