The Search for Smilin’ Ed!

Originally serialized in the late ‘90s, this cartwheeling shaggy-dog story begins, like a lot of metafiction, with the semblance of reality: Deitch narrates the beginning as the tale of what happened when he looked into the fate of the host of one of his favorite TV shows from his youth, “Smilin’ Ed’s Gang.” But by the time a frog demon reanimates a 19th-century French peasant whose brains it has eaten, it’s fairly clear that Deitch is making stuff up. The fun of the book is the way it constantly darts back and forth across the line between genuine show-business lore (a favorite Deitch theme) and delirious whole-cloth invention. There are stories within stories, unreliable explainers, secret passageways that lead from one part of the tale to another. Deitch’s artwork often seems stiff and busy—there’s scarcely a patch of blank space or foursquare page layout in the entire book—but it’s also utterly confident, building on the stylistic gestures of both the underground-comics scene that launched his career and the classic animation that inspired his talking-animal characters. For this edition, Deitch has added some new material, including an epilogue that throws a few more loops into his Byzantine personal mythology. (June)