Review - Alias the Cat by Kim Deitch
If you’re a creator who has ever been haunted by his own creations to the point that they seem like real people in some manner, then Kim Deitch’s “Alias the Cat” is the book for you.
The character at issue is a funny cartoon cat named Waldo who has infected Deitch’s stories over the years as a protagonist to the characters within them, as well as to the creator himself. In “Alias the Cat,” Deitch is faced with the idea that Waldo may indeed walk in the same world when he and his wife hear an unbelievable tall tale from an ex-sailor named Keller who owns a stuffed doll that looks exactly like Waldo. According to him, Waldo has been forcing some Pacific Island natives to manufacture dolls of him to take back to the United States and sell — among other schemes.
This encounter leads Deitch down a labyrinth of bizarre conspiracy that always leads him just short of discovering if Waldo is a real entity or not and, instead, guides him piece-by-piece through a sprawling tale of love, betrayal and munitions in 1915 New Jersey. It all starts with Deitch’s discovery of a local comic strip that tied into a film serial about a man in a cat costume preying on corrupt politicians and continues with his discovery that the cartoonist still lives and his investigation of a mythical area of Towata, N.J., called Midgetville.
In each step of the way, Deitch the author lets his characters tell their stories, which usher in some point-blank revelations about the larger picture of the path that Deitch the character is walking down rather blindly. It’s loads and loads of information to take in, pulling from the early history of comic books and film, as well the obsessive world of collectibles. In fact, “Alias the Cat” reads like a metaphorical explanation of a dream scenario for flea market frequenters. In the story — and, apparently, in real life as well — Deitch and his wife are obsessive collectors of memorabilia, ephemera, rarities, to the point that much of their enthusiasm seems directed to amassing the discarded curiosities of yesteryear. Anyone who has entered that world knows about the thrill of the hunt and the intoxication brought by the unknown. Each item procured has several stories behind it that may or may not be uncovered with its purchase.
What Deitch is doing here is enacting that common, lovely mindset that might seem obsessional in real life into a narrative explanation of the way he, his wife, and many others look at it — it’s the gateway to adventure.
Deitch isn’t above some self-examination, however, and he admirably recognizes how such interests come off to those who have never indulged them. He accepts that he may well just be a delusional psycho, but in turn posits that all creative people are probably in the same boat. We all have a Waldo lurking in the shadows that we are chasing down by amassing information that seems curious to anyone outside our sphere. Each find is another piece of the grand puzzle, each purchase in a Good Will brings us one step closer to finally completing this map we’ve been drawing while being effectively blindfolded.
There are really two kinds of people when it comes to culture — those fixated on the now and those constantly mining what has gone before. In any given human life, a person can start as the former and age into the latter. Some of the weirder ones of us are always out of step with the present and constantly studying the past though its discarded items. This makes for a kind of armchair archaeology, which Deitch makes plain in his grand tale — it’s a way to uncover our past and the hidden stories that lurk in it, as well as the fake ones. Deitch mixes up the two with a keen understanding of both.
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