Batman: Death and the City
When the Deitch boys jam, even dear ol’ dad—signature UPA animator Gene Deitch, who later created the Tom Terrific cartoons for Captain Kangaroo—gets into the act, introducing five stories written and illustrated, alone or together, by Kim, Seth, and Simon Deitch. In all, the words predominate, while the drawings complement, thereby exemplifying pictofiction, a medium Kim created in honor of the copiously illustrated old editions of Victorian novels that he collects. His two solo contributions look the most like comics because their texts are lettered rather than typeset. Both are prime Kim, concoctions of nostalgia and dread, characteristically concerned with pop-cultural ephemera (in this case, bottle caps) and early-twentieth-century entertainment (here, Depression-era jazz), simultaneously lighthearted and creepy a la his Waldo the Cat stories. Seth gives us a golem tale that Simon illustrates, a weird-science “memoir” that Kim illuminates, and an alternative-reality sketch decorated only by Kim’s frontispiece. Kim and Simon both draw rather blockish figures, the latter more realistically, if hardly as energetically as his older brother. Ingratiating work, though marred by lax proofreading. --Ray Olson