Apocalypse… The Eyes of Doom (1993) by Juan Gimenez/Roberto Dal Pra’

So what’s this then? Kevin Eastman didn’t just own Tundra — he also owned Heavy Metal. So it must have seemed natural for Tundra to reprint things that had already been serialised in Heavy Metal — and Kitchen Sink continued that. (I mean, 1993 Kitchen Sink is basically a rebranded Tundra anyway.)

So this is an album, with an oddly anonymous name (“Apocalypse… The Eyes of Doom”) that could be about anything, that was originally published in France, then it ran in Heavy Metal, and now there’s the US album version.

While this may have been natural for Tundra, it’s just such a weird thing for Kitchen to publish: It’s not something he’d have touched with a ten foot pole before. Kitchen Sink Press was a reflection of his aesthetics (to some degree), and he definitely wasn’t into this sort of gross violence porn.

The story is really slight: It’s about a guy who can blow stuff up using ESP, and a woman who tries to use that to become a crime lord. But it’s a ridiculous premise, because any competing crime lord could just have him killed. He’s not that super.

So instead we get mystery writer who observes all this, and also goes on extended acid trips for some reason, and… It’s all just an excuse to draw “cool stuff”, and the artwork is indeed pretty cool.

The book has never been reprinted in the US, and you can still pick up copies at below cover price, so I guess nobody much liked it.

I can’t find many reviews:

This one’s so so though. The plot is good enough but I didn’t care about this mystery author or kid who could destroy you with his eyes.

That is… the entirety of the plot.

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

Flesh Crawlers (1993) #1-3 by Richard Rainey and Michael Dubisch

I’m guessing this was a book already in the works at Tundra before Kitchen Sink took over, but I guess it could have originated at KSP? They also did a number of sci-fi comics, but it just seems ineffably like a Tundra book.

It starts off pretty well — the artwork is really weird, but that can work well with this sort of thing.

But… it’s just mainly a lot of weird grimaces that leave you wondering whether they mean anything, or that the artist just isn’t, well, very good at drawing faces. Most of the characters look very similar, and everybody changes quite a lot from panel to panel, so keeping track of who’s who is a strain. You have to resort to guessing by looking at hairdos — but even that is difficult since they, too, look different from panel to panel.

I think the artist’s main interest lies with drawing monster and grisly deaths.

Storywise, this thing worked pretty well the first issue: Nothing was over-explained, but it was obvious that we were in a Body Snatcher sitch with aliens etc. Very standard plot, so no exposition seemed necessary… but then they start explaining everything in tedious detail, and any momentum the book had evaporates.

Swell monsters. And people that seem to stare into infinity instead of at anything in the panels.

The series is OK, I guess? It’s mildly entertaining, and the artwork is so wonky that it’s interesting.

Looks like Dubisch is still working on monster comics, which makes sense.

It looks like this series has never been reprinted, and I’m unable to find any reviews of the series.

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

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.

Blue Block (1993) by Scott Deschaine and Jim Woodring

Here’s where the “Kitchen Sink” concept becomes a bit muddled.

Flush with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle money, Kevin Eastman started Tundra Publishing, who seemingly had a mission to give all alternative comics artists huge paychecks for publishing things that didn’t sell well. My impression was that it was halfway between a charitable concern and a commercial entity? Three years in, Eastman was fed up with the entire enterprise (understandably enough), and brought in Denis Kitchen to mop things up.

Or as they tried to frame it: The Comics Journal #158, page 17:

Kitchen Sink Press Buys
Tundra Publishing

Right from the start, everybody called bullshit on that story. How did Kitchen Sink, a small company, buy Tundra, which was much larger? I’m not sure whether anybody has ever gotten down into the nitty gritty of it and figured out just what actually happened, but everybody assumed that Eastman had paid Kitchen a bunch of money to get the mess off his hands, and to avoid losing even more money:

“Going down the list (of Tundra’s creators),
some contracts will obviously have to be rene-
gotiated,” said Kitchen. “Some are structured
in a way that I don’t think KSP can benefit from
them. In some cases, Tundra was just too
generous in its deals. KSP just isn’t positioned
to carry on with certain projects that are big
money loser-s unless I think there’s an overriding
artistic or political reason for me to do it.

I.e., Eastman didn’t want to be the heavy and cut his friends’ books, but Kitchen could. So Kitchen moved the Kitchen Sink offices from Princeton, Wisconsin to Massachusetts, where Tundra had their offices. Of the 14 people who were employed in Princeton, five made the trip, and many of the people who already worked for Tundra were fired, too.

And for the next year or so, Kitchen Sink’s publishing schedule would be dominated by things that Tundra had in the pipeline, of which this is obviously one.

So that left me in a slight conundrum for the concept of this blog — should I perhaps just bite the bullet and also cover all the pre-Kitchen Tundra books? Because it’d be weird to do just, say, Tantalizing Stories #6, when the first issues were published by Tundra and that one by the Kitchen Tundra.

I decided to just wing it, and do all the books that have “Kitchen Sink” in the indicia (as determined by comics.org), but with continuing series, I’ll also be looking at previous issues.

*phew* So much drama!

But let’s look at Blue Block!

It’s written (and layouted (that’s a word)) by Deschaine, but the very pretty artwork is by Jim Woodring, who was doing various oddball series at Tundra at the time, as well as illustrating monster comics for Fantagraphics.

This is a done-in-one 32 page comic book, which is on par for Tundra: They published a lot of stuff that you’d be hard-pressed to see how would reach a larger audience. But the colour reproduction here is just weird — it mostly looks really good, but look at that net the dog er cat catcher is using: It’s pretty much illegible what’s actually going on.

This is a semi-dystopian sci fi story, and we’re not given much of an explanation about anything in that society. Instead we focus on a couple of small events (the cat getting its head caught in a glass jar and this guy’s attempt to help it), and one big event.

(Don’t worry, the cat’s gonna be fine.)

It’s… it’s a kind of perfect little book? It’s a jolt of mystery and humanity — it’s without context, just 32 pages of a little story about a day in this society. Woodring is an odd choice for an artist for a sci fi story, since his art looks so grounded (in this mode of drawing), but that only heightens the strangeness of the book.

It’s really good.

The Comics Journal #166, page 128:

This is a strange little work, writ-
ten and laid out by Deschaine and
illustrated by Woodring, with col-
Ors by Mary Woodring. It tells the
story of@man and his family
who live in the “blue block” of some vague future
city where districts are separated by color. Huge
banks of lights crown all the buildings, making the
sky glow blue day and night. The other star of the
book is•årt omery alley cat, who prowls the margins
Of the, centralized society and whom the man feeds
and inadvertently traps in a
broken bottleneck.

[…]

No, I’m not going to give away the end-
ing. Blue Block is a short, simple Story. but in the
Woodrings’ hands it becomes something beyond
that, something hypnotic. There’s nothing all that
original about the story, but for some reason I find
myself rereading this book over and Over. Maybe it’s
because the cat’s so darn cute.

I don’t think this book has ever been reprinted? Somebody should do a collection of Woodring-illustrated books from this era.

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