_Shadowland_, by Kim Deitch

Kim Deitch spent years as a relatively obscure underground cartoonist, but is finally starting to get noticed and published by mainstream publishers. This book is a collection of linked stories fro the 1980s and 90s, most of which are about the showman and clown A.L. Ledicker Jr., an early film star named Molly O'Dare, or both.

The book is blurbed by Jim Woodring, which is thoroughly appropriate. Deitch's work is not much like Woodring's, but they do share the qualities of being hard-to-explain, and unmistakably their work. Deitch's work isn't quite as surreal as Woodring's, but it does contain odd, dream-like imagery from time to time. In Deitch's stories, however, these images always turn out to be 'real', though the explanation may end up involving ancient races, tiny aliens, or talking cats. Deitch almost always focuses his stories on the past, with a strange combination of nostalgia and paranoia -- imagine a mix between A Christmas Story and Illuminatus, and you're not far off the mark.

This isn't Deitch's best work, but it's pretty good. It has more gratuitous sex and violence than his later work does, but all drawn in such a cartoony fashion that it has little power to either titillate or horrify. It is interesting to see some of his later obsessions begin to flower here, especially movies and meta-fiction.

That last is worth some more detail: Late in Shadowland, Deitch starts using a trope which will frame all of his more recent work. The story is narrated by a character named Kim Deitch, a cartoonist with an interest in the past, who discovers old-timers and artifacts and relays their stories. He does his very best to make these visionsry escapades read as 'real' events. Or at least, he tries to put the onus of unreliability onto his sources, telling the reader their stories as honestly as he can. In small doses, this can sometimes work, but over the course of his career as a whole, the game becomes obvious. Still, it's a strangely compelling structure.

In some ways, the recent collections are not the best way to read his work. I'm not sure when I first encountered his work, whether in an anthology or an obscure one-shot, but it already felt strangely familiar then. To have to search out old comic books and piece together the hidden connections between these seemingly independent stories -- these activites make the reader become like the narrator, adding a rich layer to the experience. To have the stories neatly collected and organized in volumes seems almost like cheating. On the other hand, I would likely have never read most of them if they hadn't been so collected, so I'll settle.

Recommended for fans of weird meta-fiction.

_Shadowland_, by Kim Deitch

Kim Deitch spent years as a relatively obscure underground cartoonist, but is finally starting to get noticed and published by mainstream publishers. This book is a collection of linked stories fro the 1980s and 90s, most of which are about the showman and clown A.L. Ledicker Jr., an early film star named Molly O'Dare, or both.

The book is blurbed by Jim Woodring, which is thoroughly appropriate. Deitch's work is not much like Woodring's, but they do share the qualities of being hard-to-explain, and unmistakably their work. Deitch's work isn't quite as surreal as Woodring's, but it does contain odd, dream-like imagery from time to time. In Deitch's stories, however, these images always turn out to be 'real', though the explanation may end up involving ancient races, tiny aliens, or talking cats. Deitch almost always focuses his stories on the past, with a strange combination of nostalgia and paranoia -- imagine a mix between A Christmas Story and Illuminatus, and you're not far off the mark.

This isn't Deitch's best work, but it's pretty good. It has more gratuitous sex and violence than his later work does, but all drawn in such a cartoony fashion that it has little power to either titillate or horrify. It is interesting to see some of his later obsessions begin to flower here, especially movies and meta-fiction.

That last is worth some more detail: Late in Shadowland, Deitch starts using a trope which will frame all of his more recent work. The story is narrated by a character named Kim Deitch, a cartoonist with an interest in the past, who discovers old-timers and artifacts and relays their stories. He does his very best to make these visionsry escapades read as 'real' events. Or at least, he tries to put the onus of unreliability onto his sources, telling the reader their stories as honestly as he can. In small doses, this can sometimes work, but over the course of his career as a whole, the game becomes obvious. Still, it's a strangely compelling structure.

In some ways, the recent collections are not the best way to read his work. I'm not sure when I first encountered his work, whether in an anthology or an obscure one-shot, but it already felt strangely familiar then. To have to search out old comic books and piece together the hidden connections between these seemingly independent stories -- these activites make the reader become like the narrator, adding a rich layer to the experience. To have the stories neatly collected and organized in volumes seems almost like cheating. On the other hand, I would likely have never read most of them if they hadn't been so collected, so I'll settle.

Recommended for fans of weird meta-fiction.