Alias the Cat Kim Deitch Jonathan Cape, 136pp, £11.99
“I think I’ve got a large-sized case of the 21st-century blues,” Kim Deitch confides in Alias the Cat.
It’s easy to see what he means: the comic opens serenely enough, with Kim and his wife Pam poking around flea markets, but as the story unfolds it fills up with arms dealers, exploitative factory owners and crooked bureaucrats.
Then again, it’s not all down-to-earth gloom. For a start, there’s Waldo, the cartoon cat at the heart of the book – a foul-mouthed, money-grubbing Felix who has appeared in Deitch’s comics since the 1960s. Then there’s the storyline, which is more Pynchon than Pilger: a market stallholder tells Kim and Pam about a Waldo cult on a remote tropical island, which sends them in search of Waldo dolls. Instead, they discover a newspaper cartoon strip about an explosives expert and his alter ego The Cat, whose storylines are oddly similar to the news pieces they accompany. Hoping to learn more about The Cat, Kim heads for Midgetville, New Jersey, but ends up running into another feline entirely.
Deitch has a knack for capturing detail, whether he’s drawing a facial expression or a roomful of explosives. But his talent is just as much about narrative, and creating a “half-imagined, half-remembered”, entirely vivid comic world.
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