Photo courtesy of the Museum of Wisconsin Art
I can still remember saving my school lunch money to buy copies of Milwaukee’s underground newspaper, the Bugle American. For a quarter a week, the paper gave me a window onto new worlds of possibility—a truly alternative take on news and culture in the mid-’70s. Among the elements of the paper that stood out were the covers. The boring ones were usually photographed. The best ones were drawn by a crew of underground “comix” artists that called Milwaukee home.
Did I ever suspect that those covers would one day be exhibited as art? There is a lot of the Bugle American in the current Museum of Wisconsin Art (MOWA) exhibition, “Wisconsin Funnies: Fifty Years of Comics” in West Bend. The Bugle is also prominent in the scaled down version on display at MOWA/DTN in Saint Kate—The Art’s Hotel through November 22.
The message at MOWA’s satellite gallery in Saint Kate is decidedly political. “When we developed the idea for the exhibit in 2019, the world was a different place,” says J. Tyler Friedman, MOWA’s associate curator of contemporary art. “The DNC was coming to town and I thought the Downtown exhibit called for some lightly subversive material to provoke, reflect and give lie to the idea that comics are all adolescent superhero fantasies.” Friedman co-curated “Wisconsin Funnies” with Wisconsin historian James P. Danky, Madison graphic novelist Paul Buhle and one of the artists whose work is prominent in the show, Denis Kitchen.
The Kitchen Sink and More
Kitchen was one of the Bugle’s cofounders in 1970 and became an internationally prominent exponent of “underground comix.” His Krupp Syndicate circulated the nascent comix genre across many of America’s underground papers, and his Kitchen Sink Press published work by contemporaries from around the U.S., as well as classics in book form, including editions of Will Eisner’s innovative cartoon series, “The Spirit.”
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“My initial role at the Bugle was to ‘art direct’ in general and to draw covers regularly and illustrate ads as an inducement for advertisers—who were few,” Kitchen says. Unlike the Shepherd Express, which achieved mainstream distribution by the late ’90s in grocery chains and high-traffic venues, readers had to seek out the Bugle in locally owned record stores and head shops. Finding a copy was, as they used to say, a trip. Kitchen brought color to the Bugle and influenced the visual direction of alternative media elsewhere. “I was also the official wrangler for the four or five other cartoonists who, with me, created weekly strips (Jim Mitchell, Bruce Walthers, Wendel Pugh, Don Glassford and sometimes Pete Loft),” Kitchen continues. “The Bugle was [at first] the only underground, alternative paper with a comics section, and before long, our hastily formed Krupp Syndicate distributed them to 50 or so other weekly underground papers and some college papers.”
In 1973, Kitchen moved to Princeton, Wis., and continued to contribute covers to the Bugle after founding the Fox River Patriot, an unlikely underground paper for a small-town, rural audience. Patriot covers are also displayed at MOWA/DTN.
During childhood, Kitchen’s weekly allowance of 50 cents allowed him to purchase five comic books a week from the spinner rack at a South Milwaukee drugstore. But many of his major influences were delivered to his house, hurled at his doorstep seven days a week. “I avidly consumed everything in the Milwaukee Journal’s Green Sheet,” he says of the evening paper’s comic strips, from Nancy and Sluggo to Beetle Bailey, printed in black and white on green newsprint. No doubt he also spent many hours with the full color funnies in the Sunday paper. Kitchen’s cartoons were countercultural in content but often deliberately retro in form with money bag-clutching tycoons, busty seductresses and stolid farmers amidst the motorcars and machinery of post-World War II Midwest America.
Tweaking Power
Kitchen had already begun his career as an artist by the time the Milwaukee Journal hired Bill Sanders as its editorial cartoonist. The Journal was a reliably center-liberal paper from 1967-1991 when Sanders drew for its op-ed pages, but the cartoonist was always pushing against the boundary of mainstream commentary. He relentlessly poked fun at the city’s belligerent mayor, Henry Maier, and was suspended for an especially virulent cartoon attacking a local judge. And yet, management was tolerant of Sanders, even allowing him to freelance and publish his work in Kitchen’s comic books.
Several panels by Sanders are included at MOWA/DTN, including his “Alice in Watergateland” (1974), telling the story of the contemporary political scandal with Richard Nixon as the disingenuous monarch of a realm where truth is hard to find. The protagonist, Alice, looks thoroughly exasperated by the time she reaches the final frame. Sanders had a gift of caricature, finding the distinctive physical features of the public figures he tweaked and exaggerating them to comical ends.
Photo courtesy of the Museum of Wisconsin Art
Bill Sanders' “Alice in Watergateland”
“Wisconsin Funnies” at MOWA West Bend is more expansive, displaying more than 200 works by 31 artists with ties to Wisconsin, including 21st-century cartoonists such as Madison-based, MacArthur Grant recipient Lynda Barry.
It’s no surprise that the counterculture hub of San Francisco, home to Robert Crumb, took a leading role in underground comix in the late ’60s and early ’70s, but Milwaukee? All these years later, the Cream City’s outsized contribution to comix remains puzzling. “I wish I had some insight on this, but in truth, I really have no idea why Milwaukee was a center for active cartoonists in the 1970s,” says the Bugle’s Dan Burr, whose work is on view at MOWA/DTN.
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Photo courtesy of Museum of Wisconsin Art
Dan Bur
“From my perspective, there did seem to be a lot of comic book readers and collectors here, but there may have been just as many or more in Cincinnati than Milwaukee, so that probably explains nothing. If someone comes up with a plausible theory. I’d love to hear it. Cosmic coincidence is the best I got.” Kitchen is also stumped: “It must have been something in the water, Dave. Or the cheese. It’s true that the area nurtured a disproportionate number of cartoonists.”
Many have remained in the area. Burr continues to work as an illustrator in Milwaukee. Kitchen finally moved to Massachusetts after refusing a call from Marvel Comics, whose empire includes “Spider-Man” and “The X-Men.” “I did turn down Stan Lee’s offers several times to work in the Marvel office, but I had no desire to live in NYC or to work for a big company,” he says. “I wanted to be in control of my own destiny. The West Coast beckoned for other reasons: San Francisco was hippie Mecca. But for stubborn reasons, I stayed in Milwaukee and Wisconsin. I took a certain perverse regional pride in doing what I did from the Midwest.”
“I finally left Wisconsin in 1994 for the opportunity to merge my company with another publishing company in western Massachusetts, founded by the co-creator of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. It was also an opportunity to ‘cash out’ a bit after toiling for years without much remuneration with an underground press. The experiment out east ultimately fizzled by the end of the ’90s, but I’m in a great geographic location, deep in the woods, with a stream and pond guarded by a seven-foot Big Boy statue, and here I’ll probably stay. But I get back to the ‘homeland’ at every opportunity!”
David Luhrssen is Managing Editor of the Shepherd Express. He began his career in journalism, at age 16, at the Bugle American.
