by MATTHEW HAYS

In the last few years, as they did in the late '60s and '80s, comics have once again busted out of their relegated spot in the cultural margins. Art Spiegelman, R. Crumb and Harvey Pekar have all become household names due to the growing popularity of the medium.

New York City's Kim Deitch is rapidly becoming the next big comics discovery. The only problem with the word "discovery" is that he's been working in the comics trenches since the '60s. Spiegelman himself has declared Deitch "one of the best-kept secrets in comics for the past 35 years."

Deitch employs a strange ensemble of characters, including circus freaks, extraterrestrials and demons, who inhabit an incredibly complex and funny universe. His storylines have all been intricately woven and are in some way connected. Two years ago The Boulevard of Broken Dreams, a compilation of many of the cartoons starring his most famous character, Waldo, was published by the prestigious Pantheon Books. Deitch's style is heavily influenced by cartoons and cinema of the '20s and '30s, something that makes his comics feel especially cinematic. His storylines are so complex he has garnered comparisons to no less than William Faulkner. And yes, Deitch confirms he even had a brief stint creating a few Wacky Packages, the product-spoof stickers that were a hit in the '70s (Blunderbread was his brainchild).

Deitch spoke to the Mirror on the eve of his Blue Met appearance, where he'll be previewing his next book, as yet untitled, and conducting a master class.

Mirror: Your father's involvement with cartoons really permeates your work [his father, Gene Deitch, is a noted animator and illustrator]. How much have his old war stories informed your work?

Kim Deitch: A lot. I grew up around the animation business. When I was a kid I loved listening to all the shop talk around the breakfast table and dinner table. It definitely made some kind of an impression on me, both good and bad. Good, in that my parents were young and full of wide-eyed enthusiasm - I really caught the creativity religion from them, that there was no higher calling than to be creative. But on the downside, I watched my father battling on Madison Avenue and clawing his way to the top. So I got a real antipathy for all that kind of thing.

Wonderful world of Waldo

M: You've come up with a lot of different wacky characters. How did Waldo come about?

KD: When I first started drawing comics, my father discouraged me from doing it. He said he saw no future for me in the animation business. I did art school for a couple of years, then dropped out, joined the merchant marines, got a lot of straight jobs. It was only by degrees that I started to feel some kind of artistic calling. I started doing semi-abstract painting on the side, and they started to sell. Then my brother showed me some of what was going on in Marvel Comics, and I thought, I could really do this. I started doodling a bit, and I came up with this character. Basically, he's a composite of much of what I grew up with. Saturday-morning cartoons were silent cartoons from the '30s. There were a lot of mice. And there were these weird black cats, in Disney cartoons, in Felix. There were all these black cats running around. So Waldo was sort of a regurgitation of that. Only over time did he get the name and did he pick up the back story. His background is that he's not really a cat but a demon from hell.

M: There's a lot of playing with time in your work. It's quite melancholic at times.

KD: I've always been interested in history. And even in my own brain, I often feel like I'm replaying past and present in my head at all times. I'm writing a comic book and then I'll think about some conversation I had with a kid in second grade. Time is like one big wide continuum, surging through me at all times. It's an odd feeling. There's a definite interest in different aspects of history. I feel like I've been here from the beginning, since I crawled out of the ocean as some primordial ooze. I kind of wonder about reincarnation. I remember when I was four years old, I thought, "What about those times when I wore glasses?" And I'd never worn glasses. Sometimes I think there's something odd going on in that way.

Getting graphic

M: You've discussed the use of the term "graphic novel." It seems a way to get around using the word "comic."

KD: Isn't that a starchy term? I just found out that that was a gift from Will Eisner. He was a great man, but I think he was defensively stuffy about the whole thing. Comics are like a junk literature medium. In a way I think we should just relax and let it be a junk literature medium. Most of the great literature classics turn out to be the best of the junk. If you look at the work of Charles Dickens, they didn't come out in finely bound volumes, they were first published in parts, with splash panel and a jazzy logo and a few pictures inside. They looked a lot like comics. They were for the masses. My old man says most of everything is lousy, and I agree with him. We always look through the lousy to get to the good stuff. But you know what? They used to call me a hippie when I was younger, and I thought, "Well, if a black man is a nigger, then I'm a hippie." They'll call you whatever they want to call you. The name isn't that important.

M: Comics now get the respect they deserve. Are there certain things you think they can do that other media can't?

KD: It's a dynamic medium. They are sort of second cousins to movies. The visual element makes them very exciting. But that brings up a good point - there's still a lot of room for experimentation. They can give you a certain pictorial grandeur, but there are things that books can do that comics can't. People are starting to experiment more with the medium. I was really impressed with Diary of a Teenage Girl by Phoebe Gloeckner. She utilizes the best parts of a novel and parts of a comic and this really impressed me and had a big impact on me. Both mediums have their points. I think the hybrids are very exciting.

Kim Deitch conducts a five-hour master class in comics creation at the Blue Metropolis Literary Festival on Saturday and Sunday, April 2–3, 10 a.m.–12:30 p.m., $45 (registration: adrian.turner@ blue-met-bleu.com), and joins Michael Kupperman, Lauren Weinstein, Nicolas Mahler, Billy Mavreas with Sam Shalabi, Sherwin Tjia and Rupert Bottenberg at Comix: A Blue View, at Salle Alfred-Rouleau B, Hyatt Regency Montreal (Complexe Desjardins) on Saturday, April 2, 3 p.m., $5