Fantastic Metropolis

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.

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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.

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.

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.