There’s a recurring gizmo in Reincarnation Stories, “The Plot Robot.” It’s a carnival contraption, a combination of a one armed bandit and fortune teller machine. A desperate writer can pull a lever, and the robot ejects a story idea on two cards. “A king” “is kidnapped”. Spain Rodriguez, Kim Deitch’s friend and coworker, mocks it, but Deitch uses it to jump start his creative process. It’s functionally equivalent to all the modern story dice and cards and websites that anyone can use to overcome writer’s block.
All these devices and dice have a finite number of combinations, and long before they start repeating exact stories, they will start reusing elements. “A thief” “is kidnapped.” “A fish monger” “is kidnapped.” It’s an eternal recurrence, like reincarnation. And that’s what this book is about. Not just stories of Kim Deitch’s past lives, that he may or may not believe in, but the recurrence of certain elements in his lives, again and again.
Most specifically, the element that recurs the most is “recurrence”.
It’s a very post modern comic.
Written and illustrated by Kim Deitch
Kim Deitch made his name as an “underground” cartoonist — a contemporary of Spiegelman, Crumb, et. al. — but over the last three decades has simply been one of the most vital graphic novelists the medium has to offer, including acknowledged classics such as The Boulevard of Broken Dreams, Alias the Cat, and The Search for Smilin’ Ed. His new graphic novel, Reincarnation Stories, feels like the apotheosis of his career, an ambitiously sprawling tour de force exploring the concept of reincarnation. When Deitch was four years old, he began having memories of a time when he wore glasses. The problem was, he had never actually worn glasses. Then, one day, young Deitch is sitting outside his apartment building when an elderly man approaches him, excited. “Is it possible? Sid! SID PINCUS! Good God, man! You’ve changed. You’re smaller! And where are your glasses?” From here, Deitch weaves a dizzying path of reincarnation stories that spans the past, present, and future of human history, with appearances by Frank Sinatra, monkey gods, a forgotten cowboy star of the silver screen, a tribe of Native Americans that successfully resettled on the moon, and a parallel reality where Deitch himself is the megasuccessful creator of a series of kids books about a superhero called Young Avatar, who helps marginalized souls lead better lives and in his secret identity works as a carpenter. Did we mention Deitch’s spiritual nemesis (an incarnation of Judas Iscariot), Waldo the Cat? Deitch’s storytelling mastery has never been more fully on display that this rich tapestry of a graphic novel, certain to be a staple on 2019 “Best of ” year-end lists.
I don’t know if Kim Deitch believes in reincarnation. I do know that he had a real operation done to fix a hole in his left retina, a terrifying injury for a visual artist, and the post-operation recovery led to many sleepless nights. He kept himself sane during those nights by remembering everything he could about his life, and these memories quickly become the hallucinatory framing device for this whole comic.
Kim Deitch is an old hand in the world of comics. He comes straight from the world of the classic underground magazine Raw, where he published alongside Bill Griffith and Art Spiegelman. His art style is what I think of as “classic 70s underground.” It’s very dense, in artwork and dialog, filled with so much subtle crosshatching it barely allows in any light. Every elements on the page is easily distinguished, but there is a lot of them. The word balloons are integrated straight into the art at the first pass, and not as a fourth-class citizen. And it has an anarchist, black cat. This one is named Waldo. Not to be confused with Fritz or Krazy.
(The artwork is similar to Robert Crumb’s. I’m not familiar with all of Kim Deitch’s work, but I was very surprised that I couldn’t find any record of them collaborating.)
Kim Deitch’s stories begin with his great eyes overlooking the page, staring down with us at the scene unfolding. The eyes go away after a shot time, but they recur in other ways throughout the book. The page layouts are frequently symmetrical, which makes it easy for elements to land in the middle of the page, like balls, suns, and dialog balloons, and every one of them reflects those initial eyes. Sometime’s it’s an entire circular panel, with a storyteller drawn inside, himself staring out of the panel to the story he’s telling.
Continued belowEventually we see Deitch’s vision of Jehova: a naked, bearded cyclops. It watches over all things with it’s one, giant eye. That comes from the story that Waldo the cat is telling, who claims to be the reincarnation of Judas.
I think that paragraph is a good example of how Reincarnation Stories wildly veers all over the map of story telling. From reimagining the life of Mary, Judas, and Jesus, to the real life stories of a forgotten western actors Jack Hoxie and Buck Jones, Kim Deitch leaves very few markers of truth to know what’s autobiographical and what isn’t, and all the stories blend together. Were the elephants racing down the city streets real? Did he meet D. W. Griffith as a kid, an ddid Griffith actually believe the four year old Deitch was the reincarnation of Sidney Pincus?
Reincarnations Stories tells stories inside stories, all under a simple framing device with infinite possibilities, not unlike “One Thousand and One Nights.” And the stories intermix. It doesn’t take long before it’s Kim Deitch narrating a memory of Jack Hoxie telling the secret ending to a movie based on a book that we saw Kim Deitch reading in an earlier memory. It’s a tribute to Deitch’s careful plotting that I never felt lost or confused in all this. Each out-of-order memory leads easily to the next and to the next.
In an early story Kim Deitch visits a museum exhibit with stuffed monkeys. They were killed, stuffed, and mounted, and put on display in natural looking environs. It’s supposed to show a scene from how these monkeys actually lived, like a memory caught in physical form. Deitch remembers it because of an old man there who tells a fabulous story about running away from his father’s tent and living with these same monkeys for little while, like Tarzan. Later Deitch learn that these monkeys aren’t even from the same tribe, or from the same hunting expedition. The physical memory that the museum curators created was utterly fake, assembled from pieces.
But it doesn’t matter. The scene is close enough to what may have happened, so it may as well be real, like this comic.
