Alias the Cat - Hardcover

Kim Deitch was a seminal figure in the Underground Comix movement in the 1960s, and over the last 30 years he has worked non-stop, his comix appearing in Raw, LA Weekly, Weirdo, Heavy Metal, and Nickelodeon Magazine among many other publications. He and Pam live in Manhattan, with their two cats (actual, real ones).

*Starred Review* Followers of premier underground comics creator Deitch's long career know how hopeless it's been for him to expunge Waldo, the evil blue cat that only he and other deranged characters can see, from his cartooning--and his life. The malignant feline bedeviled the hero of The Boulevard of Broken Dreams (2002), and Deitch's new book concerns several others so cursed, Deitch himself foremost among them. He and his wife are inveterate collectors of pop-cultural detritus. Her passion for cat kitsch and his for silent movies intersect when they find, buy, and mysteriously lose a (gulp!) Waldo doll, and, thanks to her winning an eBay auction for an ancient cat costume, he then discovers a 1915 comic-strip-and-movie serial, left incomplete by its creator's bizarre death. The costume was worn in the film version, in which the shadow of cat ears--Waldo's ears!--fleetingly appears. In the final, third episode of a wild ride punctuated by wilder side trips to fill in the backstory, Deitch repairs to Midgetville, New Jersey, to face down his nemesis. He does not emerge unscathed. Deitch's parody of the hard-boiled sleuther is gloriously ludicrous yet as involving as a Philip Marlowe caper, and his boldly cartoonish artwork, packed with ambient detail and full of blockish, weighty figures (they could all be heavies), is the perfect medium for it. Ray Olson
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