#Kitchen Sink Press

[atomic-chronoscaph]

Xenozoic Tales - art by Mark Schultz (1994)

[comic-art-showcase]

The Crow by David Mack

[balu8]

Xenozoic Tales #2: Rogue

by Mark Schultz

Kitchen Sink Press

[brevoorthistoryofcomics]

BHOC: THE SPIRIT #18

As I talked about yesterday, this was the second of two magazine-sized issues of THE SPIRIT that I got for Christmas 1978, ordered out of the Superhero Merchandise catalog. And like yesterday’s issue, this one offered a batch of classic Will Eisner Spirit stories from the long-running Newspaper circular that had run in the Golden Age, along with an assortment of other features and bits. These…

[ungoliantschilde]

“a Contract with God and Other Tenement Stories”, by Will Eisner.

[browsethestacks]

Omaha The Cat Dancer (1981/1984/1986)

Art by Reed Waller

[pulpsandcomics2]

The Dreamer by Will Eisner Dec 1986

[fredseibertdotcom]

We was chocolate before chocolate was cool. 

It was a great idea, before its time. Oh, and I didn’t exactly know what I was doing. 

The late 1990s and early 2000s saw me straying into some areas that were a result of my arrogance and ignorance. I haven’t written yet about my short, disastrous foray into comic book publishing, but it led into a fun, but equally calamitous venture. Chocolate bars. 

Long story, short, in 1997 I put together a few people to invest to save storied, but troubled underground comix publisher Kitchen Sink Press, founded in Princeton, Wisconsin, but relocated in Northampton, Massachusetts. In addition to comics, the company put out all sorts of artist tangential products like trading cards, cloisonne pins, and my favorite and their best selling product, R. Crumb Devil Girl Choco(late) Bars.  When it was clear that KSP was going to continue being a black hole of financial losses it shut down. Clearly, I had no idea how to usefully help the company, and my living in Los Angeles with the company 2,920 miles away didn’t help one bit. 

I’d lost a lot of money, including my wife’s savings and my kid’s college fund, and I really wanted to earn it back for my family’s sake. Fast forward, I did, but certainly not in the KSP spin off I conceived. 

For reasons best sorted out with a therapist, I love everyday objects that have cool images printed on them. Skateboards, T-shirts, posters, you get the idea. So the fact that chocolate bars are obsessions of a lot of people, no matter their age, gender, location, and the R.Crumb and Fabulous Freak Brothers bars being a hit that I felt KSP had ignored in their plight, I got the bright idea of partnering with a Massachusetts based KSP consultant to launch a company named True Confections, solely in the business of boxes of chocolate bars with cool images printed on them.  Can’t go wrong, right? 

As I write this post in 2024, it’s pretty common to find “cool” candy bars in gourmet markets around the country. But, that wasn’t the case in the 00′s. We came up with some pretty neat designs (a few of them above), and our sales team did pretty well too. We sold pretty successfully everywhere from Toys’R’Us to Home Depot to my local Santa Monica pharmacy (they could keep Devil Girl’s in stock!). But, we didn’t know how to source the bars with good chocolate at a good price, and of course, we had no idea how to ship the candy properly when the weather turned hot. Long story short, True Confections was eating money faster than KSP was, and honestly, I got sick of eating chocolate myself. 

It was fun while it lasted, but like I said up above, we were ahead of our time. 

And, as I’ve learned, over and over, a great idea is all well and good, but if you can’t execute... well, that’s that. 

[thefugitivesaint]

Brian Biggs, 'Cut Up', ''Death Rattle'', Vol. 3, #1 & #2, 1995

[scumgristle]

your friendly reminder that once The Crow became a bRaNd, it never stopped sucking. James O'Barr and Alex Proyas / Brandon Lee room ONLY

[monsterasia-zero]

Monsterasia Zero Comic Of The Day! - Kitchen Sink Press - Xenozoic Tales #06 - Cover Date May 1988

[archivist-dragonfly]

Book 414

Cages: A Comic Novel

Dave McKean

Kitchen Sink Press 1998

Originally published in single-issue form from 1990 to 1996, Dave McKean’s Cages is a tour de force. Utilizing a bold black-and-white illustration style for most of the narrative, McKean occasionally breaks the form by mixing both media and styles to emphasize certain aspects of the story or to document a strong emotional reaction. With large wordless sections, occasional splashes of color, abstractions, breaks in the panel grid, haunting mixed media panels, manipulated photos, even changes in lettering style, McKean uses everything in his toolkit to tell the story of creation and art, neighbors and solitude, and one preternaturally intelligent cat.

[comic-art-showcase]

Hannah Dundee by Sanford Greene

[balu8]

Harvey Kurtzman

Kitchen Sink

[brevoorthistoryofcomics]

BHOC: THE SPIRIT #17

My Christmas gifts for the Christmas of 1978 weren’t exclusively Marvel based, though they were pretty much all comic book based. I had also asked for and received two issues of Kitchen Sink Press’s magazine devoted to Will Eisner’s THE SPIRIT, #17 and #18, their two first. Prior to this, I had read one Spirit story, the one that Jules Feiffer had included in his seminal reprint collection THE…

[3lix13]

#cartoonist #kayfabetober Day 12 prompt: Roid Rage - took the opportunity to analyze some Bernie Wrightson behavior... #RoidRage #kayfabetober2023 #kayfabetober #HeavyMetalMagazine #Dreadstar #CaptainSternn #HanoverFiste #RoidRage #KitchenSinkPress #CopicMultiliner #PenandInk #inking #study #sketch #inkdrawing #berniewrightson #RunningOutofTime @jimruggart @ed_piskor @cartoonist.kayfabe