Woodrow Phoenix

• Culture January 1, 1
• Culture January 1, 1

  “You know, all my life, my favorite kind of story is one that starts early in the 20th century, and then works its way on down toward modern times.” Kim Deitch, both the author of and a protagonist in Alias the Cat, explains exactly where he intends to take us in his latest book—and more than delivers. A revered underground cartoonist whose work is steeped in the lore and traditions of early animation, Deitch draws loopy, crowded, psychedelic stories that start where the Fleischer brothers’ Betty Boop and Otto Messmer’s Felix the Cat left off and add in sex, money,
• Culture January 1, 1

  Have you ever watched what happens when a sword slices through reams of paper? Or a fish is put into water? What does it look like when centrifugal force pops a man out of his shirt? Yuichi Yokoyama wants to show you. Concerned with phenomena rather than character and narrative, his comics resemble the output of a drafting machine: sequences that present multiple views of an object in action and look like exploded product diagrams. Yokoyama seems to enjoy the resulting images as much for the strange shapes that are generated as for what they reveal.