It is a rare thing indeed when aficionados of the 2D art so humbly referred to as the comic strip and critics who normally opine on what's subjectively and divisively called "high art" come to an agreement on anything, but one work dating from the first half of the 20th Century has continually managed to do just that: George Herriman's Krazy Kat.
Should you doubt the truth of what I've stated above, thinking, "Cricky, you're even more of a nutjob than I thought," I point you to art critic Gilbert Seldes' gushing tribute "The Krazy Kat That Walks By Himself" included in his 1924 tome The Seven Lively Arts and E. E. Cummings--or e. e. cummings if you're the fancy type--who wrote an introduction to a collection of the strips published in 1946.
Since Herriman's death sixty-five years ago, numerous publishers have taken up the task of collecting and reprinting the Krazy Kat strips, which ran from 1913 to 1944. Those brave enough to press their printers into the service of reprinting the full page strips have done so in a one- or two-year per volume format, including the now defunct Eclipse Comics, the equally dead Kitchen Sink Press and the still kicking Fantagraphics Books. With such a hiccupy history, it's no wonder that some reprint editions of the early strips have slipped out of print, making their price tags climb at an exponential rate. So what's a Krazy Kat lover to do?
Enter editor extraordinaire Dan Schierl, our pal for the ages and devotee of all things good about comics and graphic novels, and his one volume collection Peregrinating the Highway of Dreams--the kompleat public domain Krazy Kat sunday strips 1916-1922. Published under Colbeck Labs and currently available for purchase through Lulu, this book is a remarkable collection of Herriman's weekly full page strips originally published between April 23, 1916 and December 31, 1922, which makes 'em all public domain.
The premise of Krazy Kat can be quickly summarized thusly: A friendly, warm hearted cat of indeterminate gender--Krazy Kat--is in love with a suspicious, brick throwing mouse--Ignatz--whose violent tendencies toward the feline are sometimes thwarted by a concerned, badge wearing dog--Officer Pupp--who's in love with the friendly, warm hearted cat--Krazy Kat. It's the greatest illustrated love triangle of anthropomorphized critters ever!
With its deceptively simple story line, slapstick humor, unusual layout, and heavy combined use of the vernacular and the poetic, Krazy Kat didn't receive a five star rating from the public during its 30 year run--"too weird" was the popular consensus. But what general readers of the funnies missed, many artists and intellectuals got and praised. It also didn't hurt that an all-important publishing magnet of the time, William Randolph Hearst, loved it and refused to let it die. Hearst, as you may or may not be aware, was the Rupert Murdoch media mogul of his day and he was just as loony.
Anyhoo, as a huge fan of Krazy Kat, Dan has worked extremely hard in his efforts to search for, gather and compile these early strips so that others may enjoy seven consecutive years of Herriman's surreal work in just one volume and at a reasonable price. Some of the out-of-print reprint editions sell for upwards of $100 these days and that's for only one year's worth of strips. Outrageous.
Even the best of friends find communication through the Internets™ to be highly effective, so I asked Dan a few questions about his motivations and the process of pulling the book together. I don't normally go for Q&A formatting, but in this case I believe Dan's exact words make for a highly interesting read. Also, it's got tons of nerdy-cool appeal and we all dig that, right? Yes indeedy!
Dan: I saw myself as an archivist, not of the original, physical copies of the work, but of the comic strips themselves. They've been in the public domain for a very long time, but have been difficult to see all of them together in one place. The project started when I found some of the strips online. There were small collections of the Sunday strips, but after seeing these I said "yeah, but i want to see ALL of them!" I was able to get my hands on some of the Eclipse reprints in paperback, but I found the printing to be not so good--lots of smudged words. But they were able to give a timeline--which strips were printed when. I found some of the strips by looking through old newspaper archives...i was able to find out which papers carried Krazy Kat (primarily papers owned by Hearst), and then tracked down libraries that had these old papers on microfilm.
Mostly, I did this for my own amusement. But once I had most of the public domain strips gathered in one place, it occurred to me that other people might want to see these, as well.
Cricky: What kinds of challenges did you face in the process?
Dan: One was keeping everything in chronological order...different sources might date a certain strip on different days. Apparently it was up to the individual editors on which days strips ran, so they did get out of order sometimes. Also, it was a little disturbing to notice, late in the process, occasional repeats of strips. When George Herriman was on vacation and hadn't worked ahead, often times the editors would just throw in an old strip as a replacement. As Herriman once pointed out, "All my stuff is pretty much the same, so nobody will notice anyway!"
And yeah, lots of cleanup in Photoshop...
Cricky: How much work was it to get all the strips to a high quality, print worthy image value?
Dan: Getting the strips to match in quality, size etc wasn't really difficult, but it was tedious. Early in the strip Herriman did a lot of experiments with half-tone shading, which didn't always reproduce well when scanned, printed, and then scanned again. I did the best I could to make the results presentable.
Cricky: The strip was launched in 1913, correct? If so, why did you decide to start your reprint collection in 1916?
Dan: The strip started as a daily in 1913, but also became a Sunday strip in April 1916. When I started collecting these, I noticed that these were all in black and white, and assumed that either I was looking at cheap reprints, or that color sunday strips were a more recent innovation. However, it turns out neither of these was true--I dunno how far back the color sunday comics tradition goes, but it was in place already by 1916. However, newspaper editors were already hesitant to print the strip, and really balked when the sunday strip showed up (since the editors never really understood the strip, they assumed nobody else did, either), Hearst decided that Krazy Kat sunday strips would run in the Theater section of the paper, and hence, in black and white. I guess the assumption was that only more refined folks read the Theater section, so they would probably understand the strip better than the folks that just read the Comics section. As it turns out, it was finally moved to the comics page and in color in 1936.
So there ya have it, people. A project that could only stem from the admiration and devotion of a true fan, and now available to you in either paperback or as a download.
Buy your copy of Peregrinating the Highway of Dreams--the kompleat public domain Krazy Kat sunday strips 1916-1922 now and grin a Krazy Kat grin!
