160-page black & white/color 9" x 12" softcover • $24.99 ISBN: 978-1-60699-316-3
Comics Comics' Joe McCulloch describes it thusly: "This is a new Fantagraphics softcover collecting the earliest Krazy Kat Sunday pages, thus looping this most venerable Golden Age of Reprints project around to material Eclipse covered one year at a time back in the late ’80s (the Fanta effort began with 1925, where Eclipse left off). I think this one should include three of the ’80s volumes, thus topping out at 160 pages, with the original supplements preserved, but also updated annotations and a new Chris Ware design." Douglas Wolk at Comics Alliance: "In which Fantagraphics' splendid Krazy Kat Sunday strip reprint program loops back around to the beginning of the series' run, previously reprinted by Eclipse/Turtle Island about twenty years ago. This edition also features a brief portfolio of some of the appearances of a little black cat in George Herriman's pre-Krazy comic strips, and a few other curiosities from the early days of the strip." Tom Spurgeon, The Comics Reporter: "Still the greatest comic. The design on this is like it's the ninja issue of the series." Cyriaque Lamar of io9 takes note: "the classic cat-and-mouse series gets the paperback treatment."
Our customary PDF excerpt and video/photo slideshow is available at the link above. Your local shop can confirm availability.
FANTAGRAPHICS BOOKS AND ROSEBUD ARCHIVES ANNOUNCE PARTNERSHIP, LAUNCHING WEB SALES OF RARE AND BEAUTIFUL CARTOON ART IN A VARIETY OF FORMATS
SEATTLE WA, / DUMONT NJ, APRIL 8, 2010 --- Fantagraphics Books and Rosebud Archives have announced an agreement to market a wide variety of products related to vintage comics and posters, historical cartoons, advertising images, and illustration. The product lines will include prints, posters, framed art, books, stationery, and a hybrid format called the Rosebud PadFolio. The products are available for sale immediately on Fantagraphics.com:
“We are proud to be allied with Fantagraphics, whose commitment to quality and the advancement of the graphics arts has been notable for decades,” announced Rosebud Archives founding partners Rick Marschall and Jonathan Barli. “Our own commitment to preservation, restoration, and high historical standards are a perfect match with Fantagraphics.”
The core of Rosebud Archives’ image bank is arguably America’s largest private resource of comics-based popular culture, the collection of Rick Marschall, to which is added the collections of Jonathan Barli and several other major sources in the US and in Europe. Barli, veteran proprietor of Digital Funnies, is a specialist in restoration and themed compilations of cartoon art. He is a graduate of the School of Visual Arts.
Rosebud Archives releases will also include collectors’ editions of artwork created for, and featured in, Fantagraphics publications, including The Comics Journal and Nemo magazine. “The availability of Rosebud’s customized art objects is a perfect complement to the Marschall Books imprint we previously announced,” said Fantagraphics President Gary Groth. “Rick Marschall’s imprint will be a series of substantial volumes by individual cartoonists, thematic anthologies, and cultural collections of cartoon-related imagery. Rosebud will produce customized and short-run cartoons in various popular formats, which we’re very happy to provide on our website.”
Rosebud Archives was established in 2009 and has already released several lines of products that reflect the company’s vision. These early releases feature the work of George Herriman, ZIM, and Charles Dana Gibson; cartoon series by Gluyas Williams; prints of cartoons by Winsor McCay, Harrison Cady, and John T McCutcheon; and special art by Cliff Sterrett, George McManus, and Milt Gross. Specialty items include a “Krazy Kat” triptych and a Limited Edition portfolio of Marlene Dietrich photographic portraits. Boxed editions of works by great black-and-white cartoonists are issued under Rosebud’s “Shwartz and Weiss” imprint. Stationary items include notecards, postcards, and envelopes. Framed, frame-ready, and gallery-wrapped prints are also offered. The Rosebud Padfolio is a bound portfolio with detachable prints, a uniquely devised format.
Rosebud Archives offers its products on its own website (www.rosebudarchives.com), and has made all products available on the Fantagraphics Books website (www.fantagraphics.com). “A perfect synergy of serving the sophisticated comics connoisseur, and reaching collectors far and wide with proven integrity,” is how Marschall characterized the agreement between the two companies. Fantagraphics’ website offers all its books — by such cartoonists as R. Crumb, George Herriman, Charles Schulz, Hal Foster, Basil Wolverton, Gahan Wilson, Steve Ditko, Robert Williams, Daniel Clowes, Jim Woodring, Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez, and many others— directly to consumers. “We have tried to publish the best cartooning in the world, and Rosebud’s beautifully conceived art objects fits right into our aesthetic,” said Groth.
When Fantagraphics launched our collection of Krazy Kat Sunday strips back in 2002, we picked up with the 10th and 11th years of the legendary strip (1925-1926) because another publisher had already collected the first nine during the 1980s and 1990s. But now, with that publisher long gone and their Krazy Kat collections fetching record prices (some over $100!) among collectors, it’s time to go back and get every one of these comic-strip masterpieces back into print — re-scanned and re-retouched from original tearsheets, using 21st century digital resources.
Fantagraphics will be collecting these first nine years of Sundays into three volumes comprising three years apiece, starting with the very first Sundays from 1916 through 1918, and incorporating all the original articles and special features from the first edition, including rare art, series editor Bill Blackbeard’s definitive historical overview “The Kat’s Kreation,” and updated and expanded “DeBaffler” endnotes explaining some of the arcana behind the strip’s jokes.
Krazy Kat, with its eternally beguiling love triangle of kat/dog/mouse, its fantastically inventive language, and its haunting, minimalist desert décor, has consistently been rated (literally) the best comic strip ever created, and Fantagraphics’ award-winning series one of the best classic comic-strip reprint series ever published. Krazy and Ignatz 1916-1918, the 11th of a projected 13 volumes collecting the entirety of the Sundays, brings us within a brick’s throw of finishing “The Komplete Kat Sundays” once and for all!
Download an EXCLUSIVE 15-page PDF excerpt (2.4 MB).
We will, as is customary, be bringing you better-quality and greater-in-quantity photo and video previews in the near future. Our Twitter and Facebook followers are first to get these glimpses, so the impatient among you are encouraged to add us to your feeds there.
• Review: "The packaging... is brilliant and the actual product is no less magnificent. The quality that Fantagraphics put into [Portable Grindhouse: The Lost Art of the VHS Box] is top-notch. The card and paper stock could not be more perfect. The high resolution pictures and scans of each of the films are almost like you are holding the original. ... This is a 'must-have' for genre fans, collectors and art lovers alike." – Cinesploitation
• Review: "Huizenga delivers a quiet tour de force [in Ganges #3] that shows confident cartooning that thrills through its ease and craftsmanship,... documenting a normal life with a sharp eye and a penchant for gentle revelation." – John Seven, Worcester Magazine
• Review: "...Krazy Kat is that most unlikely of things: poetry fostered and cared for unquestioningly by commerce." – David Mathews (an edited version originally appeared in The New Indian Express)
• Plugs: Fictional or not, The Rack's Lydia Park says re: Sublife Vol. 2 "John Pham is just beyond good. So many great ideas executed perfectly. Think Chris Ware meets Kevin Huizenga" and re: The Unclothed Man in the 35th Century A.D. "Dash Shaw is incredible."
• Interview:The Daily Cross Hatch's Brian Heater has a wonderful chat with Carol Tyler (part 1 of 4): "Everything is more complicated. Everything is layered. I think as you grow older, you have this experience, but then you also, exponentially, have all of these others, due to the fact that you’ve just lived longer. You’ve met more people, and you’ve been around, and done all of these things. I try to boil it down and try to figure out the best way to do this. A collection of symbols and the right words—I really try to be a wordsmith, but I’m not! Argh! I try to pick the right words and the right way to get an idea across. Sometimes you just have to shoot it out there like bullshit and other times you have to make it more poetic. You have to balance that."
• Interview/Preview: The ubiquitous Dash Shaw talks to Rick Marshall about The Unclothed Man in the 35th Century A.D. at the MTV Splash Page blog (where there is also a 5-page sneak peek of the book): "I felt like I learned so much by drawing every day. If you want to get better at drawing the human figure, doing an animated series will definitely do that for you."
• Interview:The Comics Reporter's Tom Spurgeon talks to The Comics Journal's Kristy Valenti, focusing on Little Nemo in Slumberland: So Many Splendid Sundays but touching on other topics as well
On The A.V. Club's (controversial) Top 25 Comics of the '00s list: Eightball #23 by Daniel Clowes ("a straight-up masterpiece"), Tales Designed to Thrizzle by Michael Kupperman ("No one does giddy surrealism quite like Kupperman"), and Why Are You Doing This? by Jason ("builds to a gut-punch ending"); their separate list of the best archival books includes The Complete Peanuts ("has framed Charles Schulz’s enduring masterpiece about as well any lifelong fan could’ve hoped") and Krazy & Ignatz ("a godsend to comics fans... Each book is bizarre, sweetly amusing, and blissfully continuity-free").
