Nine Lives to Live: A Classic Felix Celebration
by: Otto Messmer and David Gerstein

Hardcover. Seattle, Fantagraphics, 1st, 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 144 pages. This is an essential purchase for fans of Felix the Cat. As all true fans know, Felix's real glory days were in the silent era, when Pat Sullivan's animation studio produced over a 100 ingenious short cartoons featurng the protean ebony feline. Though Sullivan hogged all the credit, the artist behind the series was Otto Messmer, who also worked on Felix's spin-off newspaper comic strip. He continued with that strip after the cartoons ended in 1930 (due to Sullivan's incompetent management).Editor David Gerstein has compiled a sampling of strips from the early 1920s to the 1930s. It's fascinating to see how Felix changed over a decade, moving from a blocky, snout-nosed design to a sleek look with rubber hose limbs and circular head and torso. Comic-strip Felix is of naturally talkier than his film self, and Messmer's sight gags flow less smoothly when broken up by panels and dialogue, but these strips remain a delight, especially since a couple stories are adaptations of now-lost cartoons (and even re-use art from them). As for the original stories, they take advantage of the format to tell longer tales, often in the sort of gently humorous adventure genre later used by Floyd Gottfredson's Mickey Mouse and Carl Bark's Donald Duck comics. Sadly, Felix's comic strip adventures remain far more obscure than those Disney productions.