Kitchen Sink Classics (1994) #1-3 by Reed Waller, R. Crumb and Mark Schultz

To celebrate the 25th anniversary, Kitchen Sink is re-presenting three classic books. Curiously enough, two of them are anthology issues — but this was how Kitchen cautiously introduced Kitchen’s biggest two biggest hits: Omaha the Cat Dancer as a special Bizarre Sex issue, and Xenozoic Tales in Death Rattle. (This was either a very smart approach, or just happened to work well by some kind of fluke.)

The main portion of each book reprints the original work in full.

But there’s also a bunch of stuff to give some context to the work, like this look at the very first appearance of Omaha in the Vootie fanzine.

And also a strip Waller did while waiting for Kitchen Sink to publish that first Omaha issue of Bizarre Sex. It’s fun, and makes for a real anniversary edition.

The People’s Comix (by R. Crumb), on the other hand, just reprints the original book — nothing more, nothing less (I think).

So that’s perhaps a curious choice, but perhaps they couldn’t get Crumb’s approval to extend add some context to it? Or something?

The Xenozoic Tales issue is the one with the most extras — but that’s because it’s not reprinting all of the Death Rattle issue this was printed in, but just the Xenozoic story.

That leaves more than half of the issue to do something else, so we get a long essay about Schulz’ influences and stuff.

It’s pretty interesting if you’re interested in Schulz and EC Comics in general.

The most bizarre padding, I mean fun extra, is this Savage World! story by Al Williamson and friends that they’re including. The rationale given is that this features just about all of Schulz influences in a single story.

It’s a much-reprinted story, but here they’ve tried to pick out just who did what on which panel, which is fun.

So… it’s a pretty neat little series of reprints.

This is the one hundred and seventy-first post in the Entire Kitchen Sink blog series.