The Boulevard of Broken Dreams

AUTHOR: Deitch, Kim; Deitch, Simon

ARTIST: Kim Deitch (illustrator)

PUBLISHER: Pantheon Books; Fantagraphics Books

FIRST SERIAL PUBLICATION: 1993 (The Boulevard of Broken Dreams and The Mishkin File) and 1994 (Waldo World)

FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION: 2002

Publication History

The Boulevard of Broken Dreams, a roman à clef that laments the gradual decline of American animation in the twentieth century, brings together three titles originally published in the early 1990’s. The Boulevard of Broken Dreams, which looks at the early years of cartooning and the tension between individual creativity and the emerging industry of animation, appeared in the last issue of Art Spiegelman’s RAW magazine; “The Mishkin File,” which looks as the pivotal decade of the 1950’s and the pernicious influence of Walt Disney Studios and commercial television syndication, and “Waldo World,” which looks at postmodern culture and the sordid commercialization of animation through kitschy toys and as the vehicle of the theme park, were both published by Fantagraphics Books.

The novel reflects three decades of evolution. Kim Deitch drew on childhood experiences and recollections as the son of Gene Deitch, a successful animator in his own right and, during the 1950’s, the creative director of Terrytoons, which in its heyday was responsible for iconic series such as Heckle and Jeckle, Mighty Mouse, and Mr. Magoo. The central animated character in Deitch’s novel, the blue anthropomorphic cat named Waldo, who becomes the muse and tormentor of his tragic fictional animator, had been a staple in Deitch’s alternative underground comics since the mid-1960’s.

Plot

The first book details the early years at Fontaine Fables Studio. In 1927, Ted Mishkin, a young idealistic cartoonist, comes under the spell of Winsor Newton, whose vaudeville extravaganzas had long experimented with animation and live action. (Newton would appear to interact with the cartoons in meticulously timed performances.) Wary of the expense, the animation industry began to move away from such creative, individualistic efforts.

Studio boss Fred Fontaine hires Ted on the recommendation of Ted’s brother, Al, who runs the business end of Fontaine studios under conditions that the anachronistic Newton decries as assembly-line work that destroys creativity. At Fontaine studios, Ted pitches the character of Waldo the Cat. Growing up in a community home (his mother could afford to raise only one child), Ted invented the blue cat as his imaginary friend. The combination of charm and deviltry makes Waldo a studio bonanza. During this time, Ted is captivated by a fellow animator, the beautiful, free-spirited Lillian Freer.

To compete with the emerging Walt Disney Studios brand of syrupy cartoons with melodramatic plots, one-dimensional characters, and tidy homespun lessons, Fontaine studios redesigns Waldo. Ted is upset. (Waldo, Ted’s constant companion, taunts him, feeling the studio has turned Ted into a pansy.) Ted is fired when he takes a swing at the former Disney executive in charge of revitalizing the studio. Upset and drunk, he goes to his brother’s house, only to find Lillian there in his brother’s bed. He suffers a nervous breakdown and ends up committed to Berndale Acres Sanitarium.

While institutionalized, Ted meets Newton, and the two develop a friendship in which, over several years, they share a vision of the grand possibilities of animation. Ted is released in 1933. Newton dies suddenly, and Ted and Lillian attend a Christmas party where the wife of the studio boss mysteriously falls to her death from a window. (Ted blames Waldo.)

Over the following decade, Ted is in and out of Berndale; in between his stays at the institution, he secures menial work as a comic book illustrator. Al chances to see one of the comic books and brings his brother back to the studio. Waldo the Cat has been morphed into a one-dimensional sidekick for the studio’s big moneymaker, Rocket Rat. Although not happy with the changes, Ted works for the studio and is reunited with Lillian. He also meets his troubled nephew, Nathan, who is being treated at Berndale, diagnosed as delusional—like his uncle, he sees Waldo the Cat.

The third book takes place in 1993. Classic Fontaine characters are now cheap toys that appeal to baby boomers nostalgic for the Rocket Rat cartoons. The studio negotiates with Disney to introduce both Waldo and Rocket Rat as strolling characters in Disneyland.

The new line of Waldo toys is to be unveiled at a mall store. Ted attends in a wheelchair—doctors had used electroshock therapy to affect a “cure.” Lillian has become his caregiver. In an awkward conversation at the mall, Al reveals to Lillian that in the early 1950’s, Fred Fontaine had envisioned a vast theme park that would bring animation to life, an idea dismissed because Fontaine was seen as deranged after his wife’s death. Al then drops dead in the mall.

Afterwards, Nathan, who was invited to the premiere, visits his uncle and is accompanied by Waldo. Waldo leads Ted to a hidden room where he finds visionary designs for a theme park that actually date to Newton. In the closing scene, Ted and Lillian, holding hands, find a quiet refuge watching an old Waldo cartoon with Waldo himself.

Characters

•Ted Mishkin is a gifted animator whose career spans nearly fifty years. He is the creator of the character Waldo the Cat, who is both his muse and tormentor.

•Al Mishkin is Ted’s pragmatic brother, who, as an executive with Fontaine Fables Studio, has little interest in the creative processes of animation.

•Fred Fontaine is a studio executive (a composite of Paul Terry and Max Fleischer) whose talent pool of gifted animators produces increasingly sentimental cartoons geared for wide market acceptance. He never recovers emotionally from the death of his wife.

•Lillian Freer is a talented animator in Fontaine’s studios in the late 1920’s and the woman Ted loves from afar. Disenchanted with the artistic direction of Fontaine studios, she heads west and produces avant-garde animation until her involvement with the Communist Party ends her career there. She returns to New York and helps in the resurgence of Fontaine studios in the 1950’s.

•Winsor Newton is a visionary, if temperamental, pioneer in animation (based on the iconic Winsor McCay); he tutors a young Ted and shares his sweeping perception of animation as an art form whose compelling theme is the triumph of the artistic endeavor over the tackiness of ordinary life.

•Nathan Mishkin is Al’s emotionally damaged and alcoholic son, who apparently shares his uncle’s awareness of Waldo the Cat as a real entity. He fits the tragic outsider archetype reserved for sensitive misfits.

Artistic Style

Appropriate to a work that chronicles the evolution of animation, the pages of Deitch’s novel teem with barely contained motion and elaborate and crowded panels with irregular borders. Scenes such as the hapless Ted catching his beloved Lillian in bed with his brother, Fontaine’s wife falling from the window, or Winsor Newton taking Lillian on a tour of his animation studio recall the feverish densities of Hieronymus Bosch. Deitch’s pages are broad and inviting, suggesting the vision of Winsor Newton himself, sumptuously imagined “inkscapes” where the eye can linger, explore, and engage.

Deitch uses intricate variations of tight parallel lines to create his most vivid visual effects—shadings, facial expressions, motion, and even perspective are generated by parallel lines that give the black-and-white panels the depth and immediacy of classic animation, at once an homage to and an extension of the medium’s possibility for creating nuance. Interspersed amid such riotous and grandly conceived panels, however, given the novel’s interest in the often twisted psychologies of the characters, Deitch uses the film technique of the close-up to allow a character’s facial expressions to reveal layers of conflict. Reflecting Deitch’s own signature work in the underground comics of the 1960’s, the visual style often reflects the willingness to bend the clean, hard lines of mimetic realism, a visual texture that suggests drug-induced and/or alcoholic hallucinations, which underscores the novel’s thematic interest in the uncertain boundary between fact and fantasy and reality and the fabulous.

Themes

Most pointedly, Deitch indicts the commercialization of the American animation industry, embodied here by Disney and its vision of animation as tame, low-brow entertainment with cutesy characters that affirm middle brow platitudes, all produced by teams of animators rather than artisans. More than pop-culture criticism, however, the novel explores the tangled relationship between Ted Mishkin and his alter ego, Waldo the Cat, one that tests the boundary between the fantastic and the real. Waldo, the novel’s principle of anarchy and creativity, maintains his own integrity and regularly defies the confines of the drawing board. He is both Ted’s inspiration and private demon. As such, Deitch’s work is a Künstlerroman, albeit an unconventional one.

Deitch investigates the genesis of inspiration, the energy of creativity, and, ultimately, the tragic isolation of the truly original artist in the United States who must contend with a marketplace culture that cannot respond to the audacity of the full-throttle imagination. The industry’s abandonment of Winsor McKay’s sweeping vision—that animation, like all art, can redeem the tawdry stuff of the everyday by conjuring grand worlds of pen lines that can provide temporary (and entirely symbolic) refuge from the crushing oppression of everyday life—is Deitch’s tragic theme.

Impact

Given the breadth and the sophisticated narrative lines of Deitch’s novel and that Deitch so deftly and confidently defies genre, TheBoulevard of Broken Dreams is sui generis. In an era when graphic novels centered on either nerdy, angst-ridden adolescent antiheros or grand superheroes in alternative universes, Deitch’s novel turned the genre to broader concerns.

The Boulevard of Broken Dreams is at once a cutting satire, howlingly funny in its indictment of the “Disney-fication” of cartoons, and a bittersweet, even romantic, tragedy of the lonely tormented artist. If the novel succeeds as historic realism, it also wildly defies the boundaries of realism in riotous fantasies that sweep the reader into dimensions of psychedelic daring. If it succeeds as a conservative work of psychological realism, The Boulevard of Broken Dreams is also an edgy, postmodern exercise in self-reflexive metafiction that foregrounds its creation with its author serving as the framing authority. Few graphic novels have aspired to such accomplished construction.

The impact of The Boulevard of Broken Dreams, thus, is not so much measured by its impact on its era or by any coterie of imitators it inspired as by its impact on Deitch’s career. At the time of the story’spublication, Deitch was a “cartoonist’s cartoonist,” a minority enthusiast among knowing pop-culture critics. An established figure in the late 1960’s New York City underground comics movement, Deitch, nearly sixty, broke through at last to mainstream interest. Just three years after its publication, the novel appeared on Time magazine’s list of the ten most influential graphic novels of all time. Deitch—and his work—garnered wide media attention, which led to follow-up works that received similar reception.

Further Reading

Crumb, Robert. R. Crumb’s America (1995).

Culhane, Shamus. Talking Animals and Other People (1998).

Spiegelman, Art. The Complete Maus (2003).

Bibliography

Deitch, Kim. “An Interview with Kim Deitch.” Interview by Jeffrey Ford. Fantastic Metropolis (October 9, 2002).

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. “An Interview with Kim Deitch.” Interview by Joshua Glenn. Hilobrow (August 3, 2010).

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. “Underground Comix Come of Age: An Interview with Kim Deitch.” Interview by Steven Heller. AIGA: Journal of Graphic Design 27 (March, 2007).

Hatfield, Charles. “The Presence of the Artist: Kim Deitch’s The Boulevard of Broken Dreams Vis-à-Vis the Animated Cartoons.” ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies 1, no. 1 (2004).

Irving, Christopher. “Kim Deitch: A Novel Approach.” NYC Graphic, January 5, 2010.