King-Cat Classix [Hardcover]

John Porcellino (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1, 2007

The definitive collection of the influential comic zine

John Porcellino has long been considered the greatest of all cartoonists coming from the self-publishing and zine movement of the early '90s. His spare approach with words and pictures focuses on the smallest of details, revealing a wealth of meaning and emotion in everyday events that most of us overlook in our daily hustle and bustle. Since 1989, he has released more than sixty-five issues of his self-published comic King-Cat Comics and Stories. This large collection focuses on the first fifty issues, with extensive endnotes and an index, along with selections of all the extra ephemera that makes an individual issue of King-Cat its own unique experience--essays, articles, stories, and letters from friends. Included are more than two hundred and fifty pages of comics, ranging from Porcellino's earliest scrawls to his later, perfectly minimalist delineations. The comics range through all of his concerns--family, family pets, the natural world, work, music, romance. This book presents an artist who always knew what he wanted to do. King-Cat Classics shows Porcellino's confidence and skill as it grows steadily through the past fifteen years.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

For 18 years, Porcellino has self-published King-Cat Comix. Two books of extracts, Perfect Example (1999), about his stressful eighteenth year, and Diary of a Mosquito Abatement Man (2005), about a summer gig during college, vaulted him into the front ranks of autobiographical comics creators. Now here's a heaping helping of the rest of King-Cat, with 15 pages of annotations (including more comics) appended to make the book as impressively self-reflexive as Andrew Boyd and Ryan Yount's Scurvy Dogs (2005--hard to beat those notes). The book contains many more of Porcellino's dream stories, some of the most dreamlike in all comics (Rick Veitch develops his dreams much more elaborately--see Crypto Zoo, 2004--but they're much more diffuse). Porcellino started King-Cat intending never to censor himself or record things unimportant to him. He is as unabashedly unzipped as James Kochalka (American Elf, 2004), though not as often. Some stories are fictional, such as the adventures of Racky Raccoon, and all are drawn with a bold line and lots of white, like Peanuts drained of detail. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

"Punk rock was a revelation to the young John Porcellino, showing him that anyone could make art without formal education or technical virtuosity. However, unlike many people who have taken this lesson to heart, Porcellino is a born artist, someone whose nerve endings seem more sensitive to both the pain and the mystery at the center of this existence." --Baltimore City Paper

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Drawn and Quarterly; First Edition edition (May 1, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1894937910
• ISBN-13: 978-1894937917
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.4 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,181,839 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

John Porcellino was born in Chicago in 1968, and began drawing and writing at an early age, compiling his work into little hand-made booklets. His acclaimed self-published zine, King-Cat Comics and Stories, begun in 1989, has found a devoted worldwide audience, and is one of the most influential comics series of the past twenty years. In the words of cartoonist Chris Ware, "John Porcellino's comics distill, in just a few lines and words, the feeling of simply being alive."

For more information, please visit www.king-cat.net.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Zen, exhilirating, intimate--the everyman's story, December 5, 2007

By 

Esther (WOODSIDE, NY, United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

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This review is from: King-Cat Classix (Hardcover)

King Cat Classix is a "selected works" of John P's past ten years' of work, and it is a hefty book! I couldn't wait for it to come out and read other reviewers, but now I'm honored to be the first. This tome is full of comics ranging from dreams, childhood memories, Zen parables, elegies to his dog Sam, animals.... a collection of mini-memoirs that add up the life of an ordinary working class man brought up in the midwest and is now in Colorado. I called his previous book, Mosquito Abatement Man, a bizarre slice of midwestern life, but the Classix is a gentler work, thoughtful, inquisitive and passionate about the woods, mountains, lakes. His earlier work is rendered in scrawling, cruder line, but full of energy and rage, and his later work calms to minimalism and simple elegance.

Reading Porcellino, you truly get a feeling you know the man. Or better yet, you ARE the man, working through daily life, writing Top-40 lists, watching autumn leaves fall--getting totally drunk. The intimacy to his work is a rare and exceptional thing. There are shades of Harvey Pekar here, but also the Beats, Hemingway, the early modern greats of American lit. The Classix is such an expansive book that you can dip in at any point and read a lyric about winter, or about adolescent Porcellino experiencing the first anxieties about girls. Yet everything is done with sincerity, honesty and a painful sort of clarity. Real life doesn't get realer.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I agree--this is excellent!, February 2, 2008

By 

Mfragin - See all my reviews

This review is from: King-Cat Classix (Hardcover)

Picked up this book because I like how brutally honest comix can be. This is no exception. Porcellino's minimalist drawings really convey a touching story.

Included in here is the entire all-Sam issue, which he created to pay tribute to his childhood yellow lab. If you can read that section without crying, you're tougher than I am--what a touching tribute.

Porcellino comes from a Do It Yourself generation. It's no wonder he was inspired by the Minutemen, as another title for this could have been "This Book Could Be Your Life." There are a lot of memories packed into this book.