Cherry’s Jubilee (1993) #1-4 by Larry Welz and others

Cherry was a long-running porn comic book — probably the most successful of them all, and very different from other series like Omaha (which was more soap opera with sex thrown in). This is a spin-off from that series, where most of the material in each issue is by other artists than Cherry artist Larry Welz.

He does at least a piece in every issue — but usually with other writers. Here we have Gerard Jones, and he’s chosen to write a story based around anti-porn advocates (and feminists in general) being horrible people. Oh, didn’t I have a picture of Jones somewhere… Right:

Only a single woman appears in this anthology, I think? Molly Kiely here.

It’s a pretty scattered anthology — many of the pieces have extremely little plot. (Chuck Austen.)

Many revolve around some kind of parody, and we here see a spaghetti western thing, but featuring the Hernandez brothers: Betto, Jaimo and Zippo. (Dan Fogel/Greg Espinoza.)

Apparently this page was written before Kitchen Sink “bought” Tundra — they talk about moving Cherry from Last Gasp, who had been publishing Cherry for almost a decade, to Tundra. (But doesn’t say why. Presumably Tundra was offering more money?)

The stories by Welz/Fogel feel like they’ve had more work put into them than most of the others. (And probably have less sex?) It’s very underground, but…

Dan Fogel/Duke Roosevelt’s thing about Clinton (and politicians in general) is pretty amusing, though.

Forg does one of the few things here that aims for more than just a quick joke and some sex.

And just a couple of the pieces seem outright amateurish. Larry Todd’s thing is amusing, but pretty messy.

The Comics Journal #160, page 9:

NEWSWATCH
Kitchen Sink Continues to Reorganize

Due to Kitchen Sink Press’
(KSP) acquisition of Tundra
Publishing (see TCJ #158),
the fates of the comic books
and albums published by the
defunct Tundra have become
uncertain, coming under the
consideration of publisher
Denis Kitchen and into nego-
tiations between his Press and
the former Tundra artists. At
present, only four Tundra
titles are unequivocally com-
mitted to KSP: Cages, Cherry’s
Jubilee, Captain Sternn, and
From Hell.
Dave McKean will com-
plete the ten-issue limited se-
ries Cages at KSP; theeighth
issue will be appearing in
October. Cherry’s Jubilee, an
anthology featuring Larry
Welz’ s popular X-rated char-
acter (whose other comic,
Cherry was taken by KSP
from Last Gasp earlier this
year) will continue from KSP
with #3 as this issue goes to
press.

Oh, the first two issues of Cherry’s Jubilee were published by Tundra before the Kitchen takeover… Ah! I’ve got the third printing here, and at that point, the company was Kitchen Sink.

You’d think that Cherry would be collected into paperback editions by now, but a cursory search on Amazon doesn’t find anything but single issues. (And they’re pretty expensive.) But there’s a web site where you can buy some of the most recent issues, so I guess it’s still going?

This is the one hundred and forty-fifth post in the Entire Kitchen Sink blog series.