Customer Reviews

Alias the Cat

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Everything that you would expect from our boy Kim: the obsession with 1920s/early 1930s popular American culture; the blending of autobiographical detail with fantasy; keeping faith with the righteous socio-politico viewpoint of late60s/early 70s counter-culture; the captivating originality of the artwork; the sense that one is reading the work of a potential nutcase;all of it presided over by Waldo; the growing unease that one day one will find that Waldo is no figment of the imagination after all.
One word of caution: if you are new to Kim Deitch's work you may find parts of this latest piece rambling and incoherent. Well, it is rambling and incoherent. If you were plagued by visions of a blue furred demon in anthropomorhic cat-form you too would probably be rambling and incoherent from time to time.

I first dicovered Kim Deitch while reading underground comics back in the 70's and he quickly became my favorite cartoonist. His appeal lies in a wild and engaging melange of surreal 1930's cartoon animation, a "Hollywood Babylon"-ish love of old cinema & movie stars with a fortean/occult angle thrown in for good measure.

Strong, implausible plot lines, great illustrations and character development are his trademarks. Entering Kim Deitch's world finds a landscape of fun tinged with ominious overtones making the fun much like the tacky carnivals when you were growing up that your parents frowned on you attending- but you loved every disconcerting moment. Enjoy!

I really enjoyed this book, a combination of absurd humour and actually dramatic and emotional drama. It's definitely LOW KEY ... Don't expect action fireworks (OH! BUT there ARE big Fireworks!) ... but a fun read! Both the art and story are very enjoyable!

Kim Deitch's wife Pam becomes obsessed with collecting old cat toys from years ago and it's this obsession that takes them one night to the flea market where they encounter a stall selling a rare cat toy. They try to buy it and wind up listening to a maniacal story about shipwreck, desert islands, and a demon cat who enslaves a native people. The story continues from there to a cat suit originating from the early 20th century, before WW1, and the story of early film, comics, war profiteering, and a pioneering superhero who dressed in a cat costume and called himself Alias. And from there it gets weirder, taking in a small town of small people (called colloquially "Midgetville") which ties all the storylines together into a terrorism plot.

Deitch is an imaginative writer and his storytelling is excellent throughout, as is his art which has to be seen to be believed. He's one of the most underrated cartoonists from the 60s, and while R. Crumb gets a lot of recognition, I feel Kim Deitch's work is as iconic and original and certainly deserving of a wider audience. Unfortunately "Alias the Cat" being his most printed book in the UK, it isn't his best.

While the story is imaginative and goes off on wild tangents, it's never as interesting - I can't explain it, it just felt like it was bizarre for the sake of being bizarre, not because it served the story. The odd choices which should have added to the book felt a bit forced and not nearly as clever as some of his other books.

The sequence in the 1900s and 1910s just dragged and repeated itself a few times adding to the hard going of the story. Midgetville was ok but was mostly exposition from Deitch's most famous creation "Waldo" who appears at the end to explain most of the book's strange meanderings.

I think Deitch is an utterly fantastic comics artist/writer and I felt a bit disappointed that "Alias the Cat" didn't live up to his usual high standard of work, but I urge those interested in finding out more on Kim Deitch to check out the recently republished "The Search for Smilin' Ed" which is much better, and "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" if you can find a copy (it's out of print for some reason). He is a brilliant artist but this book doesn't showcase his abilities nearly as well as other books have.

A classic (and decidedly phallic) image of Captain Marvel (the superhero who shouted "Shazam!" to get his powers) showed the big red hero riding a rocket in a bit of pro-America World War II zeal. A tribute to that image graces the cover of Alias the Cat!, although the cat on the cover has a devil's grin and evil in his eyes.

So what to expect from such a book if one is judging this graphic novel by its cover? It's hard to say, but it probably isn't what the reader gets inside the pages of this truly artful and thought-provoking work. Author and illustrator Kim Deitch has a special touch with his creation (Deitch has been in the business for decades, often not getting the due he so richly deserves; but in that time, he's honed his craft to an eloquently fine point--is that Deitch and his wife are flea market experts who collect odd and classic things. One day they meet a man selling a vintage Waldo the Cat doll for $1,000. The man spins a yarn about the doll's origins and why it should fetch such a high price, giving us the first story within a story in Alias the Cat! Thankfully, it's not the last.

Deitch uses these stories to flesh out his work in delightful ways and to draw parallels with the history of the comics medium through the decades. Deitch is also a film buff, one who scours flea markets and the Internet looking for old movie reels and stills. His brief asides on the history of film are fascinating, too, but even more so because of the way he ties that visual medium in with comics and lets us truly appreciate the dawn of the art form (and its eventual decay) in a time and place that seems worlds away from modern living. It's hard to separate the birth of comics, at least in its stages of growing popularity, from the larger picture of the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression that followed, and Deitch's view of it is both fun and intriguing.

Alias the Cat! originally unfolded as three separate comics magazines; all three are collected here. It begins as a simple story of a couple looking for collectibles but quickly turns into so much more: a quest for something mysterious, a pulp-fiction-inspired adventure tale, a foreboding story of dread, and a grand epic that's just too engrossing to put down. But mostly it's just a simple, very human story that relates to the growth and evolution of a medium.

Deitch interacts with his readers directly in all three parts of the story (reaction to the first issue ties in to the story of the second issue, for example), and it's clear he's having fun. So are the readers.

-- John Hogan

Cannot more highly recommend Kim Deitch. Strange, tight stories. Weighty black and white. Now, I read other graphic novels with despair.