Rating: 
Summary: An American Masterpiece
Review: Eighty-five years after its inception, 'Krazy Kat' remains one of the finest examples of American comic art. 'Krazy Kat' is to 'Dilbert' as chicken cordon bleu is to chicken nuggets.Anyone who has an appreciation for comic strips or an interest in possibly creating their own sequential art works needs to study 'Krazy Kat' carefully. Herriman was truly a master of the form. The biography of Herriman and the essay on 'Krazy Kat' by one of his contemporaries are interesting... but it's the huge collection of 'Krazy Kat' strips that make this book worth every penny!
Rating:
Summary: until the COMPLETE krazy is finally published
Review: fine anthologies like this will have to do. compiled principally by patrick mcdonnell (artist and author of "mutts" -- the finest contemporary comic strip) this is a good introduction to the best comic strip of all time. for some thirty years in the first half of the american century, george herriman created one of the greatest works of american art and literature. based almost entirely on variations on a theme (cat loves mouse, dog loves cat, mouse throws brick, cat deems said abuse [rightly?] as a sign of love), herriman caught the essence of a country barely growing up, as well as love in all its potential manifestations. "krazy kat" can be appreciated as allegory, or it can be enjoyed simply as damned funny. this volume will allow you to have a bit of both. but oh dear, when will some brave publisher issue the entire run?
Rating:
Summary: until the COMPLETE krazy is finally published
Review: fine anthologies like this will have to do. compiled principally by patrick mcdonnell (artist and author of "mutts" -- the finest contemporary comic strip) this is a good introduction to the best comic strip of all time. for some thirty years in the first half of the american century, george herriman created one of the greatest works of american art and literature. based almost entirely on variations on a theme (cat loves mouse, dog loves cat, mouse throws brick, cat deems said abuse [rightly?] as a sign of love), herriman caught the essence of a country barely growing up, as well as love in all its potential manifestations. "krazy kat" can be appreciated as allegory, or it can be enjoyed simply as damned funny. this volume will allow you to have a bit of both. but oh dear, when will some brave publisher issue the entire run?
Rating:
Summary: until the COMPLETE krazy is finally published
Review: fine anthologies like this will have to do. compiled principally by patrick mcdonnell (artist and author of "mutts" -- the finest contemporary comic strip) this is a good introduction to the best comic strip of all time. for some thirty years in the first half of the american century, george herriman created one of the greatest works of american art and literature. based almost entirely on variations on a theme (cat loves mouse, dog loves cat, mouse throws brick, cat deems said abuse [rightly?] as a sign of love), herriman caught the essence of a country barely growing up, as well as love in all its potential manifestations. "krazy kat" can be appreciated as allegory, or it can be enjoyed simply as damned funny. this volume will allow you to have a bit of both. but oh dear, when will some brave publisher issue the entire run?
Rating:
Summary: the medium's indisputable supreme achievement
Review: Herriman was undoubtedly a genius, and this volume provides a terrific introduction to his work. But I was disappointed when I saw that Herriman's name does not appear on the spine of this new edition. Even though reprints of classic Krazy Kat strips -- all by Herriman -- make up the bulk of the book, the names of three of the volume's compilers are featured prominently on the spine, but Herriman's is not. A small complaint, admittedly. Personally, I'd rather have seen the name of the artist there, instead of -- or at the very least in addition to -- the names of three people I've never heard of.
Rating: 
Summary: A classic -- but with a spineless spine
Review: Herriman was undoubtedly a genius, and this volume provides a terrific introduction to his work. But I was disappointed when I saw that Herriman's name does not appear on the spine of this new edition. Even though reprints of classic Krazy Kat strips -- all by Herriman -- make up the bulk of the book, the names of three of the volume's compilers are featured prominently on the spine, but Herriman's is not. A small complaint, admittedly. Personally, I'd rather have seen the name of the artist there, instead of -- or at the very least in addition to -- the names of three people I've never heard of.
Rating:
Summary: Zip........POW......'Kontact'. I'm a heppy, heppy ket.
Review: I was first introduced to Krazy Kat through the auspices of the Tucson Comic News. The world of George Herriman is populated partly by lunatic creatures, partly by all-too-human struggles, and completely by his marvelously "sillygistical" prose. Herriman's art is comic strip art at its absolute best. His prose is misnamed poetry, half "found" in a strange Brooklyn patois, half lifted direct from Yeats. This book also contains a fairly funny and quite accessible biography of Herriman, though by the time you're three pages into the vast Krazy Kat kollection in the second half of the book, you'll be wishing like crazy they'd just filled the whole thing up with strips.
Rating:
Summary: KRAZY KAT IS THE FUNNIEST, MOST LUNATIC COMIC STRIP EVER!
Review: KRAZY KAT IS THE FUNNIEST, MOST LUNATIC PIECE OF COMICLITERATURE. The mechanics of Krazy Kat are time-honored anddeceptively simple: there is a cat, a mouse, a dog, and the hurling of a brick. HERE ARE A FEW COMMENTS MADE BY OTHER FAMOUSE PEOPLE IN TRIBUTE TO HERRIMAN: "an immediate progenitor of the Beat Generation and its roots could be traced back to the glee of America, the honesty of America, its wild, self-believing individuality", Jack Kerouac I discovered Krazy Kat when a large anthology of the strip was published in 1969. The book is an editorial disaster, but it did show a lot of Krazy Kat strips, and I admired the work immediately. Krazy Kat seems to be one of those strips people either love or don't get at all. Krazy Kat is nothing but variations on a simple theme, so the magic of the strip is not so much in what it says but in how it says it. Ignatz Mouse throws bricks at Krazy out of contempt, but Krazy interprets this as a gesture of affection instead. Meanwhile, the law - Offissa Pupp - futilely tries to interfere with a process that's completely satisfying to all parties for all the wrong reasons. This weird, recycling plot can be interpreted as a metaphor for love or politics - or it can just be enjoyed for its own lunatic charms. The strip constantly plays with its own form, and becomes a sort of essay on cartoon existentialism. The background scenery changes from panel to panel, and day can turn to night and back again during a brief conversation. Similarly, Herriman played with language and dialect, inserting Spanish, phonetically spelled mispronounced words, slang, and odd, alliterative phrases, giving the strip a unique atmosphere. The drawings are scratchy and peculiar, but they provide a beautiful visual context to the equally idiosyncratic writing. Krazy Kat's sparse Arizona landscape, like Pogo's dense Georgia swamp, is more than a backdrop. The land is really a character in the story, and it gives a specific mood and flavor to all the proceedings. The constraint of Krazy Kat's narrow plot seems to have set free every other aspect of the cartoon to become poetry, and the strip is, to my mind, cartooning at its most pure. The wonderful dialects and wordplays of Krazy Kat are as impossible now as the beautiful draftsmanship that characterized that strip and others. Bill Watterson(Creator of "Calvin and Hobbes") " As `Cholly Kokonino' would put it ~ The Whoest of the Whos were There. The Dimless Dames of Coconino, the Merry Wives in Full Galaxy, The Representatives of the "Desierto Pintado's" Social Apex. Drifting now to a Lower Social Level, We find `Krazy Kat' Propelled by a Great Sense, and urge of Kuriosity on his Way to the Enchanted Mesa, on Whose Topside, `Joe Stork' The Bird of Destiny, Makes his Home." - George Herriman, April 21, 1918 ... be not harsh with "Krazy" -- He is but a shadow himself, caught in the web of this mortal skein. We call him "cat", We call him "crazy", Yet he is neither. At some time he will ride away to you, people of the twilight. His password will be the echoes of a vesper bell, his coach a zephyr from the West -- Forgive him, for you will understand him no better than we who linger on this side of the pale. George Herriman 1917 BUY THIS GREAT BOOK NOW.
Rating:
Summary: the medium's indisputable supreme achievement
Review: Over the past fifteen years or so, a strange new breed of art-geek has mutated in the suburbian basements (of their parents' houses) across the American landscape; they aggressivley praise every third-rate creation in comics, trying ever so hard to convince themselves that any of them could ever matter to a serious person outside their little world. On occasion one of them will pay lip service to the genius of Herriman, a ritual that is expected of them, and then go right back to buying up the kinds of pretentious or deviant efforts produced by the current so-called masters of the medium such as Spiegleman, Clowes, Ware, McCloud, Crumb, Bagge, the Hernandez brothers, Chester Brown, and so on. The terrible shame of all this is that through this overhyping of the layer of scum that has risen to the top of the commercial pond, those precious few men of genius--Jim Woodring, Joe Sacco,and a handful of others-- that have chosen to express themselves in the medium of comics are thrown out with the proverbial bathwater by those who are intrigued enough by this sort of publicity to investigate the genre, as soon as they discover that they have been had. Herriman's books, which are all surreal masterpieces of infinitely higher consciousness, poetry, originality, beauty, truth, love (and everything else good in the universe!) than 99 percent of "fine" art and certainly all of the aforementioned funnybook fishwraps, cannot even stay in print in such an environment. For this reason, and because if you have any sensitivity at all to the sublime you will wear out your first copy and will therefore need a spare to share with your children, I advise all readers to purchase two copies of everything that has Herriman's name on it. You will find it a bargain.
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Summary: Pop art...pop life, the beginning of the 20th cent. is Krazy
Review: This is what all popular art forms should be. A social commentary as love poem. And poem this is. There is very little that someone can write about the Krazy experience without treading in the same terran as this wonderful book. This is were your Krazy love afair begins. And unlike Ignatz you don't show your love with a brick.
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