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 magazine, 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”), so Gene Deitch created a cartoon feature for Record Changer titled „The Cat,” which quickly became a fixture of 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. 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, with commentary and reminiscences by Deitch himself. Originally published in 2003 in hardcover and out of print for years, this redesigned, first-ever paperback edition will delight a new generation of fans.
