How I Make Comics Review

I am not as well-versed in underground comix as I probably should be. I became nominally aware of them back in the 1980s, but by that point, they had largely given way to the independents comics movement of that decade. I was little too underage to even get access to any undergrounds until the late '80s at the earliest -- by which point, most of them had fallen to the wayside -- and by the very nature of underground comix, the vast majority of them have never been reprinted or collected since. Some of Robert Crumb's and Harvey Pekar's stuff. Wimmen's Comix got a nice slipcase collection a couple years ago. I've got an artist's edition version of Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary. But by and large, undergrounds are a lot like Tiajuana Bibles or old school comics fanzines in that you pretty much need to track down the originals if you want to study them.

So in coming to Kim Deitch's How I Make Comics, I'm not overly familiar with his work. Most of what I have read from him are his later comics. But I do know him to have a somewhat surreal sense of humor and storytelling and, as I'm always interested in the creative process when it comes to comics, so I picked this up.

First off, what this book is NOT is a "how to." If you have any ideas or hopes about this being the indie comics version of How To Make Comics the Marvel Way, just chuck those out the window now. It is indeed about how Deitch makes comics, but it's not prescriptive in any way. Well, it's not exactly about how Deitch makes comics generally, it's about how Deitch made this comic specifically. He goes through how he made this exact book and the reader is left to infer that his process would be similar for his other comics. Or, at least, his other comics since the late 1990s after he married artist Pam Butler, whose input he consider vital.

You ever see the music video for Phil Collins' Don't Lose My Number? It goes through Collins meeting with a string of directors and creative types proposing concepts for the Don't Lose My Number video and cycles through vignettes of each concept. Some are trying to tell more of a story, some just relying on unique visuals... but they all take radically different approaches, none of which seem to have any relation to one another. And for as absurd as it is to compare one of the most popular, widely-listened-to musicians of the 1980s to an underground cartoonist, that same basic concept is on display in How I Make Comics.

The story starts with Deitch's recollection of when he was one of the kids in the Peanut Gallery of The Howdy Doody Show and he got into a fight with an eight-year-old Donald Trump. It then shifts to an old newspaper account of a little person who had the script for his play stolen, and he sought retribution by blowing up one of the man's properties. Then there's a story about a circus elephant who had been sold to a zoo and then escaped. People having their souls transferred to tiny Felix the Cat style bodies. A man coerced into robbing a mansion with two "friends" and it turns out to be a house he painted a mural for 20 years earlier. How his mother and father met while hanging out with Forrest Ackerman.

And his wife Pam repeatedly steps in to offer critiques. "This is too bleak." "What is this character's motivation?" "What if they did this instead?"

Some of the ideas get discarded, some get merged, some just shift a bit. It's essentially a walk through Deitch's creative process. The promo copy calls the book "a creatively kaleidoscopic, non-stop exploration of how Deitch’s imagination turns ideas, influences, and irritations into comics in his inimitable style" and while, yes, that is a bit sales pitchy, it's not really inaccurate either. There are a few technical elements included about Deitch's work -- the type of brush he uses, what his desk set-up looks like, etc. -- but those are incidental to his creative process when it comes to this book. Even with my limited knowledge of Deitch's work, How I Make Comics feels very much like it could only have come from him. As I said, this isn't exactly a "how to" and you'll probably be disappointed if you go in expecting that. But if you appreciate Deitch's particular brand of storytelling, this very much fits within his oeuvre and you'll likely find it as entertaining as his other works.

The book came out in hardcover from Fantagraphics in May, so it should be readily available through your favorite bookshop. It retails for $24.99 US.

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