The Many Reincarnations of Kim Deitch
Artist Kim Deitch wakes up at 4 A.M. every morning. In less than an hour, he is sitting at his drawing table, doing what he has done for more than fifty years: drawing comics. His latest—and most ambitious—graphic novel, Reincarnation Stories, reflects back on his long career while being utterly unlike anything he has ever done before. In this epoch-spanning pseudo-autobiographical book, Deitch leads the reader on a time-hopping, picaresque journey through his soul’s previous incarnations, tracing a mysterious thread that runs through his personal histories, real and imagined, back to before the dawn of recorded time.
It is tempting to say that Kim Deitch has already lived several lives as a cartoonist. Deitch, along with Spain Rodriguez, Trina Robbins, and Robert Crumb, was among the first wave of and other underground newspapers in the countercultural mid-’60s. Like his peers, Deitch followed Crumb into the new format of underground comic books, or “comix,” after debuted in 1968. He contributed to underground anthologies including Art Spiegelman and Bill Griffith’s and published two issues of his own comic book series, . After the underground milieu dissipated in the mid-’70s, Deitch continued to work consistently, occupying every available format that came along. He drew comic strip serials for the emerging alternative weekly newspapers, short comics stories for new anthologies including Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly’s , and individual comic books for new independent publishers like Fantagraphics.
