Krazy Kat Collection: Selected Sunday Strips 1918–1919

There are certain seminal works that authors, painters, sculptors, and other creators will refer to when describing their own artistic development. The mix is different for different people, but for many writers and cartoonists one of the works that keeps coming up is George Herriman's "Krazy Kat" strips. This excellent collection helped me understand why.Right off the bat, while these were published in 1918 and 1919, there is nothing old-fashioned about them. Or at least nothing on the negative side of old-fashioned. I have a certain nostalgia for the old newspaper strips, but a lot of them are almost unreadable, at least in quantity, unless you're something of a historian. I'm thinking of strips like "Bringing Up Father", (aka "Jiggs and Maggie"), which was a contemporary of "Krazy Kat", or of "Joe Palooka" or "Alley Oop". Those last two may have given us a nickname for a punch-drunk boxer and a hit novelty song, but they didn't age well."Krazy Kat", though, has not only aged well, but improved with age. The titular hero is gender fluid. Think about that for a second. This was in 1918, and it has taken us a full century to circle back to that simple character concept. The language of the characters is an amalgam of accents, languages, and dialects. The vocabulary is beyond anything you'll find in a newspaper today. The author's asides and marginal observations make this a meta-comic before anyone ever thought of meta anything. And the author is always going for something purer and more universal than simply a punchline.So, this is a treat and well worth the effort it takes to time travel back to an era that not only allowed but applauded daring and sophisticated comic work like this. A nice find; Ignatz and I give it four bricks.(Please note that I received a free advance will-self-destruct-in-x-days Adobe Digital copy of this book without a review requirement, or any influence regarding review content should I choose to post a review. Apart from that I have no connection at all to either the author or the publisher of this book.)