Kat's book

Taschen is to be congratulated for publishing this sumptuous reprint of all the Krazy Kat Sunday color strips. This large book (check out the dimensions at the top of the page) allows anyone to enjoy the remarkable weekly story of a cat, mouse and a policeman. Put like that one would think what's all the fuss about but it's George Herriman's genius to make these three characters and others, too, come alive and entertain millions of readers week after week.

Alexander Braun's lengthy, illustrated essay is excellent in providing the story of Herriman and Krazy Kat. I enjoyed reading it because Braun places the strip in the cultural context of the times. There references to Soviet suprematism art, Georgia O'Keeffe's desert paintings, Navajo rug designs and details about newspaper printing techniques. This last item is interesting because the strip from October 6, 1935, was reprinted in June 26, 1938 (Herriman was in hospital for an operation) but with completely different colors, created by someone in the production department of King Features.

There is so much to enjoy in the strips. The name of the strip has a different treatment each week, Sunday, May 18, 1941, has KRAZY KAT as washing hanging on a line in a desert landscape. From Sunday, December 11 1938 until the last one on June, 25, 1944 there is a thin strip of art not necessarily connected to the story but a cartoon in a cartoon. The panels followed the conventional comic format but Herriman frequently broke away from that and introduced angled, circular, or irregular-shaped ones.  June 4, 1939 was just one huge drawing of the front of the jail with the mouse looking out of an upstairs window. Something that everyone looks at are the backgrounds of the panels, frequently they are the shapes of rocks in the Arizona desert but they could look like boats, buildings or trees. Sunday, October 29, 1939, featured the Trylon and Perisphere from that year's New York World's Fair.

As well as the unique art Herriman created his own strip language in the speech bubbles, full of phonetic spelling, alliteration and possible poetic sentences. Even the spelling of the strip's name gives a sense of fun he had with his page every week. I wonder what the readers made of it all because it was so different from anything else in the Sunday comic supplements. It's a credit to William Randolph Hearst who decided on Herriman's death in 1944 that the strip would die with him. No one could possibly take his place. 

The book is beautifully produced. Braun's front-of-book essay is on a whiter paper than the strips. Each of the ten-year chapters is introduced with a massive spread wide blow-up of part of a strip. The book's large size and weight mean it can only be enjoyed on a table.