Alias The Cat!

By Kim Deitch

Jonathan Cape

www.rbooks.co.uk

www.capegraphicnovels.co.uk

11.95 pounds, no idea what that costs in grams

Reviewed by: Victor Schwartzman

Kim Deitch’s artwork can be ugly.  It frequently looks ugly—ugly and creepy.  Many of his characters—in particular, his drawings of himself—have a desperate ‘the world is out to get me’ wide-eyed look of fear.  Look at the pictures Deitch draws of himself—do you think you could ever sit down and have a quiet cup of java with this guy?  He always looks as if he’s sat on a tack.  A big tack.

Starting back in 1969 or so Deitch began getting published, although in all the time since I am not aware of such a sustained work as Alias the Cat!  His art always looks the same, which is another way of saying he has a unique style.  His art is strictly black and white. It is flat—perspective is a bad word.  The pages sit on their haunches waiting to jump at your eyeballs and do something bad.  He is not interested, apparently, in creating pretty pictures.  I am not aware of Kim Deitch still lifes (lives?) of bowls of fruit.

Alias The Cat! therefore is not necessarily your first choice for a quiet, non-challenging, let’s watch Donald Trump on tv kinda evening.  Not that Donald Trump would not fit right into Deitch’s weird universe of strange compulsions and thwarted dreams.  No, if you’re going to read Alias The Cat!, you must be ready for, as Bette Davis might put it, a bumpy ride.

And that’s good.  Because Alias The Cat! has the power to change you, if you read it.

The story begins with Deitch’s wife shopping for cat toys.  Not just any cat toys—she specializes in collecting Halloween cats.  A strange former sailor they find in a flea market has a odd cat doll she desperately wants for her collection.  The sailor spins a yarn of an evil catlike creature—possibly a devil sent to Earth to torment us.  This cat has popped up in Deitch’s work before, seems to me.  A cat is the right animal to choose for the creature.  People are there for it to use.  It is always horny, violent and sociopathic—and those are its finer qualities.

What evolves, page by page in Alias The Cat!, is an epic experience spanning the better part of a century, the destruction of the lives of distant Islanders, the building of a town for dwarves and midgets, the popularity of silent film serials circa 1915, the dangers of fireworks, the need for militant activism to stop wars, and sex.  Sex with people, sex with a certain cat.  Reluctant sex, for which one character suffers the rest of her life.  And, of course, EBay.

Kim Deitch’s world holds a picture to its characters of how wonderful life could be—if only there were not the world’s symbolic evil cats always available to pervert truth and justice into the American way.  A woman sacrifices almost all for love—but when push comes to shove, it is her lover who gets shoved.  Some characters play fast and loose with the law, but grow rich and never pay a real price because they manufacture weapons of war.  Deitch himself ends up in an asylum, haunted by visions of the evil cat waiting to destroy him should he ever get too close.  I hope I am not giving away any plot points, but as you can see this is no simple graphic novel.

Whatever you expect, picking up this book, you’ll likely get something far greater.  The story has remarkable twists and turns.  Starting out as an apparently simple tale of a woman with a collectible cat fetish, Alias The Cat! evolves into a heartbreaking story of a love lost and lives forgotten. 

The book’s cover price is easily worth the truth inside. 

Last update : 11-11-2007 10:39

Average user rating

   (0 vote)