ww 02 rocket rat
ww 02 rocket rat
Fantagraphics March 1994
If you are reading this, you’ve found Waldo!
Kim Deitch continues to weave his meta-narrative featuring hard-living cat Waldo, a character he devised in the 1960s and whose earliest strips are collected as All Waldo Comics. When the L.A. Weekly finished the page a week serialisation of Deitch’s Hollywoodland, he began A Shroud for Waldo.
Deitch’s narrative and publishing history mirror each other, with multiple hiatuses, and picked-up threads. His development of a comix meta-narrative across platforms and formats is perhaps unparalleled. Waldo is (outwardly, at least), a cat evoking the anthropomorphic black felines of early cartoons and animation. However, Waldo is thoroughly removed from a family-friendly context. Despite the candy-coloured cover and anthropomorphic cartoon faces on the logo, this is emphatically not for children.
Waldo is actually a hard-living hedonist, sometimes presented as a delusion of alcoholic ‘resting’ animator Ted Mishkin, and other times a willfully autonomous being. The current volume reconciles those elements, with an explanation (delivered by guest-star Jesus, who ought to know) that Waldo is a supernatural creature from the-downstairs-place. He’s been in a “…dormant state […] visible only to drunks and other delusional types.” Aaah. It further transpires that Waldo has a history with Jesus, who is now offering the chance of redemption. This is the call to adventure that proposes to take Waldo from his settled world of back-alley drinking, and into the unknown.