ccc 03 fritz the cat

Fantagraphics November 1988
Volume 3 – 1st printing. “Starring Fritz the Cat!” Art by Robert Crumb. This is the third of a series of volumes that collect the works of one of America’s most original, trenchant, and uncompromising satirists. This series includes early work, previously unpublished strips, sketchbooks, underground comix, dramatic and autobiographical strips, and Crumb’s classic creations – Fritz the Cat and Mr. Natural. Hardcover, 8 1/2-in. x 11-in., 128 pages, B&W. Mature Readers Cover price $39.95.

These early volumes of our multiple Harvey and Eisner Award-winning Complete Crumb Comics series have been amongst our most demanded reprints the last few years. Following last season’s reprint of the expanded Vol. 1, the first three volumes of this best-selling series will all be in print for the first time in a decade! “Starring Fritz the Cat” includes the stories that began to build the Crumb legend: the original Fritz stories from Harvey Kurtzman’s Help! magazine in 1965, plus much rare art, some of Crumb’s long-lost American Greeting cards from the ’60s, and more. Plus, the story of Crumb’s first acid trip!

Fritz the Cat’s first public appearance came in January, 1965 in Harvey Kurtzman’s Help! magazine. In that debut, “Fritz Comes on Strong,” Fritz brings a female cat home and strips off her clothes before mounting her and…picking off her fleas. After reading this submission from Crumb, Kurtzman sent Crumb a letter that read, “Dear R. Crumb, we think the little pussycat drawings you sent us were just great. Question is, how do we print them without going to jail?”

The May 1965 issue of Help! contained another Fritz story, “Fred, the Teen-Age Girl Pigeon,” in which Fritz is a guitar-playing pop star. After Fritz flies into one city on his concert tour, a fanatical groupie goes wild and desperately chases Fritz across town. Fritz takes pity on her and eventually brings the teen-age pigeon up to his hotel room…where he proceeds to eat her.

Three years later, while Crumb was selling Zap Comix #1 for a quarter a copy in San Francisco, Fritz the Cat remained his most successful cartoon character and continued to provide a significant source of personal income. After all, the shitty page rates from EVO were not about to pay the bills. Even in 1969, when Crumb had become a prolific counterculture superstar, he still welcomed the money when Ballantine Books paid him a $10,000 advance for publication rights to three stories featuring Fritz. An additional $50,000 flowed Crumb’s way when Fritz starred in Ralph Bakshi’s infamous animated movie, Fritz the Cat (a film Crumb may despise, but he certainly found a way to spend the money).