Alias the Cat

Followers of premier underground comics creator Deitch´s long career know how hopeless it´s been for him to expunge Waldo, the evil blue cat that only he and other deranged characters can see, from his cartooning--and his life. The malignant feline bedeviled the hero of The Boulevard of Broken Dreams (2002), and Deitch´s new book concerns several others so cursed, Deitch himself foremost among them. He and his wife are inveterate collectors of pop-cultural detritus. Her passion for cat kitsch and his for silent movies intersect when they find, buy, and mysteriously lose a (gulp!) Waldo doll, and, thanks to her winning an eBay auction for an ancient cat costume, he then discovers a 1915 comic-strip-and-movie serial, left incomplete by its creator´s bizarre death. The costume was worn in the film version, in which the shadow of cat ears--Waldo´s ears!--fleetingly appears. In the final, third episode of a wild ride punctuated by wilder side trips to fill in the backstory, Deitch repairs to Midgetville, New Jersey, to face down his nemesis. He does not emerge unscathed. Deitch´s parody of the hard-boiled sleuther is gloriously ludicrous yet as involving as a Philip Marlowe caper, and his boldly cartoonish artwork, packed with ambient detail and full of blockish, weighty figures (they could all be heavies), is the perfect medium for it.