From Booklist
As creative director at UPA studios, whose bold, abstract style (e.g., in the Mr. Magoo cartoons) influenced all movie cartooning, and at Terrytoons, where he created Tom Terrific, Deitch was a leading figure in 1950s film animation. Just before then (1945-50), he contributed prolifically to The Record Changer, a jazz magazine, drawing dozens of graphically bold issue covers as well as gag cartoons in his midcentury-modern style (think Virgil Partch meets Gerald McBoing-Boing). The cartoons feature "the Cat," a hardcore record collector and jazz purist based on Deitch himself. In them, the bald, bespectacled jazz lover chases down rare platters, argues the superiority of traditional jazz to bebop, and otherwise airs his obsession (in one cartoon, he turns to horticulture because cactus needles were thought to cause less wear than metal ones on shellac 78s). Deitch's breezy annotations bolster the cartoons' evocation of the postwar jazz scene, and this oversize volume, containing all of the Cat and the covers as well as other drawings, is a hipster's delight nonpareil. Gordon Flagg
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Book Description
A visual feast of swingin' cartoons for jazz lovers. On the long road to becoming an Oscar-winning animation director, Gene Deitch became an intense jazz fan. At the age of 21, he discovered The Record Changer, a jazz collector's magazine filled with fanatical, scholarly, and purist essays about jazz as well as listings of hard-to-find jazz albums. Every jazz swinger in the '40s was called a cat (as in "cool cat," derived from the West African word "Katta," a human), so Gene Deitch created a cartoon feature for Record Changer titled "The Cat," which quickly became a fixture at the magazine. He also started drawing the covers, which graced almost every issue from 1945 to 1951 along with "The Cat." Deitch's stylistically virtuoso images exquisitely embodied the essence of jazz and became a visual paean to the joy of collecting and appreciating jazz. In the 1940s, jazz was a vaguely disreputable musical genre and Deitch's visual embodiments of the music acquired a cult; to this day, his original Cat cartoons are bought and sold on the internet. Fantagraphics Books is proud to collect all of Deitch's Record Changer covers and "Cat" cartoons in one coffee-table, landscape-format art book, reproducing his covers in the same gorgeous colors in which they first appeared as well as the black-and-white Cat cartoons and a commentary by Deitch—who later went on to become an award-wining animator as the Creative Director of CBS/Terrytoons, where he created Tom Terrific and Mighty Manfred the Wonder Dog for The Captain Kangaroo Show, as well as many other animated features, including a legendary stint on MGM's "Tom and Jerry" series. Fully illustrated throughout; 90 pages color.

About the Author
Gene Deitch has lived in Prague for the last 30 years with his wife. He is the father of underground cartoonist Kim Deitch.

FROM THE PUBLISHER