Bop (1982) #1 edited by Catherine Yronwode

Well, this is an odd one. During the first few years of the 80s, Kitchen Sink basically published Will Eisner stuff and not a lot else. This was launched as a new ongoing magazine series, and I guess it makes sense one some levels. But… it’s a comics/music magazine about… oldee tymey music. I know comics fans are often really conservative, but c’mon.

Marc Hempel does a take on A Christmas Carol, but about how old people always hate on whatever music’s new.

Joe Schwind does this…

… but the most successful piece in the book is Trina Robbins’ take on East Virginia Blues.

OK, this parody of Crumb’s Heroes of the Blues is pretty much on point.

And there’s, like, essays…

And reviews of (old) music. Hm, why didn’t Eclipse publish this instead? Yronwode and Mullaney are both Eclipse people…

Harvey Pekar shows up with a suitably absurd thing, and Alex Toth takes us dancing. Well, actually, the Toth thing is pretty good, too.

I guess the magazine is kinda OK, but it’s just rather confusing as a project. I’m not surprised at all that no further issues happened, though.

The Comics Journal #81, page 36:

On the other hand, Denis Kitchen’s Bop
is fully professional in its production and
the work of dedicated and talented people
—but in its own way falls equally short of
the mark.
Bop was a fine idea—a black-and-white
“music comix magazine” which sought to
bridge the gap between the underground
comix and the music many underground
comix artists listen to while they work, in a
format suftciently “above ground” to sell
outside the rapidly disappearing head-
shops.
Alas, there was also a gap between the
basic idea and its realization—which may
have contributed to Bop’s disappointing
sales as well as its basic failure to fulfill its
promises. Thus Bop #1 was both a•first and
a last issue, and its potential has been
stillborn. That’s a pity; I had hoped when I
first read it that it would improve with sub-
sequent issues.
Bop is a handsome magazine. John
Pound’s airbrushed cover is a pure delight.
Sadly , nothing inside the magazine, despite
Bop’s overall graphic excellence, comes
anywhere close to Pound’s cover painting
in vigor, wit, or musical animation. Why?
I’m not sure. The easy answer would be
that editor Cat Yronwode set her sights
too low, and accepted too many pieces that
failed to imbue themselves with the spirit
needed (no pun intended). But perhaps she
had no choice; perhaps this result was in-
evitable. It’s possible that the melding of
comix and music she (and l) sought was im-
possible to achieve. I’m not sure. Looking
back over the years of underground comix
I can think of few examples that meet the
necessary requirements.

[…]

When I edited the first Rock issue of
Heavy Metal I had a number of French
pieces (published in two Rock Special issues
Of Metal Hurlant) to draw upon, but I used
only a few. The French love of ’50s rock
and roll and what they perceived to be the
American culture of that time produced a
few brilliant pieces and a lot of garbage.
Among the American artists I turned to
were Spain, whose Trashman had been a
fixture among ’60s pnderground strips, and
who rivals Wilson for rock-energy in his
work. But that issue of HM was not edited
from the same premises used for Bop; I
wanted pieces which told stories or ern-
bodied rhythm, or in some way evoked the
rock experience, which is a far narrower
focus than Bop’s, despite superficial
similarities between the two magazines’
approaches.
Bop is far more academic in its approach
to music. It is too often didactic, choosing
to explain music rather than sharing its ex-
perience. And its feel is anemic, as though
the life-blood of music—all music—has
been siphoned off first, leaving a relatively
lifeless body.

[…]

It’s an irony that a man like
Toth, who has enjoyed such a long career
•in the professional comics, turned in the
best piece of “comix” in Bop, but perhaps
that offers yet another explanation for
failure to realize its potential.
The rest of Bop—perhaps half the total
issue—is not comics Or ‘ ‘comix,” but is
typeset text with spot illos, and the text
material is basically music-fanzine material,
some if it quite good, but all of it essentially
explanatory and not evocative—more
didacticism.
The overall impression I’m left with is
that Bop lacks the essential aliveness of
music, and isn’t great shakes as comics
either. Pound’s cover and Toth’s panto-
mime are only real successes and they
just don’t carry the issue.
That’s a genuine pity, because the obvi-
ous time, money, and care that went into
Bop should have yielded better results.
Denis Kitchen deserves applause for not
only trying Bop but for his almost single-
handed efforts to keep a dying industry—
underground comics—alive. His failure to
make a success of Bop will inevitably be
reflected elsewhere in the shrinking
Kitchen Sink empire and we will all (along
with Denis) be the poorer for it.

This is the sixty-third post in the Entire Kitchen Sink blog series.

The Art of Will Eisner (1982) by Catherine Yronwode

Kitchen Sink had previously published the Eisner Color Treasury, so I wondered what this was going to be about. And instead of gathering a lot of nice art, this is more about doing an Eisner biography…

… while collecting a whole bunch of Eisner ephemera. The biographical sketches are well-written and informative, as usual by Yronwode, and the selection of stuff seems nicely done.

So we get a bunch of stuff like this, and a handful of snaps of Eisner at various ages.

A couple of stories are reprinted in full.

And even a full colour Spirit strip. (A kinda meta one, so it’s pretty apposite.)

If I were an Eisner fan, I’d be totally into this book.

This is the sixty-second post in the Entire Kitchen Sink blog series.

The Spirit Color Album (1981) #1-3 by Will Eisner

The Spirit magazine Kitchen Sink was publishing at the time also dabbled in printing some Spirit stories in colour, but to pretty horrific results — they looked horrible. So Kitchen took another stab at it with this album series, printed in Belgium.

And these have been thoroughly recoloured (the credits doesn’t say who, so I’m guessing either Eisner himself, or Pete Poplaski, or some unknown Belgians)? It generally looks pretty good, but the colourists have gone a bit overboard with their watercolours.

I mean, you have to commend them for the effort put into this, but it frequently looks like an unreadable mess.

Other stories look really nice indeed.

And some seem to vary on a panel-by-basis between fully painted colours and mechanical separation. Very odd.

And some stories use virtually nothing but flat colours.

Oh, yeah, I’m not actually talking about the Spirit stories themselves, because I assume everybody’s read anything that’s worth writing about those. But I’ll note that this is a pretty random sampling of stories, but just from the prime years, and they’ve selected some of the more entertaining ones and skipping the duds.

The second and third albums have a much more consistent colouring job: It’s sculptured colouring, but it doesn’t go overboard, and doesn’t invent things that weren’t originally there. Much.

They look really nice — handsome objects, comfortable format, and good reproduction.

The album series was abandoned when Kitchen started doing a monthly comic-book-sized chronological reprinting of The Spirit in October 1983.

This is the sixty-first post in the Entire Kitchen Sink blog series.

Mod (1981) #1 edited by Terry Beatty

I think this is the first comic Kitchen Sink published with the new logo? A new logo for a new era.

This book is edited by Terry Beatty, and he also contributes the majority of the pieces. So I guess it’s more like a solo book, but with some invited guests, like Rodney Schroeter above.

And it’s a very random collection of things. There’s a spooky story that doesn’t go anywhere to the left (art by Geo Cochell, if I’m parsing the signature correctly), and then a page about Lene Lovich? Well OK.

But it’s mostly a book where Beatty can strut his skills at emulating different art styles.

Bob Burden shows up for a few pages…

… and Gary Kato illustrates an inspired piece of lunacy.

About halfway through the issue, it really clicked into place for me: It’s kinda brilliant? Like this mashup (by Beatty) of a romance comic (in the text) and a Wally Wood-ish sci-fi horror story (in the artwork). Was Beatty attending art school around this time? It’s really fun.

And finally, and incongruously, we get a handful of Bill Griffith pages.

Surprisingly, this book is a really good read. There’s a couple of things that don’t quite work (the inside front cover brought the expectations way down), but it’s a fine little anthology.

Bill Sherman writes in The Comics Journal #70, page 108:

The titles before me are Mod and Com.
ical Funnies. The first is edited by Terry
Beatty , former Buyer’s Guide columnist and
presentday fan artist; the second is a
tabloid offshoot of the old punk fanzine.
The source of Mod’s title is especially tell-
ing: it works both as a parody of the Kurtz-
man EC title and as a reference to a mid-
’60s English rock movement (which en-
joyed 15 minutes of renaissance in 1979
England). Beatty’s cover carries at least
part of this punning premise through with
a parody of the premiere Mad showing
Kurtzmanian caricatures of new wave
rockers Elvis Costello and Lene Lovich be-
ing menaced by the corpse of Presley. But
he forgets about the second halfofhis pun:
neither Costello nor Lovich could be called
“mod” (a much more precise critical term
with clearer musical antecedents than the
broad *’new wave”). The results are only
half clever. •
But Beatty is less interest,ed in mod—a
fairly lean rock form exemplified by the
early Who or more recent Who-derivatives
like the Jam or Secret Affair—than he is in
the orotund phrasing of Mod’s patron
priestess Lovich. A highly theatrical rock
artiste, known for her broadly gothic man-
nerisms, Lovich possesses a style of new
wave that is crammed with self-conscious
pastiche. The singer is enshrined within
the premiere Mod as “Artist of the Issue,”
and Beatty seems to have taken her par-
ticular mode of art to heart. Just as Lovich’s
music is dependent on a recollection of
its sources (the eye-rolling theatrics of
German horror movies, cabaret) for full
appreciation, Beatty’s Mod material is
equally tied to its wellsprings.
Fully half of Mod devotes itselfto fannish
media parodies, an overdone form at best,
and has less to do with rock than with the
broader concerns of over-fantasized
‘American youth. Giant robot jokes,
Fleischeresque bugs, the inevitable EC
parodies, a beach party strip—the material
is familiar and rote like a Saturday Night
Live talk show skit. Beatty the scripter
(who’s responsible for most of the parodies)
may be able to inject some humor or out-
rageousness into this format, but it’s
dimmed by deja vu. Lovich, at
least. has chosen a sufficient-
ly arcane source for her pas-
tiches: Beatty’s material has
been done to death. What’s
next? A haunted house com-
edy strip?
Not all of Mod’s material
is so openly derivative. Brit-
isher Hunt Emerson’s back
cover discourse on English
rock fashion even contains
the book’s one genuine mod
reference (circa 1979) as he
discusses his own involve-
ment in rock’s
“sartorial
wars” through the ’70s. (“l
was too young to participate
in the first great mod move-
ment, but I did own an op•art
tee-shirt. ‘ Emerson’s in-
volvement as art designer for
the English Beat, a ska/reggae
band that broke through dur-
ing the British mod renais-
sance, makes him an apt corn-
mentator, but his discussion
of the British rock scene prob-
ably will only make sense to
an American reader weaned on the music
magazine Trouser Press. Still, his stylized
geometric fashion parodies are witty and
telling.
But newcomer Bob Burden’s five one-
page entries are the most happily indi-
vidualistic: non-sequitur parables set in
either Jean-Paul Sartre’s afterlife or a kid’s
desert.

This is the sixtieth post in the Entire Kitchen Sink blog series.