GEORGE HERRIMAN'S KRAZY KAT The Complete Color Sundays 1935-1944

For the first time ever, ten full years--632 pages--of Herriman’s Krazy Kat Sunday pages, his best and brightest work, in large 10x14 size. One of the first comics to be considered a work of art, Krazy Kat delights with its characterization and visual-verbal creativity alongside the slapstick shenanigans between Krazy and Ignatz the mouse. This book comes with an illustrated introduction by Alexander Braun. It was thanks to media tycoon William Randolph Hearst, a confirmed fan who gave Herriman carte blanche in his newspapers, that the artist was allowed to freely explore countless absurd and melancholy variations on the theme of unrequited love for years on end. Herriman unabashedly took advantage of this, radically exploring the medium’s potential and pushing all of its formal boundaries; readers had to put up with surreal, Dadaist sceneries, a language that whirled slang, neologisms, phonetic spelling, and scholarly references, plus diffuse gender roles -- making Krazy Kat probably the first gender-fluid star in comic history. The premise is simple: a black cat loves scheming a white mouse who incessantly throws bricks at the cat’s head, which police dog Officer Pupp, secretly harboring a passionate love for the cat, tries to prevent. George Herriman endlessly plays with the above formula in his legendary newspaper strip Krazy Kat, published from 1913 until his death in 1944. Through his wit, detailed characterization, and visual-verbal creativity, Herriman introduced even the least comically-inclined to the young medium; Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Pablo Picasso, James Joyce, US President Woodrow Wilson, Jackson Pollock, Charlie Chaplin, Frank Capra, P.G. Wodehouse, Willem de Kooning -- all KK fans among many others. Rush Service and International shipping could require an additional charge.