Kim Deitch. Vegas.
By Mark Kaufman
As I mentioned a couple of days ago, I had the distinct pleasure of attending a lecture by Kim Deitch, the cartoonist, illustrator and all around cooler guy than you or I in Las Vegas over the weekend. Mr. Deitch spoke at the Vegas Valley Bookfest and he was awesome. Kim has a very low key way of speaking, but is a wonderful storyteller, so much so that it was a riveting 90 minutes. He spoke about his childhood as the son of creative parents, growing up in New York, LA and back to NY where his father ran the UPA animation studio by day and churned out a daily comic strip at night. He told tales about attending Pratt in Brooklyn for a short time before taking a series of jobs that included going out to sea on a Norwegian tramp steamer, working the night shift at what he termed a “posh nut house” in New York, working at an orphanage, being a dope dealer and struggling cartoonist. Like I said much cooler than either you or I. That was all before he even started talking about the work which is intricately crafted, well designed, and densley populated with interesting characters, strange situations and riffs on historical fact and American mythology. One quote that I can decifer from my chicken scratch notes which I found interesting; “Comics are a dynamic delivery system for words and pictures”. And Kim Deitch is a dynamic (if low key) practitioner of that system.