An Interview with Kim Deitch
Kim Deitch is one of the premiere alternative comics artists working today. He began his career in 1967, creating comics for the East Village Other and soon rose to the forefront of the then nascent underground scene along with contemporaries like Robert Crumb, Justin Green, Bill Griffith and Spain Rodriguez. His work is marked by a fascination with the comics and animations of the 1920’s and 30’s, a genius for incredibly intricate but organic page and panel construction, and an unparalleled excellence in the creation of structurally complex narratives concerning equally complex characters. Often working in collaboration with his brother, Simon, his comics have appeared over the years in Raw Magazine, Pictopia, Weirdo, and Details Magazine, and in the collections Hollywoodland, Beyond the Pale: Krazed Komics and Stories, and A Shroud for Waldo.
In his most recent book, the graphic novel, Boulevard of Broken Dreams (Pantheon Books/Random House, Aug. 2002), Deitch tells the story of the dissolution, through Disneyfication, of the early potential of American animation by tracking the career of animator, Ted Mishkin, whose cartoon creation, Waldo, the cat, becomes a dark familiar, increasingly haunting the artist as the animation studio becomes more insistent on turning the Dionysian character into a bland cherub of a Disney knock-off. This graphic novel is at once a historical fiction, a work of dark fantasy, a psychological investigation of the relationship of two brothers, and an astute commentary on the neutering of an artistic medium. Deitch’s story blends drama and humor in a non-linear, meta-fictional, narrative with black and white pen work that in its complexity of imagery at times achieves the hallucinatory. This said, the story never confuses; the characters never fail to elicit the reader’s interest or emotional response.
To quote Art Spiegelman (creator of the graphic novel Maus), “Deitch has created a private world as fully realized in its own way as Faulkner’s… He’s an American Original, a spinner of yarns whose beautifully structured pages and intricate plots conjure up a haunting and haunted American past.”
This interview was conducted by e-mail in the second week of September, 2002.
Jeffrey Ford: There is a staggering amount of art work in Boulevard of Broken Dreams and the plot is rich and complex. I know that different portions of this work appeared in various venues through the years. Did you have a clear plan for this story when you started it or did it grow organically the further you got into the characters? How long did it take you to create the work that has now been published as a “graphic novel?”
Kim Deitch: The story grew like Topsy out of the opening scene which was based on a real event; that being a testimonial dinner that Max Fleischer threw for Winsor McKay [creator of the comic Little Nemo in Slumberland and animation pioneer] in 1927 or 28. My brother and I had heard the story from various sources and thought it kind of summed up the whole problem with animation in microcosm; essentially McKay giving a somewhat windy speech about the potential of animation; sensing suddenly that he is losing his boozy audience; losing it, he breaks off his prepared remarks and says, in essence, “God Dammit. You guys have taken the art I created and turned it into shit! Bad luck to you…” so this observation about the poor use of animation’s potential and then following the ups and downs of the cartoon business over the next 60 or so years, that was the basic idea—spin out of this anecdote and then touch on the various great stories we’d heard, and in some cases were witness to over the years. And to tell the best possible, more intimate, human interest story we could along the way. In one way it was a tall order but also kind of a natural as we’d been exposed to aspects of this story all our lives.
Doing the bulk of the story took about four years and then about four or five months this year improving and tuning it up a little.
