![]() He doesn't use crosshatching - nothing so muddled and messy as that. That's particularly evident in his shading. You can tell that he moves his pen in long, slow strokes, not agitated, brisk ones. He draws multiple versions of every page, and it's evident in the cleanliness of the final lines. He may use broad imagery, but his lines are measured and deliberate. Deitch's subversion is itself a cover story.īut then, how rollicking is Deitch's art, really? Arguably, a powerful strain of orderliness, even monasticism, runs through all his work. Underneath the appearance of lawlessness, there's a huge amount of craft and care. They seem to throw the cold water of objectivity over Deitch's rollicking art. Even though Butler is somewhat equivocal, the pages of unadorned text are a powerful visual antidote to the rest of the book. Strikingly, one of the very last sections is an essay by his wife Pam Butler - who serves as a voice of authority elsewhere in the book - about her experience with past-life regression. Deitch introjects this concept into the book in ways that express his own sense of helplessness, at one point having Waldo lecture him about his unimpressive past lives. Reincarnation, after all, is fundamentally the idea that you're living out a destiny established long before you were born. That theme is order, control, even inevitability. And yet there's a pervasive theme here that, while hard to see, is arguably just as Deitchean as all the clamoring misrule. The different stories seem even less connected than in Deitch's other books. There's an epic history of the monkeys at New York's Museum of Natural History and an alternate-reality comic book, Young Avatar!, starring Jesus as an intergalactic superhero. While it starts with some fairly straightforward childhood stories, it quickly becomes just as weird as you'd expect from Deitch. I started reaching back in my mind to see how far back my memory really went." The rest of the book, Deitch implies, documents what he came up with. He didn't get much actual sleep this way, so "just to pass the time, I started creating little mental exercises. He even reprints the actual strip here.) His books tend to go flamboyantly off the rails, making a hash of narrative throughlines and pulverizing the divide between truth and fiction.īook Reviews 'The Seventh Voyage' Takes A Grand Journey In A Tiny Spaceshipĭeitch kicks off Reincarnation Stories with an account of the eye surgery that necessitated him spending a week sleeping on his stomach on a contraption that kept him from rolling over. (In this book he calls back explicitly to the naughty old days, recalling a time when he and Rodriguez teamed up to write a gonzo strip together, missing their deadline and angering their boss. Ever since he helped pioneer the field of underground comics in the '60s, writing for the East Village Other while rooming with Spain Rodriguez, he's channeled that movement's ethos of compulsive subversion. Here as in all his work, he cultivates the image of the dexterous rulebreaker. That's not something Deitch is letting on, though. But that's far from the whole story - both when it comes to this book, and when it comes to the great Deitch himself. All this might make Reincarnation Stories seem like a release, a purging, a great unmediated yowl or yawp from the depths of the artistic soul. Even the cover pushes at boundaries, with the iconic Waldo the cat zooming out at the reader in a fiery flying car. Griffith, Bozo the Clown and even Jesus make appearances. There are Hollywood cowboys and antique toys in Kim Deitch's graphic novel Reincarnation Stories, as well as cartoon magpies Heckle and Jeckle, a storytelling robot and a crystal ball. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. ![]() Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title Reincarnation Stories Author Kim Deitch
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