How I Make Comics by Kim Deitch

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

The legendary underground cartoonist Kim Deitch pulls back the curtain on his singular creative mind in How I Make Comics by Fantagraphics, a book that is as much about the act of cartooning as it is about a life shaped by comics themselves. Rather than offering a straightforward how-to manual, Deitch delivers a wildly imaginative graphic memoir that shows how comics formed his identity, his obsessions, and his way of seeing the world.

How I Make Comics pinwheels between true autobiography and invented comics history, often blurring the line until the two feel inseparable. The book opens in 1952 with a startlingly real anecdote. An eight-year-old Kim Deitch appears in the audience of The Howdy Doody Show, seated near another eight-year-old named Donnie Trump. When Trump attempts to rig an audience election, Deitch uses the moment as a springboard into a broader meditation on performance, power, and spectacle in American culture. From there, the narrative ricochets into a famous newspaper story about a tiny woman fiercely defending her equally diminutive husband in court, a case that happens to inspire Harold Gray’s Little Orphan Annie. These strange but factual moments anchor the book’s more surreal detours.

Throughout the book, Deitch frequently turns to his wife, artist Pam Butler, for critique and advice, inviting her into the storytelling itself. Her responses influence the stories that follow, creating a running dialogue between artist and editor that grounds the book’s gleeful chaos. What emerges is a parade of Deitchian visions. Revenge-driven circus performers, fairytale mural painters, sordid comic book legends, obsessive readers who attempt to become superheroes, and impossibly old cats who pass supernatural judgment while inhabiting human bodies all flow naturally from one section to the next. The journey culminates in a remarkable real-life story involving Deitch’s mother hitchhiking across the country and being picked up by Forrest J. Ackerman, the legendary science fiction and monster culture evangelist, who brings her to a convention where she meets a teenage Ray Bradbury.

At its core, How I Make Comics is a kaleidoscopic exploration of how Kim Deitch’s imagination transforms ideas, irritations, memories, and cultural detritus into comics. Behind-the-scenes snippets of notes and sketches do not remain explanatory for long. They expand outward into fully realized short stories, each one spinning off into unexpected territory. The book moves freely from notion to notion, quietly building recurring themes while reveling in its own boundless imaginative energy. Across its 180 pages, it functions simultaneously as an intimate graphic memoir and an eye-popping graphic novel.

Deitch also uses the book to reveal his highly disciplined yet unconventional creative process. He has long believed that morning is the most productive time for conceptual work, often discovering that his subconscious has already solved narrative problems overnight. Memories and subconscious mechanisms play a crucial role in his storytelling. During a period of recovery from eye surgery that forced him to keep his eyes closed, Deitch mined vivid recollections and imagined past lives that eventually became the foundation for Reincarnation Stories. Vintage animation, obscure twentieth-century pop culture, and real historical ephemera are all absorbed, preserved, and transformed within his work.

Unlike artists who separate writing from drawing, Deitch often does both simultaneously in sketchbooks, allowing stories to evolve organically on the page. When constructing formal layouts, he frequently begins in the middle of a story, tackling the most difficult sequences first before working toward the end and finally circling back to the beginning. This nonlinear approach mirrors the looping, self-referential nature of his narratives, where Deitch himself often appears as a character, further collapsing the boundary between lived experience and illustrated fantasy.

Technically, his work is defined by a densely crosshatched, vintage-inspired black and white style that feels both timeless and obsessive. His legendary work ethic underpins it all. Deitch maintains a strict forty-hour work week at the drawing table and meticulously logs his hours, treating cartooning as both craft and calling. Pam Butler remains a constant presence throughout this process, acting as muse, editor, and narrative anchor who helps balance his exuberant imagination with emotional clarity.

Now entering his 60th year of cartooning, Kim Deitch shows no signs of slowing down. How I Make Comics stands as both a master class in creative thinking and a celebration of a lifetime spent chasing ideas wherever they lead. It is a book that makes clear that, for Deitch, comics are not just something he makes. They are the medium that made him.

Publication date: April 7, 2026