Cat O' Many Tales

The lights are down at the West Side Y, but Kim Deitch is having a hard time overcoming some A/V glitches: The film projector keeps burning up stalled frames, and he constantly loses contact with the microphone as he stiffly reads his notes. But as slides of his work hit the screen, this seminal underground cartoonist with the lank gray ponytail suddenly becomes animated, supplying myriad voices for his characters, even vamping a scraggly baritone for one luckless crooner who bemoans "Ships That Never Come In." Then, while waiting for a reel of 70-year-old cartoons to be threaded into the projector, he tells the story of some hapless young animators who screened a pornographic cartoon for bossman Walt Disney's birthday, way back when. He imitates the Master's calculating laugh: "Ha ha ha! That's great! Who made this?"—then a stammer—"Uh, well, it was Charlie, and, uh, um, Joe there, and . . . uh, me." "Ha! That's just great! Great! You're all fired!" The full house at the Y roars with laughter.

Kim Deitch is a born storyteller, though everyone—including his old man, the prominent animator Gene Deitch—felt he was a lousy artist. During an interview in his Upper East Side apartment, Deitch, 58, concedes that his father may have been right—"in the sense that I'm not a natural born artist, I have to just sort of force myself and have my wicked way with it." And he's been wicked since the mid '60s, drawing sausage-limbed figures reminiscent of the black-and-white cartoons already ancient when he first saw them as a kid. "I can remember peering through the mail chute to see the neighbor's TV before we got one," he says. But Deitch doesn't draw comix about blushing mice, slapstick farmers, or clowns in inkwells. His desperate human beings are trapped in prisons or nuthouses or strange cults, constantly fending off demons both astral and earthly. When "Miles Microft, Psychic Detective" (circa 1973) runs through a graveyard under a rat's nest of tree branches, the voices of the dead well up from the tombstones, their moans and pleas drawn in jagged bubble letters that grasp and claw at him. An anthropomorphic moon (that in a different incarnation would happily have serenaded Betty Boop) grimaces and casts off droplets of sweat, fearful witness to Microft's terror. The psychic's tie, askew from haste, forms the visual knot of a taut, noir composition—The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari channeled through American Gothic. Deitch speaks of his love of silent film—"a fascinating form of literature with words and pictures, just like comics!"—and his admiration for Mondrian's intense abstractions of black, white, and primary colors. Such influences help explain why his rigid drawings become so lithe within the grid of his comic panels.

Fluid visuals propel Deitch's new book, The Boulevard of Broken Dreams (just out from Pantheon), a tale of America's animation pioneers fictionalized from historical sources spanning the 20th century. He casts a gimlet eye on early cartoons, appreciating the innocence of the stories and images, while giving a full account of the human wreckage left behind as a sublime new art form morphed into a huge, bottom-line industry. Rather than peddle nostalgia, he convincingly connects a bygone age to our own. The early animators could easily have given the purveyors of MTV a run for their filthy lucre—drinking, dope, vengeful egos, flagrant affairs, and madness all wend through the book, fleshing out characters both onscreen and off. Waldo the Cat, one of Deitch's most enduring creations, appears in this graphic novel in dual roles: as the lean, scruffy, and devilish cartoon star of the Fontaine Fables studio, and also as imaginary friend and goad to successive generations of the Mishkin brothers. In the '30s, as Disney's reign over cartoons became more totalitarian, all of the studios were driven to use rounder shapes because they were (in the words of a Disney animator) "cuter and more appealing." In Boulevard, Waldo, neutered by his cherubic new form onscreen—"Those shits are turning me into a fuckin' pansy!"—grows more antagonistic and dissolute within Ted Mishkin's brain, driving the animator to binge drinking and to bobbing his head in toilet bowls, as if trying to drown his own creation.