Review by Woodrow Phoenix
This third hardcover volume of the The George Herriman Library: Krazy & Ignatz reprints three more years of the Krazy Kat newspaper strip’s weekly Sunday pages, from January 1, 1922 to December 28, 1924. These are in black and white, but interspersed among January, February and March’s pages for 1922 are ten full colour strips. For ten weeks, Herriman drew these colour one-pagers for the Saturday New York Journal, in addition to the ongoing Sunday one-page black and white strips appearing in other Hearst papers.
You can see from their arrangement in this book that the Saturday New York Journal was a larger size than the other papers where the Sundays were published. And another difference is these strips also have ‘toppers’: a panel above the title where ads or other copy would often be placed. In this case, the topper is an extra cartoon by Herriman. An insert box says “This most amusing comic, ‘Krazy Kat’, appears every day in the New York Evening Journal”. It’s interesting to see how delicately the colour is applied to the drawings here, compared to the more robust approach Herriman would take when his Krazy Kat pages went permanently into colour every Sunday ten years later.
The reasons behind that full colour experiment are explained by Bill Blackbeard in his introduction to this volume, along with a look at the production of a ‘jazz pantomime’ ballet based on Krazy Kat which premiered in a New York theatre in 1922 to smash-hit reviews and sold-out performances. Herriman illustrated the piano score book published afterwards and those drawings telling the ballet’s story along with program notes, are reproduced here.
A second essay accompanies another historic find: a previously lost Herriman series, possibly his first continuing strip, ‘Mrs. Waitaminnit—the Woman Who Is Always Late’. The twenty examples shown here were printed daily through September and October 1903 in the New York Evening World, featuring a married couple, James and Hortense. James is constantly irritated by Hortense’s slowness and we see them in a variety of domestic and social situations as he attempts to hurry her up. Other rarities in this volume include an example of a special Krazy Kat page created in 1922 for a Hearst tabloid Sunday supplement, a ‘children’s activity section’ called Book of Magic. Each page of drawings was black and white, but if children brushed water over the pages, colours would be revealed. The reds and blues of these pages are not as vivid as they would have appeared in 1922 but they still look striking. More samples of Herriman’s ‘magic’ pages appear in the next volume. There are also three examples of Stumble Inn, another Herriman strip produced between October and December 2, 1922 for the New York Evening Journal.
Anyone encountering Krazy Kat for the first time may need a little help in understanding just why it’s acclaimed as one of the greatest comic strips ever created. Spend a while with these volumes, supported by the excellent quality of the research that puts Herriman and his world into context, and you’ll get it. The riches continue to pour forth in Krazy & Ignatz 1925-1927.
