Review by Woodrow Phoenix
The beautifully designed and produced fourth hardcover volume of the complete Krazy Kat Sunday newspaper pages by George Herriman, Krazy & Ignatz 1925-1927 has a more sober look to its layouts than seen in the previous three volumes. The first seven months of 1925 are the usual array of ingenious and extraordinary arrangements of imagery, with panels of varying shapes and sizes in fascinating compositions. However, from August 1925 Herriman’s publisher and number one fan William Randolph Hearst decided to try reformatting the strip in a larger size to make a greater impact on readers of the New York Evening Journal, by running eight enlarged panels across a spread. The other Hearst papers were allowed to continue printing Krazy Kat as a single tabloid page as usual, which meant rearranging the eight panels into a grid. This design left a ‘hole’ in the centre tier, and this hole was filled with random decorative drawings by Herriman which had nothing to do with whatever the story might be, which is undoubtedly a little confusing until you realise what’s going on.
Being confined to a strict grid meant Herriman was creating his Sunday pages with one hand tied behind his back, but even with the restrictions on page design these enormously skilful strips are just as clever and engaging in their arrangement of the basic building blocks of his premise.
The three main characters are a cat called Krazy, who secretly loves a mouse called Ignatz; Offisa Pupp, a police dog who secretly loves Krazy and mistrusts Ignatz, and Ignatz who has no respect for the law or Offisa Pupp, and pelts Krazy with bricks because it’s a satisfying activity. None of them knows how the other two really feels, so the stories revolve around continuous misreading of each other’s motives and the various ingenious ways that each tries to get what they need. Herriman spins endless variations on this theme and continually invents new angles on the relationship between the three, the schemes and plots that Ignatz and Offisa Pupp invent, and the ways that Krazy can go from a central to an incidental part of the action. It takes a while for readers new to Krazy Kat to understand why any of this should be so highly praised because the strip works on a process of accumulation. The more variations on the central theme, the funnier and more impressive it becomes. Every repeated reading of this work increases the richness of it, and there is a lot of detail in the drawing, the backgrounds and the characters that repays close observation.
Extras in this volume include examples of more strips by Herriman; a reprint of the storybook accompanying the ‘Jazz Pantomine’ created by musician and composer John Alden Carpenter; an article and sample pages from the Book of Magic, an activity book for children; piano sheet music for the ‘Krazy Kat Rag’, and more. This is a truly superb packaging and restoration of one of the most highly lauded of all American comics, and there’s more to come in Krazy & Ignatz 1928-1930.
