How I Make Comics

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By Kim Deitch. Published by Fantagraphics. Hardcover, 192 pages, B&W, 2026. The legendary underground cartoonist Kim Deitch unveils his creative process in all its imaginative whim sy. How I Make Comics is not just about how Kim Deitch makes comics, but about how comics made him. The book pinwheels between real autobiography and imagined comics history, but it begins in 1952 with a true story of eight-year-old Kim Deitch appearing in the audience of the Howdy Doody Show with eight-year-old Donnie Trump. Following Donnie's attempt to rig an election among the audience (no kidding!), Deitch relates a famous newspaper account of a diminutive wife who valiantly defends her equally diminutive husband in court, who just happens to be the inspiration of Harold Gray's Little Orphan Annie. Periodically, Kim asks his own wife for her critique and advice of the stories he's told so far, which he takes into account for future tales that include revenge-driven circus performers, fairytale mural painters, sordid comic book lore, comics readers creating real-life superheroes, impossibly old cats issuing supernatural judgments and inhabiting the bodies of humans, culminating in the real-life story of Kim's mother hitchhiking across country and being picked up by none other than Forrest J. Ackerman, the sci-fi, fantasy, and monster aficionado, who takes her to a convention where she meets a teenaged Ray Bradbury. How I Make Comics is a creatively kaleidoscopic, non-stop exploration of how Deitch's imagination turns ideas, influences, and irritations into comics in his inimitable style. Snippets of behind-the-scenes explanations of his notes and sketches expand into cascading short stories. Each section goes freewheeling from notion to notion, quietly building themes and reveling in its own wild-eyed imaginative capacities across 180 pages to form both an intimate graphic memoir and an eye-popping graphic novel. One of the most prolific artists of his generation, Deitch enters his 60th year of cartooning more inventive than ever and showing no signs of slowing down. Praise "At once memoir, metafiction, and artistic manifesto, this book by underground comics legend Deitch offers a dizzying, exhilarating tour through a lifetime of creative obsession." — Library Journal Starred Review "Deitch's latest is both fun and insightful, featuring engaging stories that will appeal to anyone with a taste for the metaphysical." — Booklist "An influential figure in the underground comix revolution of the 1970s, Kim Deitch is one of those creators that it pays to keep an eye on." — AIPT "An absolute 'must' for the legions of Kim Deitch fans and devotees of the underground comics of the 60's..." — Midwest Book Review "Deitch's comics are as dense as prose—he is one of the few artists who has truly taken the phrase "graphic novel" to heart." — The Brooklyn Rail Show more