How I Make Comics by Kim Deitch

Kim Deitch's work has been largely of a piece for the last thirty or so years, going back to A Shroud for Waldo. Deitch himself is a character in his work, often the main character in the modern-day sections, investigating or just discovering mysterious stories about old entertainment, obscure Hollywood movie-makers or vaudeville or carnivals or similar things from the early 20th century. But the meat of the story is in that past world, with supernatural entities and midgets and mysterious technology and reincarnations of the same people over time.

For a while, the stories centered on his trickster character Waldo, something like an evil Felix the Cat, but I think Deitch has been deliberately playing down Waldo over the past decade or so, to tell different kinds of stories using other elements of the same mix.

How I Make Comics is his most recent book, from earlier this year; it follows in that tradition while being a little lighter and more accessible. Despite the title, it's not a how-to. It might be a series of examples, though: it's explicitly a linked collection of shorter pieces, like beads on a string, which connect loosely to each other to tell a series of stories about Deitch in the present day and the same sort of past events - some of them possibly true, or partially true, but it's never clear - that he's turning into his stories. As always, we see the Deitch-created versions while he tells us that he's presenting the true history, but, this time, his wife Pam is a more major character, and she acts as his first reader and sounding board (both, we understand, in life and in the fictional versions in this book), commenting on the stories in the middle of them and between them.

Of course, Pam here is a fictional version of the real Pam, as the Deitch here is a fictional version of the real Kim Deitch. He does draw their real apartment, with all of its knickknacks and oddities, and details their conversations - but never forget that it's all a story being told, and that this is the same thing Deitch has been doing for decades. He slides from modern domesticity into stories about reincarnated rats and flying cars seamlessly, with the reader left wondering which bits are "real" and which are invented.

So the first story dives right into a 1952 taping of Howdy Doody in which an eight-year-old Deitch was bullied by a six-year-old Donald Trump. If I had to untangle truth from fiction, I'd bet Deitch was in the audience for Howdy Doody that year, and maybe Trump was, too, but that the rest is modern fabulation. 

The rest of the book is similar, with probably-true bits about cartoonist Harold Grey being inspired by news reports of a woman's passionate courtroom speech in a case about a midget couple involved in a fatal bombing and definitely-fictional bits about that couple's (normal-sized) son becoming a superhero with a flying car and his father-reincarnated-as-a-rat sidekick. The stories aren't quite complete: there are a lot of anecdotes and beginnings here, but no real endings.

How I Make Comics has a dozen sections: a few of them are clearly interstitial material - titled "Interlude" and "Appendix" and "Preview" - but most are stories, or partial stories, with that mixture of probably-true and obviously-fiction. They circle or cluster around the same concerns as Deitch's prior work, but don't really build or combine. They stay mostly separate pieces, as Deitch pitches them to Pam and she finds faults in most of them. The last section, the one called "Preview," might be the topic of Deitch's next book, a collection of stories from storytellers in a park he frequents.

So this could be a bit disappointing to some Deitch fans, especially the ones that want the wilder mythology of Waldo and the time-hopping, integrated plots of his bigger books. On the other hand, it has lovely art on its big pages, quirk to spare, as it tells the kinds of stories that only Deitch can. And for a guy in his early 80s, that's impressive - I'll take whatever odd stories Deitch feels like telling now.