Kim Deitch


Kim Deitch is an American cartoonist who was an important figure in the underground comix movement of the 1960s, remaining active in the decades that followed with a variety of books and comics, sometimes using the pseudonym Fowlton Means.
Much of Kim Deitch's work deals with the animation industry and characters from the world of cartoons. His best-known character is a mysterious cat named Waldo, whose appearance is reminiscent of such black cat characters as Felix the Cat, Julius the Cat, and Krazy Kat.
The son of illustrator and animator Gene Deitch, Kim Deitch has sometimes worked with his brothers Simon Deitch and Seth Deitch.

Biography

Early life and education

Deitch was born in Los Angeles, California. His influences include Winsor McCay, Chester Gould, Jack Cole, and Will Eisner; he attended the Pratt Institute. Before deciding to become a professional cartoonist, Deitch worked odd jobs and did manual labor, including with the merchant marine. Searching for a path, he at one point joined the Republican Party; at another point he became a devotee of Hatha yoga.

Career

Deitch regularly contributed comical, psychedelia-tinged comic strips to New York City's premier underground newspaper, the East Village Other, beginning in 1967. He joined Bhob Stewart as an editor of EVO's all-comics spin-off, Gothic Blimp Works, in 1969. During this period, he lived with fellow cartoonist Spain Rodriguez in a sixth-floor walk-up apartment in New York's East Village.
In 1969, he moved to San Francisco, which at that point was the epicenter of the underground comix movement. Deitch was also a publisher, as co-founder of the Cartoonists Co-Op Press, a publishing venture by Deitch, Jay Lynch, Bill Griffith, Jerry Lane, Willy Murphy, Diane Noomin, and Art Spiegelman that operated in 1973–1974.
Deitch's The Boulevard of Broken Dreams, released in 2002, helped bring his work to the mainstream book trade. The book was chosen by Time magazine in 2005 as one of the 100 best English-language graphic novels ever written.
In 2008, the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art featured a retrospective exhibition of his work.

Waldo

Deitch's character Waldo the Cat, first created in 1966, appears variously as a famous cartoon character of the 1930s, as an actual character in the "reality" of the strips, as the hallucination of a hopeless alcoholic surnamed Mishkin, or as the demonic reincarnation of Judas Iscariot. He occasionally is even claimed to have overcome Deitch and created the comics himself.
Speaking about Waldo in an interview, Deitch explained:
Later in the interview, however, Deitch offered this admission:

Personal life

From his first relationship, to cartoonist and author Trina Robbins, Deitch has a daughter, Casey.
Through most of the 1970s, Deitch was in an 11-year relationship with animator Sally Cruikshank. He met fellow artist Pam Butler in 1994 and they subsequently married. Of Butler, Deitch says, "Her influence on my work cannot be underestimated. You could say that she has become my very best collaborator."

Awards

Deitch won the 2003 Eisner Award for Best Single Issue for The Stuff of Dreams and in 2008 he was given an Inkpot Award.
In 2024, Deitch was inducted into the Will Eisner Comic Awards Hall of Fame

Nominations

  • 2003 Eisner Award for Best Graphic Album-Reprint
  • 2004:
  • * Ignatz Award for Outstanding Series
  • * Ignatz Award for Outstanding Comic
  • 2005 Angoulême International Comics Festival Prize for Best Album
  • 2006 Ignatz Award for Outstanding Comic
  • 2014:
  • * Ignatz Award for Outstanding Graphic Novel
  • * Ignatz Award for Outstanding Artist
  • 2016 Ignatz Award for Outstanding Story

    Creator series and books

  • 1972–1973 Corn Fed Comics
  • 1988 No Business Like Show Business
  • 1988 Hollywoodland — 1984 story
  • 1989 Beyond the Pale — 22 stories produced in the period 1969-1984
  • 1990 A Shroud for Waldo
  • 1993 The Boulevard of Broken Dreams — 40-page original story published in Raw in 1991 — with Simon Deitch
  • 1992 All Waldo Comics — 5 Waldo stories published in the period 1969-1988
  • 1993 The Mishkin File! original OOP; reprinted in The Boulevard of Broken Dreams
  • 2001 A Shroud for Waldo
  • 2002 The Boulevard of Broken Dreams
  • 2002 The Stuff of Dreams — original OOP; collected and released by Pantheon as a hardback in 2007 as Alias the Cat!
  • 2006 Shadowland — 10 stories
  • 2007 Deitch's Pictorama — co-authored with Simon Deitch and Seth Kallen Deitch; includes 78-pg "Sunshine Girl"
  • 2010 The Search for Smilin' Ed — serialized in Zero Zero beginning in 1999
  • 2013 The Amazing, Enlightening and Absolutely True Adventures of Katherine Whaley! Hardback
  • 2019 Reincarnation Stories Hardback

    Publications appeared in

  • Apex Treasury of Underground Comics, Links Books/Quick Fox, 1974,
  • Arcade
  • Bijou Funnies — issues #2, 3, and 8
  • Corporate Crime Comics
  • East Village Other
  • Gothic Blimp Works
  • Heavy Metal
  • High Times
  • Laugh in the Dark
  • LA Weekly
  • Lean Years
  • Mineshaft Magazine
  • Pictopia
  • Prime Cuts
  • Raw
  • Swift Comics — with Art Spiegelman, Allan Shenker and Trina Robbins
  • Southern Fried Fugitives
  • Tales of Sex and Death
  • Get Stupid
  • Webcomic Hurricane Relief Telethon
  • Weirdo
  • Young Lust
  • ''Zero Zero''

    Animation

  • Easy Groove ID, Nickelodeon, 1987
  • Farmer & Cat ID, MTV, 1996
  • "Dallas", Venue Songs, They Might Be Giants, 2005

    Interviews

  • Ford, Jeffrey.
  • Heller, Steven.
Category:1944 births
Category:American comic strip cartoonists
Category:American comics writers
Category:American humorists
Category:Inkpot Award winners
Category:Jewish American comics artists
Category:Jewish American comics writers
Category:Underground cartoonists
Category:Raw
Category:Living people
Category:People from the East Village, Manhattan
Category:21st-century American Jews