Description

Krazy Kat & Ignatz: George Herriman Library 1928-1930

Hardcover – Fantagraphics – May 2025 – 200 pages

In this volume: What profound insights can Krazy glean from an art exhibit of the old masters? What happens when Krazy applies for a job as a debt collector and discovers the biggest debtor is Ignatz? What’s with all the balloons? And volcanos? Why is a giraffe wandering lost in the desert? Where will the unending travels of Mr. Bum Bill Bee take him? Is it fate or is it fake? These are just some of the questions that are beside the point in this collection of these hauntingly surreal, yet amazingly tender/violent adventures of Krazy Kat, Ignatz, and Offisa Pup.

With incisive essays by Herriman scholars, and reproductions of rare Herriman ephemera, this entry in our ongoing series makes it plain to Herriman fans and newcomers alike why historians, scholars, and cartoonists consider this to be the best comic strip ever created and why The Comics Journal proclaimed it to be “the greatest comic strip of the 20th Century.”

For those just joining us: Krazy Kat is an ongoing story of a (head-) achingly unrequited love triangle. Krazy adores Ignatz, who returns that affection by launching literal bricks at Krazy’s cranium. Offisa Pup loves Krazy and seeks to protect “her” (Herriman always maintained that Krazy is genderless) by tossing Ignatz in the pokey. With this deceptively simple structure, Herriman builds entire worlds of meaning into the actions, building thematic depth and sweeping his readers up with the looping verbal and visual rhythms of his characters’ unique dialogue and his loopy, ever-shifting surrealistic backgrounds.