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1976: Kurtzman Komix

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Kurtzman Komix (1976) #1 by Harvey Kurtzman

Kitchen Sink would eventually be the home of basically all the pap pap comics legends, but they were still sort of nibbling around the edges in 1976. They’d done a couple of issues of The Spirit, and here comes a 32 page reprinting of random Kurtzman comics from the 40s.

The introduction by R. Crumb is pretty good (and presumably helps sell the book to an underground audience).

It’s not stated explicitly where these comics are from — and there’s only Pot-Shot Pete, Sheldon and Hey Look! strips.

The Pot-Shot Pete strips are the most interesting graphically, I think. (Here we see the bad guy fridge the hero’s sex crazed fiancee (sort of.))

I think I’ve read many (all?) all of the Hey Look! strips before?

They’re a bit hit or miss, but the ones that do work are kinda genius.

Huh. Alfred L. Neuman?

It was apparently not a success:

Kitchen Sink printed approximately 9,000 copies of this comic book. It has not been reprinted.

Hm… but my copy says that it’s a second printing? I think ComixJoint is mistaken.

TM Maple writes in Amazing Heroes #172, page 79:

KURTZMAN KOMIX
This 32-page black-and-white collec-
tion is more widely available now via
a resolicitation (rather than a reprint)
of its second printing; it was first pub-
lished in .1976.

[…]

Finally, there is another series of
one-page strips; entitled e”Hey Look.”
Here we) have a poor slob (who is
never named) who always ends up
with the short end of the deal. Part of
the charm is in trying to figure out
how he’ll get it this time and some of
the gags are nicely inventive and am-
using. But even when you can see it
coming a mileÄvay, there is some
weird pleasure in seeing how it grinds
out.
Kurtzman crams a lot of fun and
action onto every page and this vol-
ume is definitely worth the rather
modest cover price. And speaking of
the cover, it features a humorous illus-
tration of Kurtzman kissing a bare-
breasted beauty who is emerging from
his drawing board. Nice though it is
(and also appropriate, I guess, given
his involvement with Little Annie
Fanny), I uonder if it is fitting for this
particular comic as it is certain-
ly not indicative of the nature of the
contents.
Besides being a fine look at a pre-
Rtvrws
vious era in the history ofcomics, this
edition will hopefully help to increase
the awareness of Kurtzman by the
comics reading public. Obviously, he
deserves no less.
GRADE: ! ! ! 1/2

So Kitchen still had copies of the second printing left in 1989? So not a huge seller.

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

1976: Wet Satin

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Wet Satin (1976) edited by Trina Robbins #1

There were a couple of porn I mean erotic underground anthologies by women around this time — Tits and Clits, for instance, which ran for half a dozen issues. This one only got two issues — first one from Kitchen Sink, then one from Last Gasp (and Last Gasp also reprinted the first issue, which is what I’ve got here).

I’m not sure what the story was behind that, and ComixJoint mysteriously doesn’t list this series.

We start with a very edumacational page by Cathy Millet (a pen name for Christian Roux, but if I understand correctly, that wasn’t well known by people in comics at the time).

There’s a mixture of approaches here. I don’t know who Pechesky and The Mad Peck are, but they go for humour.

While Lee Marrs go for a kinda-not-that-explicit fantasy.

As usual, Trina Robbins brings a plot and a twist.

Shelby Sampson extols the pleasures of using coke and having sex.

And as usual, Melinda Gebbie … doesn’t just go all the way, but beyond. This is the least rude page. I don’t want to get this blog arrested, after all.

OK, I was going to do the second issue of Wet Satin, too, even though Kitchen Sink didn’t publish that, but it’s still in the mail.

Robbins is interviewed in The Comics Journal #53, page 54:

SHERMAN: Wet Satin ran into a lot Of trouble getting
printed.
TRINA: so did wet Satin #2.
SHERMAN: I haven’t seen #2. yet.
TRINA: Oh, you must see it: I’ve got one of the classic
stories in there in which the male protagonist is the enemy
but he’s really lovable.
SHERMAN: Could you recap the difficulties you had?
TRINA: The printer, who was the midwestern printer
who has printed all of Krupp’s comix.
SHERMAN: Including Bizarre Sex?
TRINA: Including Bizarre Ser. Which 1 use as a classic
example because there was one cover of Bizarre Sex where
the cover was so awful it actually had to be covered with
a white paper cover on the stands. (Bizarre Sex
Came from Alpha Centauri Looking for Love , ” which had a
giant vagina attacking a city skyscraper. I He was willing
to print Bizarre Sex , but he wouldn’t print our book. He
called it pornographic. And when he was asked why this
was pornographic and not Bizarre Ser, he said, “Well. men
draw Bizarre Sea.” These are his words. t’ It was all in
fun. It was a satire.” And Wet Satin wasn’t a satire; it was
taken seriously. Yet, we have this review from Screw—I
have an editorial in Wet Satin #2 and in there I say that
Screw , which is by no means a feminist journal, gave us
this fabulous review in which they said that the whole
reason that Wet Satin was so good and what saved it from
being a really dreary feminist diatribe was the fact that we
all had a sense of humor and we were able to poke fun at
ourselves and that it was satire, that it actually was fun-
nier than the men’s books. So you see we’ve been censored
in the miawest.
SHERMAN: so #2 has been printed by. ?
TRINA: Last Gasp.

Ah, so that’s why they changed printers — the printer Kitchen used just wouldn’t print it.

Edit one year later:

But then the second issue arrived.

Robbins explains the printing/publishing drama more in depth. Kitchen’s Mid-West printer refused to print both the first and second issues, so Last Gasp became the “formal” publishers of both issues, using their normal Californian printer (who’d print anything). Then the books were shipped to Kitchen Sink, and he sold them.

The second issue is in a larger format — it’s in comic book aspect ratio, but halfway to magazine size. It’s an attractive format, but you see few comics in this size.

Sharon Rudahl starts the party with another one of her sci-fi vignettes.

Joyce Farmer explains how dictionaries are very useful for children who are figuring things out.

Lee Marrs has two stories in here, and they’re the ones that take the cover motto most seriously: “Women’s erotic fantasies”. Most of the other strips lean more clearly towards humour, and even Marrs’ stories have amusing endings, but the fantasies are the most important bit.

Well, OK, Joey Epstein also does a fantasy, but “erotic”? It’s very funny, though.

Trina Robbins does two very bried vignettes that mix adventure with sex, and they’re gorgeously rendered.

Finally, Mary Wilshire does a little happy-go-lucky kind of sex comic.

It’s a pretty good anthology. I would have appreciated some longer stories, but since it’s a 32 page book, that’d squeeze out all the other contributors. Still, the vignette style does fit the subject quite well.

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

1976: The People’s Comics

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The People’s Comics (1976) #1 by Robert Crumb

Oops. This blog went on an unscheduled three week hiatus… Oh well.

This book was originally published by the Golden Gate Publishing Company in 1972, and then Kitchen Sink took it over in 1976 and kept it in print until the 90s. My printing is from the mid-80s, and looks pretty good. I mean, it still looks like a proper underground comic.

I had assumed from the title that this was going to be a “political” book, but the only nod in that direction is this two-pager about proletarisation… which ends in the typical Crumb way.

As with many Crumb solo books, this starts with a number of short pieces that have some kind of loose theme going — this time it’s Crumb being born, being thrown out from home and then going “mommy!” at all the women he meets.

The major story here is a Fritz the Cat story, which surprised me, because … er… while I’ve read the Fritz the Cat epic several times, I didn’t know that it was serialised in books like this…

… and then! THIS IS THAT STORY! The one where Crumb kills Fritz the Cat off? I mean, I knew that that was how it ended, but even knowing that, it came like a shock.

The story is like “ennui… ennui… DEAD!” On the inside back cover! No epilogue! Nothing! Just ice pick to head and the book is over.

This must have blown people’s minds in 1972.

The more I read these Crumb solo comics, the more I understand why he was as important as he was. I mean, yes, the artwork’s amazing and that’s easy to grasp, but when reading Crumb in later collections, it’s sometimes hard to understand why he had such an impact that he had. But this book is a perfect shock to the system.

(Crumb wanted to avoid further Fritz the Cat movies by killing him off, but it’s an even better comic if you don’t know that, so forget I said anything.)

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

1976: Comix Book

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Comix Book (1976) #4-5 edited by Denis Kitchen

Denis Kitchen explains in the editorial what this is. To recap — Marvel wanted in on the Underground magazine business, so they called up Kitchen to make him put together a magazine which they would then publish on the newsstand. This didn’t really make much sense, and the magazine folded after three issues. But there were already two more issues in the pipeline, paid for and all, and Kitchen managed to convince Marvel to let him publish those two issues himself, which is what we’re looking at here.

As you’d expect, it looks a lot more professional than Kitchen’s other books.

The main problem is — how do you do undergrounds while still make something palatable for sale in a supermarket? And… the formula they landed on is, not very surprisingly, short humour strips, some of which are about sex (but nothing very risque). (John Pound.)

You’d expect the artists to try to straighten stuff out slightly, but Skip Williamson’s pieces (which are the longest ones) are pretty impenetrable.

Ick. (Joel Beck.) I guess something like this (fortunately) wouldn’t go over well in Mad Magazine, for instance, but… that’s a long way around to get to a lame pun, isn’t it?

Right, here’s the Trina Robbins serial that was collected in Trina’s Women.

Ted Richards predicts… stuf…

(Leslie Cabarga.) There’s quite a variety of approaches to comics featured here, but it’s not really a good read? Virtually all the pieces are three or four pages, and the book has no flow. It seems totally random.

The best thing here is probably Sharon Rudahl’s thing.

But I do like seeing more of Kim Deitch’s earlier, goofier work. Not that I don’t like his later Waldoverse stuff, but this is certainly different.

(Lee Marrs and Mal Warwick.) Pretty uniquely for a book like this, there’s more than one woman contributing work. If I counted correctly, there’s three in this issue, which means that it’s an infinite percentage more than most underground anthologies at the time.

Hey! Harvey Pekar! (and Robert Armstrong). It’s a very untypical story for him.

Howard Cruse does some Barefootz…

… and there’s a five part Justin Green serial over the run of the magazine. It’s the weirdest thing I’ve seen Green do.

In the final issue, Kitchen explains that Marvel retained copyright of the work in the first four issues, but that he managed to convince Stan Lee to relinquish copyright… and that the book was cancelled two weeks later. (Cause/effect unknown.)

“This copyright barrier was a major handicap in attracting top underground talent to the magazine.” So… Kitchen is saying that the contributors to the first four issues weren’t top talent? Ooookay…

Heh. After Comix Book was cancelled, a couple people too their work to Arcade, who published it before Kitchen did.

The only “top talent” new in the final issue is S. Clay Wilson, I guess? (I assumed that “top talent” was a euphemism for “R. Crumb”, but I guess Wilson also qualifies.)

Tim Boxell does a really, really weird two-pager. And… I think the first page is really fascinating, but the second feels a bit random.

And Trina Robbins is interviewed.

But otherwise the fourth and fifth issues are very, very similar, so I’m not sure that dropping the copyright thing helped much?

A bit more than half of the material in Comix Book was reprinted in 2013 in the Best of Comix Book: When Marvel Comics Went Underground book.

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