Publishing, he likesto remember, was a happy accident, more a matter of his being dissatisfied withthe way his work was being handled by a West Coast publisher than his interestin publishing the work of others. He figured to self-publish Mom’s HomemadeComics, but he was roped into publishing Bijou Funnies, aChicago-based underground comic book that had enjoyed success in San Francisco, the heartof the undergrounds and the hippie counterculture. Once he took the plunge,Kitchen found that he had a sizable audience.
“What I had goingfor me was that there was a rapidly growing market amongst hippieswhat we nowcall a niche market,” he told Charles Brownstein, author of a lengthybiographical essay accompanying the beautiful new coffee-table book The Oddly Compelling Art of Denis Kitchen(Dark Horse). “They also had a certain fashion sense, and clearly had tastesthat weren’t being fulfilled by the mass market, in literature and certainly inentertainment, like comics… And freaks seemed to be everywhere, not just theBay Area.”
Unfortunately forthe artist in Kitchen, the more deeply he became involved in his newfoundpress, the less he produced in his own art. By the end of the 1970s, Kitchenhad moved almost entirely away from the drawing board.
“I always thought itwas rather a shame that Kitchen became a publisher and businessman to theneglect of his artistic talent,” R. Crumb states in his cover blurb for thebook. He is hardly alone in this observation. The Oddly Compelling Artreprints the most memorable of Kitchen’s work, and, in the process, provides ahistory of a period in comics that greatly influenced today’s writers andillustrators of comic books and graphic novels.
There’s plenty of Wisconsin, in general, and Milwaukee, in specific, in this book. Thereare healthy samplings of Kitchen’s college work, his covers for the Bugle-Americanand Fox River Patriot (a biweekly publication started up inlate-1976), and his early underground comix. Kitchen’s quirky sense of humor,highly influenced by Mad magazine creator Harvey Kurtzman, is on displayeverywhere, from cornball Midwestern puns and jokes, to social commentary madefunnier by the use of outrageous characters, to the kind of cartoon-likedrawings associated with Keith Haring, to surrealism predating some of thepopular work being produced today. It was the type of humor and expressionappreciated by Stan Lee of Marvel Comics, who enlisted Kitchen’s editing andpublishing skills in his short-lived Comix Book, intended to beaboveground competition with the undergrounds and National Lampoon. Thiswas material intended for the kid still inhabiting the adult, or for the adultrefusing to be sucked into the bland, boring humor that seemed to bemass-produced and force-fed to the general public.
Brownstein’s essayaddresses the ways in which Kitchen applied his sensibilities as an artist tothe building of the various Kitchen Sink enterprises, and how his historian’sand fan’s interests in classic comic strips and books led to his reprint work, virtuallyall of it accomplished in Wisconsin. It’s no wonder that Will Eisner, known tobe an astute businessman as well as an influential artist, thought of Kitchenas a younger version of himself.
Kitchen, whorecently won an Eisner Award for his work on The Art of Harvey Kurtzman,a collaboration with fellow Wisconsinite Paul Buhle, hopes to return to thedrawing board now that he is no longer tied down to Kitchen Sink Press andother endeavors, but judging from his heavy involvement as an editor and writerin other projects currently in the works, that might be a pipe dream. In themeantime, readers and comics fans have this book, which shows what Kitchensacrificed in his pursuit of publishing others.
