Here's a spiffy, embossed hardcover – sporting highlights in metallic blue ink, no less – arriving just in time for readers to celebrate the 82nd birthday (May 21) of this American comics master whose career spanned the dawn of underground comics to the advent of the graphic novel and then continued on down the comics highway, eschewing the heavily trafficked avenues and instead taking meandering side roads so as to better be able to discover – and share – lost tales full of equal measures of pathos and insight. 

For six full decades now, Kim Deitch has been creating a unique synthesis of American popular culture in comics form.  Some well ripened fruits of which are on display here in this anecdote-filled overview of his life and comics-making career.  It all starts with a(n apparently true) 1952 encounter with Little Donnie Trump™ on the set of an episode of The Howdy Doody Show™ that centers on an election, no less.  The centerpiece of How I Make Comics is a custom mix of history and fantasy centering on another certain "little" – Anne –  that is rooted in reality but then takes off on more than one flight of fancy as it weaves through the book, and in the process shows not only how Kim Deitch makes comics, but how comics as a form take root and grow, first in the mind, then in culture.  Woven in are tales of a lonely elephant, the legend of a 40 year-old cat and much more, including a really nice piece of (up close and personal) popular culture history that we don't want to say too much about because we don't want to give anything away.  Suffice it to say that this volume is chock-a-block with so many great stories that it helps to explain how Kim Deitch keeps going:  these stories are simply too good to languish in a drawer – they must be shared!  And there's no better way to share a good story than comics!  So find a comfortable spot and get ready to enjoy!

The legendary underground cartoonist Kim Deitch unveils his creative process in all its imaginative whimsy.

How I Make Comics is not just about how Kim Deitch makes comics, but about how comics made him. The book pinwheels between real autobiography and imagined comics history, but it begins in 1952 with a true story of eight-year-old Kim Deitch appearing in the audience of the Howdy Doody Show with eight-year-old Donnie Trump. Following Donnie's attempt to rig an election among the audience (no kidding!), Deitch relates a famous newspaper account of a diminutive wife who valiantly defends her equally diminutive husband in court, who just happens to be the inspiration of Harold Gray's Little Orphan Annie. Periodically, Kim asks his own wife for her critique and advice of the stories he's told so far, which he takes into account for future tales that include revenge-driven circus performers, fairytale mural painters, sordid comic book lore, comics readers creating real-life superheroes, impossibly old cats issuing supernatural judgments and inhabiting the bodies of humans, culminating in the real-life story of Kim's mother hitchhiking across country and being picked up by none other than Forrest J. Ackerman, the sci-fi, fantasy, and monster aficionado, who takes her to a convention where she meets a teenaged Ray Bradbury.

How I Make Comics is a creatively kaleidoscopic, non-stop exploration of how Deitch's imagination turns ideas, influences, and irritations into comics in his inimitable style. Snippets of behind-the-scenes explanations of his notes and sketches expand into cascading short stories. Each section goes freewheeling from notion to notion, quietly building themes and reveling in its own wild-eyed imaginative capacities across 180 pages to form both an intimate graphic memoir and an eye-popping graphic novel. One of the most prolific artists of his generation, Deitch enters his 60th year of cartooning more inventive than ever and showing no signs of slowing down.