The Life and Death of Fritz the Cat

by R. Crumb

Overview

The iconic comics that started it all, making R. Crumb famous —  against his will.

Robert Crumb's first iconic character — and still possibly his most — was Fritz the Cat: the horny, high, hipster feline whose wild adventures and sexual escapades captivated countercultural audiences from the mid-’60s until 1972, when Ralph Bakshi turned the strips into an X-rated animated film that Crumb hated so much, he famously killed off the character and never returned to him.

The Life and Death of Fritz the Cat contains all the Fritz stories from the earliest sketchbook-drawn tales ("Hey, Ol' Cat!" and "Fritz Comes On Strong") to the wild adventure stories ("Special Agent for the C.I.A.") to the classic "peak" Fritz stories ("Fritz the No-Good") all the way to the despairing "Fritz the Cat, Superstar" with its infamous icepick ending. Plus an introduction by Crumb, sketchbook pages, and more in a new paperback edition.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798875001383
Publisher:	Fantagraphics
Publication date:	01/13/2026
Pages:	96
Product dimensions:	8.40(w) x 10.80(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Born in Philadelphia, Robert Crumb is one of America’s most celebrated artists. Thrust reluctantly into fame as a defining voice of the 1960s and 1970s counterculture with comic strips like Fritz the Cat, Mr. Natural, and Keep on Truckin’, then again in the 1990s with the acclaimed documentary Crumb and more recently the 2025 biography Crumb: A Cartoonist’s Life, he continues to push himself and his chosen medium from his home in the south of France.