An Interview with Kim Deitch
Jeffrey Ford: Are you comfortable with the term “graphic novel” as a description of what Boulevard of Broken Dreams is?
Kim Deitch: I’m comfortable enough with the term “graphic novel” as a vehicle for promoting acceptance among those who have a bias toward comics for whatever reasons right or wrong. What I guess I’m saying is, it ain’t no nevermind to me what people want to call it as long as it isn’t getting in the way of stories I’m writing and drawing.
Jeffrey Ford: Although you have created other memorable characters—Miles Microft, the detective, The India Rubber Man, etc.—Waldo, the cat, is undoubtedly your best known character. Do you recall when and how he was conceived?
Kim Deitch: Waldo came along around the time I was becoming enamored with the idea of comics but wondering how I was going to finesse doing them with my rather limited drawing skills. I mean that at the beginning of my comics career, I wasn’t sure I would be able to draw credible human figures on a sustained basis. Having grown up watching the old Aesop’s Fables cartoons of the 1920’s, which were a staple of the early television I grew up watching in the 1950’s, it occurred to me that I could probably get away with drawing a cat character based on the army of anonymous black cats that existed as almost an everyman army in that series of seemingly endless cartoons. These cats had been imbedded in my developing young mind from the age of five on. Later, as my drawing skill developed, the cat remained and it was inevitable that he’d end up horning into our emerging cavalcade of animation saga.
Jeffrey Ford: Do you feel that the medium of comics, the combination of words and images, can achieve things in the art of storytelling that mere textual fiction can not? If so, what?
Kim Deitch: Well, it can do different things. Over and above comics, I have a larger fascination with words and pictures. I mean, kids books set me up for it even before comics. Take a book like Stuart Little. What a beautiful marriage of words and pictures! I couldn’t imagine one without the other in that book.
And then, let’s jump back to Victorian English Literature. What a revelation it was to me to discover that a book like Thackeray’s Vanity Fair contained about one hundred and ninety illustrations by the author. And how weird that they have been blithely ignored by so many champions of this work ever since. And then you’ve got the great Dickens, who pretty much chose the subject matter of the illustrations of his books, while hiring and firing the illustrators.
In lesser Victoriana such as in Ainsworth, you can see an illustrator like Cruickshank almost inventing comics or at least contributing to their evolution when, for instance, he breaks up what is intended as a one page illustration into three or four smaller illustrations on one page to better put over a graphic idea of the book’s text.
On the other hand, it’s interesting to see Dickens’ rather striking response to the idea of the indispensability of illustration in his work by dispensing with them altogether in what might arguably be considered his best book, Great Expectations.
Jeffrey Ford: Boulevard of Broken Dreams, among other things, is a fairly accurate historical fiction depicting one part of the rise and subsequent fall of the early animation industry. Was much of this knowledge of the early days of animation something you readily knew from your father (Gene Deitch, animation artist for Terrytoons) or did the writing of this tale require a good deal of research?
Kim Deitch: I’d heard plenty of stories from my father and his colleagues all my life growing up. When my father got the job of running the Terrytoons studio in 1956, essentially with the mandate to bring that studio up to date and get it up to speed with the emerging trendy modern art concepts that were gaining increasing popular acceptance, the big mind fuck there was that here were the human remnants of the team of guys that had made those old Aesop’s Fables cartoons of the 1920’s that I grew up watching! Not only did I get to know them, but I also observed them now making modern art style cartoons for my father!
Over and above that, I found the book Talking Animals and Other People by Seamus Culhane to be an invaluable resource. Also John Canemaker’s half hour documentary/interview film about Otto Mesmer, the unsung genius creator of Felix the Cat, just to name two key influences.
