'The Boulevard of Broken Dreams'

Pantheon, 2002, 160 pages

Written and Illustrated by Kim Deitch

A visually beautiful, narratively intricate, and powerful book by one of the most original, and - until now - least recognized comic artists at work today.

The place is New York City in 1933. The setting: the Fontaine Talking Fables animation studio. Teddy Mishkin - definitely alcoholic, possibly insane - is hard at work on the latest cartoon short for Waldo the Cat, the "star" of Fontaine's stable of animated characters. But little does anyone (except Teddy) realize that Waldo is realΓÇôand that he is Teddy's insidiously helpful assistant.

One of the godfathers of American underground comics, Deitch grew up among animators, and this graphic novel is his twisted allegorical history of the rise and fall of American animation. Spanning from 1927 (when theatrical cartoons began to hit their stride) to 1993, it's crammed with intrigue, mysteries and Deitch's trademark exploding page layout. The story concerns a close-knit group of employees of a minor animation studio, Fontaine Talking Fables, but it's driven by a malevolent talking cat named Waldo who's just real enough to drive some of the cartoonists who created him into alcoholism and madness. (Waldo's been appearing in one form or another in Deitch's work for 35 years.) It helps to know a bit about animation history to catch some of the jokes (animator Winsor Newton and his creation Milton the Mastodon, for instance, are clearly inspired by Winsor McCay and Gertie the Dinosaur). But even without this knowledge, the culture of the studios comes across clearly and the story's complicated chronology is remarkably engaging, albeit weirdly paced. Deitch has an odd, idiosyncratic visual style: his real-world characters are crudely two-dimensional, but they're drawn into distinctly un-cartoony tableaux of squalor and shadow. His funny animal characters, meanwhile, have all the squishable malleability of their silver-screen counterparts with an additional tinge of dark Surrealism.