Omschrijving
The legendary underground cartoonist Kim Deitch
unveils his creative process in all its imaginative
whimsy.
How I Make Comics is not just about how Kim Deitch makes comics,
but about how comics made him. The book pinwheels between
real autobiography and imagined comics history, but it begins in
1952 with a true story of eight-year-old Kim Deitch appearing in
the audience of the Howdy Doody Show with eight-year-old Donnie
Trump. Following Donnie’s attempt to rig an election among the
audience (no kidding!), Deitch relates a famous newspaper account
of a diminutive wife who valiantly defends her equally diminutive
husband in court, who just happens to be the inspiration of Harold
Gray’s Little Orphan Annie. Periodically, Kim asks his own wife for
her critique and advice of the stories he’s told so far, which he
takes into account for future tales that include revenge-driven
circus performers, fairytale mural painters, sordid comic book
lore, comics readers creating real-life superheroes, impossibly old
cats issuing supernatural judgments and inhabiting the bodies of
humans, culminating in the real-life story of Kim’s mother hitchhiking across country and being picked up by none other than Forrest
J. Ackerman, the sci-fi, fantasy, and monster afficionado, who takes
her to a convention where she meets a teenaged Ray Bradbury.
How I Make Comics is a creatively kaleidoscopic, non-stop exploration of how Deitch’s imagination turns ideas, influences, and irritations into comics in his inimitable style. Snippets of behind-the-scenes
explanations of his notes and sketches expand into cascading short
stories. Each section goes freewheeling from notion to notion, quietly
building themes and reveling in its own wild-eyed imaginative capacities across 180 pages to form both an intimate graphic memoir and
an eye-popping graphic novel. One of the most prolific artists of his
generation, Deitch enters his 60th year of cartooning more inventive
than ever and showing no signs of slowing down.