The Acid Bath Case (1992) by Stephen Walsh and Kellie Strom

Kitchen Sink had a pretty strong identity as a publisher, even if it shifted over time. They started out as an Underground comix publisher, but a pretty mild one, and then segued into being a publisher that did quality reprints of superior genre material, while publishing books in the horror/fantasy/science fiction area.

But by 1992, you’d be hard-pressed to pinpoint a Kitchen Sink book any more.

So what is this? I guess you can see the connection to, say, Blab — this is a hard-boiled noir 50s thing, but with an art style that’s totally unlike what the Blab people are going for.

It’s also just… a befuddling reading experience. My guess is that the creators here have no comics experience, so it’s hard to interpret what we’re even supposed to glean from a sequence like the one above. Why is he grabbing the steering wheel?

I like reading comics that don’t explain too much, but this book was just incomprehensible.

I think… the plot is that Eisenhower is going around killing people and then dissolving them in acid? I’m probably wrong. 🤷🏾‍♂️

The artwork is sometimes pretty stunning, though, so it’s worth reading for that alone.

The Comics Journal #157, page 123:

This 46-page trade palxrback is a mystery/hard-t»iled
detective story involving an upper echelon police
detective in pursuit of an urban serial killer whose
modus operendi is death by industrial acid. The vivid
imagery of coiled skin corpses, skulls with protruding
eyeballs. and ribbons Of sinister fumes arising from
victims are Strong enough to turn even the steeliest
of stornachs. The artuork is painfully effective in
the horror am! obscenity of the murder scenes.
The visual composition is complex and engaging, as
is the actual drawing style. This could compared
to a film noiron paper. It is lurid and macabre, with
a sharp. urban look to it. The portrayal of the main
character, Nat Slimmer, doesn’t come across as be-
ing very likeable mostly due to the fact that the writer
leans too heavily on genre cliches, i.e., Nat’s self in-
tru: “l spit thinka some o’ the crimes I seen.. .Truly
such things as yu uouldn’t ever wanna cast yer orbs
Over. I’m a cop, y%ee. My beat is the city.” This
writing style may be a bit of a hurdle to those who
donh favor the hard-boiled school ofdialogue, but the
odd and intricate plot combined with the lush and
ferocious illustration make this tx»k uell worth a

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

Batman: The Sunday Classics, 1943-46 (1991) by a whole bunch of people

This is an oversized book collecting Batman Sunday pages from the 40s. These only ran in a handful of newspapers, so they haven’t been seen widely.

The book is obviously a labour of love. We not only get interviews from surviving creators of all the different sequences, but also biographies of everybody involved (and there’s a lot of people involved). We get about 50 pages of this stuff, and the book is 200 pages long, so one quarter of the book is research.

Some of it is even pretty interesting.

But I’m guessing people bought this book for the reprints, and they’re really well reproduced for this kind of thing. Colours that pop, but look pretty natural otherwise, and the linework reproduces well.

As is natural for a Sunday page serial, each sequence is pretty short — around the five page mark. That sounds like it should be pretty naff, but the pages are so dense that they manage to squeeze in stories that feel pretty complete, as Batman stories go.

Now, 40s Batman stuff isn’t really something I’m terribly interested in, but these are pretty good for what they are. More readable than the Batman comic book at the time, I’d say.

It’s a good mix of goofy and hard-hitting adventure.

Like I said, not really something I’m terribly interested in, but this is a quite satisfying book, none-the-less.

After Kitchen folded, DC Comics reprinted the strips, too.

Here’s a review:

This is a pretty good run of all-ages Batman stories, though the non-gory deaths might be too intense for the youngest readers. They largely ignore the War going on, outside a rich man’s quick reference to donating to the War effort.

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

Small Wonders The Funny Animal Work of Frank Frazetta (1991) #1 by Frank Frazetta and others

A popular scam I mean publishing genre involves finding early works by people who later became famous. This work can sometimes be interesting, but in comics this usually involves finding some public domain stuff from some bottom feeding publishing outfit, that didn’t give the artists much money at the time, and that had no publishing standards what-so-ever.

So I’m guessing that this is one of those books, because the second volume of this series never happened, and you’d think that anything with “Frank Frazetta” on the cover would sell.

Oh wow. This is even rougher (and more horrible) than I imagined.

And… wha? About one third of the pages here are like this. I’m guessing these are illustrations that went with short stories from some magazine or other? I understand the completist impulse (ahem), but c’mon.

*phew* Finally something that’s worth reading. The bulk of the book is funny animal strips featuring characters stolen from apparently any other funny animal comic.

So we randomly get a character that looks very much like Peg-Leg Pete (but without the peg leg).

And an alligator named “Al”.

In any case, these stories aren’t that bad, really? Frazetta’s cartooning is lively, and the stories are… OK. Nothing to get excited about, but I’ve certainly read a lot worse.

Now they’re just fucking with us. How do you spell “p.a.d.d.i.n.g.” anyway?

As transparent money-grabbing scams go, this book is one of them. There’s enough somewhat interesting material here to fill about one normal-sized comic book, which is something. But man…

You almost have to admire the brazen shamelessness of it all. Almost.

I was unable to find any contemporary reviews of the book.

This work has apparently never been reprinted again:

What many people, even some dedicated Frazetta fans, don’t realize is that Frazetta was primarily a comics artist for the early part of his career, starting in professional comic book work at the age of 16.

Some of his earliest work was for so-caled “funny animal” comics, in which anthropomorphized barnyard animals careen through loopy nonsensical misadventures in emulation of the popular animated cartoons in the same genre.

This is the one hundred and thirty-third post in the Entire Kitchen Sink blog series.

Will Eisner Reader (1991) by Will Eisner

This is a collection of pieces from Will Eisner’s Quarterly…

… so I wasn’t going to re-read these stories, but I ended up doing so, anyway.

It’s a pretty good selection of works — it includes some of the more satisfying “ironic” stories.

And a collection of one-page slightly off-colour jokes.

And even a Kafka adaptation.

And it ends with an excerpt of To the Heart of the Storm.

It’s a pretty good collection, if you’ve never read any of this stuff. But these stories have also been collected in other books, so…

R. Fiore writes in The Comics Journal #267, page 186:

[…]

The reader may have detected a
certain hedging on my part about the
artistic significance Of the third career. I
must confess that I’ve never derived a great
deal of enjoyment from them. Having spent
a lifetime doing work made to order Eisner
was going to do what pleased him, which
wasn’t necessarily What pleased fans of The
Spirit. What I missed in the later work was
the tightness and virtuoso turns of The
Spirit. I’m going to have to take another
look at it without preconceptions one of
these days. Looking at what I have on hand
(The Will Eisner Reader and To the Heart of
the Storm) dispels some misconceptions. To
begin With, think the Whole third career
has to be considered gravy, a gift from Eisner
to his cult and a gift from his cult to Eisner.
Next, the commonly held belief that there
was a great falling off after A Contract With
God won’t hold water. It would be more
accurate to say that many of us upon reading
Contract concluded (a) that we’d seen late
Eisner and (b) that we’d seen enough of it.
The style of late Eisner is looser than early
Eisner but it’s not loose. He didn’t lose a lot
of skill to age, and he didn’t “grow” a whole
terrible lot. It’s as if he had learned to play
the clarinet, and at a certain point he knew
how; the playing became a little mellower
and less showy With age but didn’t change
much in its essentials. The virtuosity of
The Spirit I suspect had more to do with
injecting originality into formulaic material
and later on maintaining interest in subject
matter that had come to bore him. The
stories in the Reader, which are not bad at all
for the most part, are a lot like the material
he was interpolating into the postwar Spirit.
Eisner a natural spinner Of yarns. He
was a sentimental ironist whose sentiment
is leavened by a Lardneresque cynicism
about human nature. He was usually more
sophisticated than hc seemed at first. He
aimed to subvert cliché, but (he subversion
often comes so latc in the Story that cliché is
the dominant impression.
Take “A Sunset in Sunshine City”
from the Reader. It appears to be standard
melodrama: A widower whose business is
slowly fading is convinced by his daughter
to retire [o Florida. As he looks around the
old neighborhood for the last rime his mind
is filled With bittersweet reminiscences about
his domineering Wife and his daughter’s
marriage to a nogoodnik against his wishes.
In Florida he meets a slightly younger fellow
retiree Who pursues him and eventually
convinces him to remarry, though he doesn’t
seem that enthusiastic. This sends a shock
up the coast, because the nogoodnik son-
in-law had been counting on the eventual
inheritance to shore up his shady business
deals. He pressures the daughter to come
down with him to Florida to put the kibosh
on the marriage. It’s not until the last
three pages that the string is pulled. The
nogoodnik has discovered that the matron
has more money than the widower. He asks
her to marry him instead, and she is quite
satisfied to be used in this way if it means a
young man in her bed. Initially the widower
is upset by this development, but in a deft
wordless sequence it dawns on him that
his situation is not nearly as bad as it first
appears. After a lifetime of being pushed
around by every female in his life from Start
to finish, he realizes that his to be divorced
daughter is now entirely dependent on him.
As the story ends he’s got her waiting on him
hand and foot.
In To the Hearn Storm the semi-
autobiographical main character, a recruit
en route to be trained to fight the ultimate
expression Of anti-Semitism, reflects on
episodes of anti-Semitism in his life and the
life of his family. TO begin With, the framing
device is a bir glib. The larger problem,
however, is that he’s addressing subject
matter that’s been done by some of the finest
writers of the last century, and comparisons
are inevitable. And the largest problem is a
failure of reflection, i.e., that if his character
is anything like him then he’s spent the last
several years retailing racial caricatures, and
will resume upon his return. Now, I’m not
one of those people who wrings his hands
over Ebony White, and Eisner had examined
his conscience and found it clear, but not to
confront this issue renders his self-analysis
superficial.

Well, I guess that’s a point…

This is the one hundred and thirty-second post in the Entire Kitchen Sink blog series.