How I Make Comics by Kim Deitch

Underground comics legend Kim Deitch is back with a book that feels less like a traditional memoir and more like somebody opening up a filing cabinet inside their imagination and dumping the whole thing onto the floor. How I Make Comics arrives May 19, 2026, and it sounds exactly like the kind of gloriously strange, wildly inventive ride you would expect from one of the true masters of underground cartooning.

Published by Fantagraphics Books, this looks like essential reading for anyone fascinated by underground comics, outsider art, old-school animation, or the strange machinery of imagination itself.

The book is not simply about drawing comics. It is about how comics completely rewired Deitch’s brain and shaped the way he sees the world. The story bounces between autobiography, comics folklore, surreal fantasy, old Hollywood weirdness, and genuine American cultural history. It starts with an absolutely unbelievable but apparently true story involving eight-year-old Kim Deitch sitting in the audience of the Howdy Doody show beside another kid named Donnie Trump, who allegedly tried to rig an audience election. From there, the book spirals into stories about revenge-seeking circus performers, mysterious mural painters, haunted cats, comic book mythology, and the bizarre intersections between real life and imagination that only Deitch could pull off.

One of the most fascinating threads involves Deitch’s mother hitchhiking across America and getting picked up by legendary sci-fi superfan Forrest J. Ackerman, eventually leading to a meeting with a young Ray Bradbury. That alone feels like a forgotten piece of pop culture history rescued from some dusty alternate universe.

Deitch has always operated in his own lane. Long before comics became respectable bookstore material, he was helping shape the underground comix movement through publications like The East Village Other and the influential Gothic Blimp Works. His landmark graphic novel, The Boulevard of Broken Dreams, explored the dark underside of the animation industry and earned recognition as one of Time Magazine’s greatest graphic novels ever published.

What makes Deitch unique is the way his art looks cheerful on the surface, while something deeply unsettling hums underneath it. His pages often resemble old rubber-hose cartoons dragged through a fever dream. There is always this strange collision between nostalgia and nightmare. That blend became hugely influential on generations of alternative cartoonists, including creators like Matt Groening, Charles Burns, and Jim Woodring.

At 60 years into his cartooning career, Deitch still sounds completely fearless creatively. How I Make Comics feels less like a retrospective and more like a veteran artist continuing to experiment, riff, wander, and pull readers into the bizarre corners of American pop culture history that most people forgot even existed.