Kim Deitch

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A 1974 comic with cover art by Kim Deitch.

Kim Deitch (born 1944) is an American comics artist. He was an important figure in the underground comix movement of the 1960s, regularly contributing comical, psychedelia-tinged comic strips (featuring the flower child "Sunshine Girl" and "The India Rubber Man") to New York City's premier underground newspaper, The East Village Other, beginning in 1967. He became editor of EVO's all-comics spin-off, Gothic Blimp Works, in 1969. He was also a publisher, as co-founder of the Cartoonists Co-op Press. Deitch has continued to produce new and increasingly ambitious comics since that time. He has sometimes worked with his brothers, Simon and Seth Deitch, and is the son of illustrator/animator Gene Deitch. Kim Deitch has also worked under the pseudonym Fowlton Means.

In the past two decades, Deitch's comics have become increasingly lengthy and elaborate. Formally, his work is notable for great density of visual detail and ambitious narrative structures that veer between fantasy and reality and skip through time. Common themes in Deitch's work are addiction (specifically alcoholism), deception and delusion, set against the history of twentieth-century popular entertainment, including the early days of animation, cinema, comics and television, and the origins of those forms in vaudeville, carnivals and the circus. His best-known character is a mysterious cat named Waldo, who appears variously as a famous cartoon character of the 1930s, as an actual character in the "reality" of the strips, as the demonic reincarnation of Judas Iscariot, and who, occasionally, is claimed to have overcome Deitch and written the comics himself.