Conversations with Underground Comix Kingpin Dennis Kitchen

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Photo Via Denis Kitchen Online - Facebook

Denis Kitchen

The story of “underground comix,” like so much from the 1960s-‘70s after a half century or more has passed, grows dim, like an old and fond film seen—not on late night television anymore but streamed. These “comix,” anticipating “alternative comics,” a category never less than vague, and the rise of the modern graphic novel, never did quite receive the place in the history of comic art that their role merited.  

More easily forgotten is the actual production and sales of the comics that made today’s graphic novels possible. The scholarly/classroom boom in “comic art” may yet open up further studies by new generations. Until then…the Denis Kitchen Story in the form of a new book, Conversations with Denis Kitchen (University of Mississippi Press) 

For Milwaukeeans with a long memory—really anyone in Wisconsin looking back fondly on the counterculture era—Denis Kitchen may be recalled as an almost cosmic force. As far away as Princeton, not the college but the town famous for its flea markets, he was producing an assortment of visual items, in a former Mukluk factory, that broke barriers in comic art and sold, for a while, like proverbial hot cakes. Not to mention the alternative tabloids that he edited in several parts of the state. 

Let’s start at the beginning, as we can do easily with this volume of interviews collected by comics scholar (and noted curator/exhibitor) Kim Munson. Born in 1946, spending his first years in suburban Caledonia, then onward to high school in Racine, Kitchen published an adolescent ‘zine that predicted much ahead. He went on to UWM, majored in journalism, and put out a college humor magazine, Snide, the first in the school’s history. He was going somewhere, but not Vietnam, dismissed from the Army after 22 days. 

Mom’s Homemade Comics 

Few may now remember the Great Schlitz Parade of 1969 these days, but it was a perfect place to sell Mom’s Homemade Comics, Kitchen’s newest and most predictive invention. Mom’s appeared just in time to meet the upward climb of the undergrounds originated mainly in the Bay Area. (This reviewer’s own Radical America Komiks appeared the same year, from Madison.) He already had connections with Milwaukee’s alternative spaces, and within a few years, he had created a small empire that included a retail store of his own (Strickly Uppa Crust), a commercial art studio, a little record label and assorted mail order operations.  

Personally, Denis described himself as a socialist; commercially, he was a counterculture businessman of the most inventive kind. He was also, in his way, a model public servant: he published a highly illustrated Consumer Comx (1975) for the Wisconsin Department of Consumer Affairs, distributed free to all state high school students and warning against the ripoffs of credit cost among others. You could also say he was in line with the vision of Robert F. La Follette, who had urged a progressive partnership of business with an active citizenry way back in the 1910s-20s. 

The assorted interviews in the book touching on these themes and memories have Kitchen come across as modest but not shy. Older readers of the Stranger are likely to revive some of their own memories of the times. But Conversations with Denis Kitchen serves more directly as an inside history of the vibrant, drastically changing world of comic art. Kitchen would go on to make a point of seeking out his heroes, past giants of the trade that included Harvey Kurtzman of Mad Comics and other giants from the same era who had passed, including Ernie Bushmiller and Al Capp among others. Kitchen, an admiring fan who never lost his admiration for the once hugely popular and significant comic art in the daily newspapers and comic books, would offer their work to others. 

Will Eisner’s Spirit 

He took a special interest in Will Eisner, who is broadly credited with one of the earliest not the earliest “graphic novel,” A Contract with God, first published obscurely and the reprinted by Kitchen in a popular edition. They met almost accidentally at a comic book convention, and Kitchen picked up a reprints series of Eisner’s 1940s creation, “The Spirit,” in 1977, proceeding from there to an extended relationship that even eased the sometimes politically conservative Eisner into a more current vision of progressive politics in moveon.org.  

The reprints sometimes made money. But mainly, I think, he continued to ruminate on what he had seen and admired as a kid, and what could deepen comics not only as an art form but also as a way of seeing the world. By contrast, he is mistakenly modest of his own comic art or, so he rationalizes in passing, the effort absorbs too much time and energy. He has always seemed in a hurry. 

Back to biography, as it emerges from the interviews: his Kitchen Sink (KSP) published from Princeton during the 1970s-‘80s, experienced amazing success or a smallish operation, sometimes running to several hundred thousand with a single (most often Crumb) comic. These included a real first: Gay Comix along with very dopey drug-related comics, experiencing and observing threats of censorship that led him to create and for some time guide a comics’ legal defense movement, no small thing for an industry that had been nearly ruined by assorted threats during the dark ages of the 1950s.  

Right to Buy Comics? 

Notably, for Kitchen and historians of constitutional rights, this struggle mirrored an actual comic-book burning in the small town of Stone Bank, between Madison and Milwaukee in the middle 1950s and prompted a brave defense of free speech and the right of kids to buy comics, by Senator Reuben C.  Peterson in the state legislature. Kitchen was another Reuben Peterson, and with the same reasoning that the legislator offered to the legislature: the first amendment, too precious to be breached for a special interest of any political kind. 

Comics, even now, tends to be a boom-and-bust industry, with recent bankruptcies in distribution proving the case again. Kitchen could hardly be immune to this reality. Moving from Princeton to Northampton, Massachusetts in 1993, close to the headquarters of Tundra, a friendly rival that became a business partner. A rocky six years followed, notable for the publication of what many of us believe to be Robert Crumb’s best work after the underground comix days, Introducing Kafka, in collaboration with writer David Zane Mairowitz. These years also saw the collapse of the comic market and in 1999, amidst considerable confusion and maneuvering, the end of KSP. Kitchen had by now ceased publishing comics, with some “boutique” exceptions.  

Ever energetic, our home boy had become a comics agent of sorts, one of the few literary agents who knew the field and could place some of the most promising new projects with the trade press. 

It would be impossible to annotate, let alone describe, his other comics projects along the way, or the prizes that he has received for assorted contributions to the field. Without Kitchen, the history of comics would be poorer. Blame it on the Great Schlitz Parade of 1969. 

Paul Buhle is author of Comics in Wisconsin (2009) published by Borderland Books in Madison, and co-editor of It Started in Wisconsin (2013) a documentary volume on the Uprising of 2011-13.