How the underground master bypasses standard nostalgia to resurrect the ghosts of 20th-century entertainment.
There is a precise moment at the beginning of the final chapter of How I Make Comics (Fantagraphics Books) where Kim Deitch draws an invisible but profound line between the craftsman’s trade and spiritual possession. Describing his father Gene, the legendary animator, hunched over his drawing table late into the night to bring the comic strip Terr’ble Thompson to life, Deitch is handing us the master key to his entire universe. Drawing comics is an inherited condemnation, an obsession that perpetuates itself across decades.
While critics have often pigeonholed Deitch as one of the historic pillars of the American underground Comix movement, this volume goes much further, shaping up to be a monumental metanarrative essay.
Doodyville and the Phantoms of the American Imaginary
Deitch’s journey unfolds like a Russian doll narrative, digging deep into the foundations of 20th-century pop culture. In the chapter dedicated to Doodyville 1952, the author takes us back to his childhood, sitting among the audience of the “Peanut Gallery” in the wildly popular television program Howdy Doody. Yet, Deitch’s nostalgia is never consolatory or passive. On the contrary, it is constantly sabotaged by surreal, grotesque and satirical short-circuits: the anachronistic insertion of a six-year-old Donald Trump screaming about conspiracies and “rigged elections” after the defeat of the puppet Mr. Bluster transforms a childhood memory into a distorted mirror of our present.
From 1950s television, Deitch’s gaze retrocedes all the way to 1922 Chicago, exploring the lives of pioneering comic strip artists (such as Harold Gray working on The Gumps), or stepping onto Vaudeville stages and into bizarre, psychedelic odysseys inhabited by monkey gods and moon-dwelling tribes.
The Aesthetics of Noir and Cross-Hatching
Visually, How I Make Comics is an all-encompassing experience that demands a slow, almost ritualistic pace from the reader. Deitch’s line work retains the material density of the underground: an obsessive, incredibly dense cross-hatching where every face and background is saturated with lines that evoke the 1920s rubber hose animation style and the aesthetic of the Fleischer Studios or Winsor McCay.
A “Proactive Humility” to Traverse Time
In the book’s epilogue, WHY I Make Comics, the author drops the fiction to deliver a series of intimate reflections and practical advice for the next generation of artists. He speaks openly about his frailties, his tendency toward addiction (the alcoholism that very nearly destroyed him), and how he managed to “invert” that same obsessive drive, putting it to work for his art through a rigorous routine. He treats cartooning like a regular job, punching an invisible time clock for forty hours a week and methodically pushing past the critical “two-hour threshold” at the start of each session.
Deitch theorizes what he calls proactive humility: a profound, reverent respect for art that, rather than immobilizing the artist, drives them to dig with geometric constancy to access the hidden depths of the human mind.
How I Make Comics moves far beyond a mere technical manual or an aging autobiography, establishing itself as a true act of psychic archaeology. Kim Deitch has constructed a stylistic time machine that uses the graphic tools of the past to dissect our contemporary neuroses. In his ink-heavy pages, “yesterday” ceases to be a bygone era and becomes a physical space, dense, beautiful, and the perfect place to get lost in order to rediscover the profound meaning of creation.
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