Reincarnation Stories

by Kim Deitch

Overview

Legendary underground cartoonist Kim Deitch’s magnum opus, a sprawling odyssey of reincarnation.

Deitch’s quest to piece together the cosmic jigsaw puzzle of creation and reveal his past lives weaves through time and space, encompassing a dizzying array of oddball characters, including aspiring screenwriter Sidney Pincus, a tribe of moon-dwelling Native Americans, a feline YouTube star, a has-been silver screen cowboy, Frank Sinatra, and the awesome Monkey God! Featuring Deitch’s surreal scenarios and eye-popping psychedelia, Reincarnation Stories is a gripping yarn and a cartooning tour de force.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781683962618
Publisher:	Fantagraphics Books
Publication date:	10/15/2019
Pages:	260
Sales rank:	1,103,169
Product dimensions:	8.10(w) x 10.70(h) x 1.00(d)
Age Range:	13 - 18 Years

About the Author

Kim Deitch lives in New York, NY, with his wife, the artist Pamela Butler. His books include The Boulevard of Broken Dreams, Shadowland, Alias the Cat, and The Search for Smilin' Ed!

Editorial Reviews

09/16/2019

Gloriously mad and bordering on nonsensical, this graphic novel from underground cartoonist Deitch (Shadowland) bounds around like it’s composed by Carlos Castaneda crossed with Fritz the Cat. It stars Deitch himself as an old man, suffering from the aftereffects of retinal surgery, who falls down the rabbit hole of his past after remembering an incident from his childhood: when a drunk D.W. Griffith mistook him for one Sid Pincus, a writer who came up with a creativity aid called the Plot Robot. Deitch feverishly slaps out tangled tales that weave biographical realities—he did draw cartoons in 1968 for the East Village Other, and his dad once ran the Terrytoons cartoon studio—with unlikely fuzzy childhood flashbacks about meeting old Hollywood stars (he claims to be very mistrusting of “the memory game” overall) and layers of outright psychedelia mixed with Hindu-inflected mysticism. In between, he follows long tangents, including a madman’s story of being raised by an extraterrestrial-worshipping band of monkeys and that of a whacked-out lost screenplay. Deitch’s signature crowded, heavily cross-hatched stiff figures with goony expressions mesh well with the reality-hopping stew of cross-dimensional riffings and reincarnations. This ribald Rubik’s Cube of a book feels both like paean to 1960s alternative comix, which Deitch helped define, and gleefully ignorant of any tether whatsoever. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

"Deitch's latest — and most ambitious — graphic novel explodes with the full range of his visual styles."

The Paris Review

"Kim Deitch, a mainstay of the underground comix movement, gives a full display of his ebullient creativity in his new book, Reincarnation Stories."

The New Yorker

"A joyful, labyrinthine, and profoundly strange journey through the cosmic history of creator Kim Deitch."

Shelf Awareness

"Reincarnation Stories goes flamboyantly off the rails, making a hash of narrative throughlines and pulverizing the divide between truth and fiction. Underneath the appearance of lawlessness, there's a huge amount of craft and care."

NPR Books

"Deitch has created one of the most complex, sprawling, strange and great ongoing works of American art — in any medium — of the last century. The latest volume in his universe is Reincarnation Stories, and it’s one of his very best. At 75 years old, [Deitch] is creating more vibrant and exciting work than other graphic novelists half his age."

The Guardian - Chris Ware

★ 10/01/2019

This new collection from celebrated cartoonist Deitch (The Amazing, Enlightening and Absolutely True Adventures of Katherine Whaley) opens with the author attempting to conjure his earliest memory while recovering from routine eye surgery—a scene those unfamiliar with his work would be forgiven for assuming to be the opening of a memoir. Within a few pages, though, the author's memory of visiting the Museum of National History as a child segues into a wild tale about meeting a man who claims to have been raised among a group of monkeys who regarded him as their spiritual leader. Another story begins with Deitch recounting his first job delivering newspapers as a boy before turning into an adaptation of an unproduced screenplay about a group of Nez Percé living on the moon. Deitch's love of classic films, old cartoons, and 1960s psychedelia is clear, and aliens, demons, talking cats, and time travel abound in these beautifully crafted, wonderfully surprising stories, mostly revolving around reincarnation and culminating in an unexpected profound treatise on the nature of good and evil. VERDICT While the work Deitch has produced since 1967 has already earned him acclaim as one of the world's greatest living cartoonists, this latest release is both his most accessible and, at last, his masterpiece. [See author interview on p. 82.]

Library Journal