Fantastic Metropolis

Jeffrey Ford: Your brother Simon, also a comics artist and writer, is given credit at the beginning of Boulevard for having contributed to the story. Are there any parallels between your relationship with your brother and that of the brothers Al and Ted Mishkin who appear in your story? Are there any aspects of Boulevard, seeing it is about “comics artists/animators,” that are autobiographical?

Kim Deitch: Well, Boulevard is about two brothers, one quite dysfunctional in the animation business. And it is natural enough for people to hazard an educated guess that this might somehow be based in some way on me and my brother. But actually this is not the case. The story about the ups and downs of the relationship of me and my brother would make quite an amazing yarn in itself but it Would be another story altogether.

Jeffrey Ford: Your art work is obviously influenced by the look of early comics and animation from the 30’s and 40’s. What is it about the look of the comics work done in this time period that captures your imagination?

Kim Deitch: Well, let’s make that the 20’s and 30’s. On one level, I just think the cartoons of that period had more searing personality than the more tepid and homogenized stuff that came later. What’s more, the later stuff was parading by in TV spots on the tube right alongside the earlier stuff. The comparison was striking and very much in our faces side by side on 1950’s TV.

Jeffrey Ford: I’ve noticed in your work that at times you share with the early Fleischer Brothers’ animations, particularly Betty Boop, the device of anthropomorphizing objects like houses, the moon, clocks, etc. What is it about this device that you find effective? In your real life do you have the sense that the world around you is alive, that it has a kind of sentience?

Kim Deitch: My very unintellectual answer to that question is that anthropomorphizing like that is just a lot of fun. It is part of the free wheeling sense of fun that was presented in the best of those early cartoons.

Jeffrey Ford: You’ve been in the comics field since the late 1960’s. In watching the evolution of comics over the course of ensuing years, are there any places where you think comics have “missed the boat?” What do the newer comics artists of today do better than the creators of the early days of the “undergrounds?”

Kim Deitch: Well let’s face it, we may have been freeing up things in the early days of underground comics, but we were also taking way too many drugs and in general not fully applying ourselves as well as we could have been. I think the best of the new guys today are better disciplined than we were. And they have the added advantage of having learned from some of our mistakes. I think the best of the new guys have most of us old guys beat by a big old country mile. And I think that’s just great. Now I’m studying and learning from them. And that’s not just a bunch of bath water. I mean that with all my heart and soul.

Jeffrey Ford: So many of the comics artists from the early “underground” scene, like yourself, have continued to produce important work—Crumb, Griffith, Spain, to name a few. What was it about your collective approach to the medium, do you think, that has allowed you all to continue with such vitality? I’m guessing it wasn’t the money.

Kim Deitch: I can only speak for myself on this one. For one thing the medium has only really been developing in terms of maturing into more adult themes for about thirty years; at least in a way that you could call really dramatic. There’s still a lot of unfinished business in comics, and I am totally floored by what the best of the new guys are doing today. We’re in a stone golden age now. It’s a god damn art movement and you really couldn’t have said that with a straight face thirty years ago. I’m totally inspired by what’s going down right now, and I want to play with the big boys. And for my money, most of the big boys are guys fifteen and twenty years younger than me.

Jeffrey Ford: Which of today’s younger comics creators do you think are doing work worthy of notice?

Kim Deitch: Okay. These, for my money, are the big boys. Chris Ware, Dan Clowes, Seth. Adrian Tomine is coming up fast and Joe Sacco’s book Palestine may be the single best and most exciting comic book that I have thus far read. So there’s a few to chew on.