Hey! Wasn’t this blog series supposed to be over now? Yes, indeed, but there’s a few things I missed, and there’s a few updates, and I’ve got some random ephemera I thought it might be nice to cover.

Like Kitchen Sink Pipeline.

It’s a monthly newsletter Kitchen Sink published, detailing whatever new things they’ve published, and pushing older stuff, too. These were sent out to retailers that would then put them into the bags of people buying comics, or people picked them up on their own.

I remember getting these in my shipments from Mile High Comics back in the 80s, but I don’t think I kept any of those. But I’ve got a handful from the mid 90s, that some helpful ebay person included with something I bought, I think?

Most of these are “six pages” long, but they fold out in this way, which means that a retailer could hang them on their walls, perhaps?

Let’s look at a random one of these in more depth:

So most of the entries are marked “new!”…

… but there’s also older stuff.

And things that are of special interest, like the Devil Girl R. Crumb candy bars, which were apparently featured in the New York Times food section at the time.

The other side of this “poster” has mostly cover art.

So many non-sports card collections… Mamie Van Doren… Man Bait…

Kitchen Sink published a lot of merchandise — cards, tin signs, candy bars, t-shirts, lighters, whatever — and did really well from it. Very few alternative comics publishers managed to make their way through the 90s without publishing stuff that made more money than what was their main business historically (Fantagraphics published porn via Eros, Eclipse published trading cards), but you feel like many of the others did this reluctantly, while Denis Kitchen was really into publishing this merchandise. As a result if this enthusiasm, what I’ve seen of it seems like it’s pretty good quality.

One of these are just four pages with an extra sheet.

I seem to recall these Pipelines back in the 80s being just four pages, but I may well be mistaken.

The Pipelines are pretty nicely made as promotional material go.

This is the two hundred and twenty-second post in the Entire Kitchen Sink blog series.