The phonetic spelling of the characters' speech really appealed to me as well. It was very easy to become immersed in the characters themselves; I could almost hear their individual voices. I also really liked the names of characters that were puns, such as Dr. Y. Zowl (wise owl, get it, get it?)
The storytelling, too, was funny and often made great social commentary. The very first strip (p. 29-30) made me chuckle and they just got better from there. As for the catnip/tiger tea in the story, I immediately thought of this as a drug reference but doubted myself for a few more strips ("No way is this about weed!") but when the characters begin discussing different variations of catnip tea, "kitten, kat, wild kat, kooger, panther and [...] tiger" (p. 62) it became pretty obvious that this was definitely a reference to drugs, if not specifically marijuana. I did a small bit of research on this and found that marijuana became outlawed around the 1930's and 40's in America and was misunderstood as having effects similar to cocaine. What I'm unclear on is towards the end of the story, Krazy is having trouble getting anyone else to drink his tiger tea, though throughout the story earlier everyone wanted some. Why is that? What does this represent?
And on that topic of representation, the scene with the ill tiger lily and the violet stood out strongly to me. I wasn't totally sure what this symbolized, other than the lily is generally a desired North American flower and the violet (also a North American flower) is sometimes considered a weed in gardens. If anyone has other thoughts on this, I am really interested in knowing what you think.
As for the Disney Treasures, I didn't enjoy these strips as much as the first ones I read. The Donald strip was pretty funny, I especially liked how Donald is always getting falsely blamed for the antics of his nephews. I was not fond of the strip written entirely in (sort-of) rhymes; I found it a little boring and childish for my tastes. Well, what do I expect from Disney?
Milt Gross was visually very interesting to me (is that photo-emulsion screen-printing?) with the layered CMYK palette. Some of the jokes made me chuckle, like when Doc is poking fun at Dickens, but a lot of the humor was really slapstick, something that doesn't appeal to me too much.
Can't wait for next week!
