Kim Deitch - Beyond the Pale! Krazed Komics and Stories

The black-and-white comics of this collection bring together Deitch's ( Hollywoodland ) strange brands of seedy fantasy and silly satire. A former merchant marine and psychiatric attendant, he lived among the down-and-out on New York's Lower East Side. In the story "Keep 'em Flying," Deitch portrays himself as a hypnotized figure who ends up on another planet with one of his own characters, the cigar-smoking Waldo the cat. The goofily interesting Famous Frauds series relates the history of a supposedly mechanical chess player and the hard lives of those who actually sweated inside the huge contraption, preying on an unsuspecting chess-playing public. The best story, "Two Jews from Yonkers," is an autobiographical, squalid tale about cartooning, drugs and the Pope. The drawing style here has Sunday-morning-funnies charm as interpreted by a hippie/Bowery bum.