How I Make Comics

The legendary underground cartoonist Kim Deitch unveils his creative process in all its imaginative whimsy.

How I Make Comics is not just about how Kim Deitch makes comics, but about how comics made him. The book pinwheels between real autobiography and imagined comics history, but it begins in 1952 with a true story of eight-year-old Kim Deitch appearing in the audience of the Howdy Doody Show with eight-year-old Donnie Trump. Following Donnie’s attempt to rig an election among the audience (no kidding!), Deitch relates a famous newspaper account of a diminutive wife who valiantly defends her equally diminutive husband in court, who just happens to be the inspiration of Harold Gray’s Little Orphan Annie. Periodically, Kim asks his own wife for her critique and advice of the stories he’s told so far, which he takes into account for future tales that include revenge-driven circus performers, fairytale mural painters, sordid comic book lore, comics readers creating real-life superheroes, impossibly old cats issuing supernatural judgments and inhabiting the bodies of humans, culminating in the real-life story of Kim’s mother hitchhiking across country and being picked up by none other than Forrest J. Ackerman, the sci-fi, fantasy, and monster aficionado, who takes her to a convention where she meets a teenaged Ray Bradbury.

How I Make Comics is a creatively kaleidoscopic, non-stop exploration of how Deitch’s imagination turns ideas, influences, and irritations into comics in his inimitable style. Snippets of behind-the-scenes explanations of his notes and sketches expand into cascading short stories. Each section goes freewheeling from notion to notion, quietly building themes and reveling in its own wild-eyed imaginative capacities across 180 pages to form both an intimate graphic memoir and an eye-popping graphic novel. One of the most prolific artists of his generation, Deitch enters his 60th year of cartooning more inventive than ever and showing no signs of slowing down.