By Hillary Chute

Kim Deitch—a key player in the underground comix scene of the 1960s and 70s—has long been one of cartooning’s greatest talents. He is also one of contemporary comics’ least recognized avatars (at least in terms of mainstream appreciation of his work). Now we have a book that could help change his status as a simply a cartoonist’s cartoonist and place him more firmly on the A-list of literary comics. Alias the Cat!, his latest offering, is published by Pantheon’s graphic novels division, like Deitch’s The Boulevard of Broken Dreams, which came out in 2002.  (In his significant survey piece in the New York Times Book Review on comics in that same year, Nick Hornby wrote that Boulevard was “ambitious, surreal and occasionally baffling,” and praised Deitch’s drawings as comparable to Crumb’s in their “feverish, angry energy.”) 

The digest-sized Alias the Cat! collects three stories that were first published as individual comic books by Fantagraphics, called The Stuff of Dreams!. (Fantagraphics also published Shadowland, a long, lovingly-printed, large-format Deitch collection, in 2006.) The cumulative effect of reading the linked stories consecutively here under one (quite gorgeous) cover is that Deitch’s sheer skill as a fabulist becomes dazzlingly apparent. There are literally stories within stories within stories, yet even the tripled narratives—because of Deitch’s craft—feel light instead of arduous. (However, I’ll quote one memorable line from the text: “this whole unwinding web of wild story had me totally by the mental balls”). He is an old-fashioned storyteller—a spinner of yarns—a quality that may strike one as refreshing, given that a large body of contemporary comics work is now nonfiction, revolves around self-musing, and can sometimes feel, perhaps, boring—or, worse, as someone recently pointed out to me, troublesomely disconnected from history. We have comics about trips to the coffee shop.

Alias the Cat! is neither boring nor, significantly, disconnected from history. But it is also, interestingly enough, not a book that eschews the self: the main characters are a cartoonist named Kim and his wife Pam (the name of Deitch’s real-life wife). Hornby’s smartest point about Boulevard is that it beautifully melds the personal and the cultural. He wrote: “What is particularly impressive is the way that Deitch juggles the personal—his artist hero is plagued by a cartoon demon that simultaneously inspires and destroys him—and the cultural dimensions of his narrative: his book is just as much about the neutering and Disneyfication of animation as it is about the self-destructiveness of genius.” Yet while Hornby correctly identifies the entwining of the personal and cultural in Boulevard, in that text the artist hero is an animator named Ted Mishkin. Alias the Cat! ups the intimacy, going one step further into shades of autobiography.

But only shades. Deitch himself may enter more explicitly into the story’s weave here, offering up the trials and tribulations of the artist hero “Kim Deitch,” but it’s all in service of an intricately layered, wildly inventive tale that consistently blurs fact and fiction, past and present, realism and surrealism. (An ageless, obnoxious, randy blue talking cat named Waldo is a recurring character). Alias the Cat! is a wonderfully self-reflexive book that is about comics, about authorship, about artistic inspiration, and about collecting remnants of the past, and it toys with its readers constantly to achieve this deliberately unstable register, incorporating aspects of straight-up nonfiction (a letters section; fake ad pages addressed to readers that provide full contact information). I found myself so convinced and fascinated by Deitch’s fabricated histories—his accounts of political goings-on in New Jersey towns in the early part of the twentieth century, for instance—that I had to look the towns up just to confirm to myself that they do not, and never have, existed. Yet some of Deitch’s histories—his descriptions of old photoplay stars, for instance—are indeed factual (and informative). As the narrator Kim writes in the book’s conclusion, “That’s the wild beauty of this comics thing.  I can re-create the world my way!  Half-remembered, half-imagined.”

Ultimately, that idea is the anchor of Alias the Cat!, a book that is about new and old forms of entertainment media, and which happens to showcase what comics can do especially well. With his meticulously detailed panels; fluid, rounded line; and chatty, straightforward narrative voice, Deitch creates a unique visual and verbal world that feels so persuasive that its leaps into the supernatural enhance rather than disrupt its hold. Further, he makes conspicuous use of the form of comics to enact the graphic juxtaposition, or blending, of past and present, as when he shifts seamlessly from the present to the past and back again across the panels of a single page, moving us around in time. And yet he also points up another crucial aspect of comics form: its ability to double its narratives. In one ongoing chunk of the book, Deitch draws two discrete, serial narratives that unfold together on each page: his own present-day quest to seek out information in newspapers from 1915 in black, and the 1915 newspaper comic strip Alias the Cat! drawn in a muted green. (This well-realized strip is Deitch’s own creation, but is presented as the fruits of his research, illustrated by one Moll Barkeley). These riveting pages literally, spatially contain multiple narratives, and the reader flows easily, with pleasure, through the various temporalities and visions Deitch conjures up. In his thick, busy, but purposeful and graceful pages, Deitch shows us the full capacity of comics to be—to draw on a phrase from the first page of book—“the odd and beautiful.”