Krazy and Ignatz, 1943-1944: "He Nods in Quiescent Siesta" (Krazy Kat) (Paperback)

by George Herriman (Author), Bill Blackbeard (Editor)

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist
The lavish reprinting of Krazy Kat Sunday color installments reaches the end of the strip’s three-decade run (further volumes will corral early, uncollected black-and-white examples). Herriman’s health had long been declining, but only the last few weeks of Krazy Kat show any diminution of his skill. If the final Sundays show a slight visual simplification of characters and backgrounds, the exquisite design and clever wordplay remain sharp as ever. When Herriman died of nonalcoholic cirrhosis in 1944, Krazy Kat ended, too. The syndicate wisely saw that the brilliantly unorthodox cartoonist was irreplaceable. --Gordon Flagg

Review
A testament to the creative power of the comic book form. (Tony Brownfield -Newsarama )

Endlessly perplexing, energetic, deep, and playful. (Sarah Boxer -New York Review of Books )

So damn deep, so damn wonderful and so damnably us (Laurel Maury -Los Angeles Times )

The exquisite design and clever wordplay remain sharp as ever. (Gordon Flagg -Booklist )

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 120 pages
• Publisher: Fantagraphics Books (October 8, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1560979321
• ISBN-13: 978-1560979326
• Product Dimensions: 11.9 x 9 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #271,059 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Resolution of a Long Sonorous Cadence..., October 4, 2008

By	ewomack "ewomack" (MN USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

Let's recap this heroic tale, shall we?

Way back in the now rather crusty year of 1988, an obscure publisher called Eclipse grasped the reins of a Quixotic quest. They set out, sans astrolabe and almost no backwind, to publish all of George Herriman's illustrious eye candy know to komic fanatics as "The Krazy Kat Sunday Pages." That first slim volume contained some trepidation in its accompanying essays: "...the problems of establishing a complete run of Sunday Krazy pages can prove to be a real nightmare for any enterprising archivist... no Hearst newspaper archive offers the student a complete record of Herriman's achievement." So, busier than Bum Bill Bee, the editors and archivists set out to spackle the gaping holes in the primary sources. They dubbed this series, thankfully spelled korrectly, "The Komplete Kat Komics." Culling from multifarious sources, they managed to release nine volumes, stretching from 1916 to 1924, of rich tapestries of lost history. Intriguing titles such as "The Limbo Of Useless Unconsciousness," "Sure As Moons Is Cheese," and "Inna Yott On the Muddy Geranium" graced each issue. Sadly, the vicissitudes of publishing, the free market, and the costs of undertaking such an epic journey took their toll. In 1992 Eclipse published their last volume, unbeknownst to readers that it was the last. Oh, tribulation! These pencil thin books instantly became collectors items, sometimes fetching three figures for a single volume. The quest seemed at a dusty and humiliating end.

Ten years passed. [fill in with appropriate memories of Krazy Kat gap anguish]

Then, just as all hope coagulated, the year 2002 arrived with a fog-cutting beacon: Fantagraphics, the magnanimous king of classic comics, announced the exhumation of the Krazy Kat Sunday Series. Aptly titled "There is a Heppy Land, Fur Fur Awa-a-ay," this volume picked up right where Eclipse dropped off. The difference: these volumes had twice the thickage. Two years of Sunday pages were packed into these colorful bales of manna rather than one. This heppy land presented 1925-1926 along with essays and the triumphant return of editor Bill Blackbeard, who was also present at the christening of the Eclipse series. As joy permeated the streets, Fantagraphics bravely steered this series through financial problems, research snafus and the additional burden of color, excuse me, kolor, beginning in 2005 with the 1935-1936 volume. Tasty tidbits such as intriguing essays, Herriman art, and even the occasional daily strip permeated the installments. But the nagging question lingered: would they make it to the end? Would Fantagraphics fall into the same pit as Eclipse? Drama is as drama does.

With this latest release a resounding YES! echoes off the valleys of Coconino County. Finally, some twenty years later a complete run of the beautifully beguiling Krazy Kat Sunday pages has popped into existence. Those who possess all volumes possess everything Sunday from 1916 - 1944. Krazy. They did it. Yay!

But of course when the fanfare dies out and the joy-inebriated crowd disperses, humbling finitude descends. Though the series is happily complete the series is also sadly complete. No more new volumes await drooling Krazy Kat fanatics. The polymorphous nature of reality strikes again!

On an equally sad note, this wonderful volume also shows Herriman's melancholy decline. Bad health plagued his final years and his penlines and storylines manifest his suffering as 1944 unfurls. The final pages of June 1944 have a creepy, oblique, and ominous tone. Unlike the equally acclaimed Peanuts gang, the group at Coconino County never said goodbye. Herriman passed from this world with strips still unfinished on his drawing board (included in this issue's first section along with an essay on his final years). Nonetheless, these years still contain some great unmissable material that's up to the usual snuff, though the brick beaning had become largely suggestive by this point. Plus, this volume burgeons with additional material: handpainted strips, photos, a foldout page, Walt Disney's letter of condolence to Herriman's daughter, and a final epitaph.

Fantagraphics has showed great kindness to Krazy Kat fans worldwide. They have given this strip, one of the greatest of all strips, the attention and wide release it has always deserved. Poetic justice, too. Krazy Kat was widely neglected in its later years as Hearst editors tried to extinguish it from their paper's pages. Those editors would likely be shocked at the illustriousness of this twenty year series and the fortitude shown in reprinting the strip so many of them derided. In the end, the challenge was met. It is accomplished.

Now to end on a happier note. Perhaps things are not at an end. This volume reiterates the promise made back in 2002 of reprinting the Eclipse series. This will apparently happen in "three fat volumes." Plus, suggestions of daily strip reprints and volumes of Herriman's other work waft in the introduction by Bill Blackbeard. Hope remains. Keep watch, and celebrate this, the resolution of a long sonorous cadence.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Finally, the last volume (sort of) in this long series., October 14, 2008

By	Michael R. Brown (Boca Raton, FL) - See all my reviews

Long being a fan of Krazy Kat, but there being no comprehensive collection of the strips (sundays or dailies), I was happy many years ago when Eclipse started to reprint all the sundays.

Then they went belly up, after only 5 volumes (which I have).

Thankfully, a few years ago, Fantagraphics took up the mantle, this time with larger and more elaboratly design volumes, twice the size as Eclipse. They didn't bother to reprint the stuff Eclipse had done (promising to do those later), and started into the rest.

With this volume, they've finally completed the last of the KK Sundays.

But in some cases, it should not be the last. They've promised to go back and re-publish the stuff in those early Eclipse volumes in 3 new ones in this series (which I look forward too!), AND reprint what dailies are out there. The dailies are an unknown area for me. I'm uncertain how long they lasted, and I understand they are incomplete out there. There have been a few reprint volumes of them, but I always avoided them, wanted a more comprehensive collection. I hope we get that, but I have no idea how the one daily collection Fantagraphics has done so far will fit into that.

PLUS, Fantagraphics plans to reprint all of Herriman's other strips, which also have seen reprints in only bit or pieces, or in lesser known collections. What fun!!

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Sunset over Coconino County, March 24, 2009

By	Christopher Barat - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

With this volume, Herriman's great comic-strip opus (the full-page version of it, anyway) grinds to a somewhat weary, but nonetheless ingenious-to-the-end, halt. Herriman died of a liver ailment in April 1944, and the final full-page strip (the original of which I've seen in Geppi's Entertainment Museum in Baltimore) appeared on June 25 of that same year. As Bill Blackbeard points out in a brief foreword, you can definitely sense Herriman's weakening powers in the last month or two of strips. While the composition remains strong, the figure drawing becomes less and less assured, and the gags, of increasing obscurity ever since the late 1930s, become positively inscrutable. Since Herriman had become a virtual recluse by the time of his death, the effect is that of a striking but fragile seasonal flower slowly closing and crumpling as its time of growth expires. I'd seen a number of these late strips in black and white form, but only in the poor reproductions in the 1946 Henry Holt collection, and they do indeed have a rather mournful quality to them even when seen "unobscured" and whole.

In order to fill out a volume that would otherwise have been rather slender, Fantagraphics asked the readers of its KAT collections to send in any Herriman memorabilia that had not previously appeared in its pages. Well, the Kats certainly came crawling out of the woodwork in response, and we get to see everything from a curious "Big Little Book" version of KRAZY KAT from the mid-30s (if this was meant to be sold to contemporary kids, then they were probably as baffled as the kids of the mid-60s who watched the Gene Deitch King Features cartoons, given how few papers the strip appeared in by that time) to a 1930's souvenir paper bag featuring an "unauthorized" Kat that's at least 15-20 years out of date with Herriman's then-current model. More substantial, and aesthetically pleasing, are the numerous hand-tinted strips and gift drawings that Herriman created for friends and acquaintances. All of these date from the late 1930s or earlier, indicating just how completely Herriman isolated himself post-1940. (We do get a drawing that Herriman made for his daughter's 40th birthday to make up some of the difference.)

Happily, Fantagraphics plans to reissue the KRAZY KAT volumes produced by Eclipse Comics that reprinted the full-page strips before 1925, so the full-blown version of the Kat will soon be coming back. I have my fingers and "toze" crossed that the announced plans to reprint the KRAZY KAT dailies will also come to pass. Fantagraphics has done a great job with this series, especially given the paucity of surviving material on Herriman, and I salute them for their worthy efforts to preserve this great comics masterpiece.