MORE KRAZINESS

Fantagraphics reached a temporary plateau in its Krazy Kat project in July 2008 with the tenth volume of Krazy & Ignatz, completing with these 1944 strips (George Herriman’s last) the Sunday reprinting project launched in 1988 by Eclipse, which brought its series through 1924 in 9 volumes. The Fanta book (120 9x12-inch full-color pages; paperback, $19.99) prints not only the last Sunday (published June 25, 1944), an eerily prescient episode about Krazy’s near death by drowning, but two unfinished dailies found after Herriman’s death on his drawing board — inked but not lettered, ghostly pencil lines lurking behind the inks. Alas, Fantagraphics opted to print these strips at what appears to be their actual size, which results in their straddling the gutter, effectively obliterating much of the center panel.

Like all the other volumes in this series, the book showcases extra-curricular color drawings that Herriman made for friends and family (birthday and anniversary “cards”) and two charming page-size strips he did for Vanity Fair in 1930, plus the customary “debaffler page” whereon Bill Blackbeard, Kim Thompson, and Jeet Heer explain otherwise obscure references in some of the strips. Heer, with Michael Tisserand, also supplies this volume’s introduction, “Herriman’s Last Days,” which, unaccountably, fails to note the actual date of his demise (April 24, 1944). The essay, however, does offer insights from Herriman’s granddaughter, Dinah (Dee) Cox, who, at age 74, is surrounded by much Krazy memorabilia, “including a Navajo rug bearing the cartoonist’s name.”

Cox was nine when her grandfather died, but she remembers how he lived in his last years: “When I knew him, he was a recluse. His daughter — my mother — had died [in late 1939], and his wife [Mabel] had died [killed in an automobile accident in September 1931]. Then he had a Japanese houseboy who got hauled off to the internment camps. The only person left for him was my Aunt Toots.” At the end of his life, she said, he retreated more and more into his work: “Coconino County and that strip was his reality. He was totally immersed into this world that he created.”

Fanta is also re-visiting the years covered by the Eclipse books (1916-24) in order to produce a uniform set of Krazy for the entire run of the Sundays. The first volume, subtitled “Love in a Kestle or Love in a Hut,”reprints the 1916-1918 Sundays and includes rare art, notes about the Kat’s creation, and the usual “debaffler” end notes.