Few “underground” cartoonists deserve that subterranean title so fully as Kim Deitch. He was there at the beginning of the movement, drawing for The East Village Other in 1967, and his work retains much of that psychedelic, R. Crumb-like earthiness.
But also: He’s constantly digging, churning the inky soil of American pop culture and marveling over the fossils he turns up.
In “The Boulevard of Broken Dreams” (2002), he constructed a fake but convincing history of early American funny-animal cartoons via the many iterations of Waldo the Cat, the white-gloved, foulmouthed feline muse who has graced (or invaded) his work for 40 years.
more from the NY Times Book Review here.