Mickey Rat (1972) #1-2 by Robert Armstrong

Uhm… this doesn’t say “Kitchen Sink” anywhere… Oh! I’ve bought the wrong issue! This one was self published, and then Kitchen published the second issue:

OK, I’ll get that book and then update this blog post later. Let’s have a look at the first issue now, at least.

It’s a very underground comic — like many of them, it makes fun of hippies.

Armstrong’s cartooning is pretty interesting. It’s got an easy charm going on. The stories are mostly pretty simple jokes, but it hangs together quite well.

See? Old people suck, but younger people suck, too. It’s very even handed.

Unfortunately, the long story that rounds out the issue feels like it was going nowhere, and then it went nowhere.

Heh:

He started as a t-shirt design. Nothing but a crude rip-off of Mickey Mouse, not so close in design to Disney’s character that he’d get in trouble, but close enough to be obvious. His name was Mickey Rat.

Perhaps not the most auspicious origin story of a character.

OK; I’ll update this blog post when I get the second issue.

[Edit] And the time is now!

The second issue is published by Kitchen Sink.

Armstrong’s artwork and storytelling here is more assured — and it has more gangs.

Far out, dude!

We get a meandering story that ends with “to be continued”, but I’m not sure it was.

There’s the age-old problem when reading Underground comics: Wouldn’t it be better to read them while on drugs?

But I ain’t got no drugs here, so I have to enjoy this sober, and marvel at its groovyness.

It’s a solid book — it’s extremely of its time, but that’s part of the charm.

Except for the rape, which isn’t quite as charming.

And we end with an ad for an R. Crumb record.

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

Fever Dreams (1972) #1 by Richard Corben, John Richardson and Jan Strnad

There’s two stories in this book, each taking half the issue, and both are written by Strnad. The first story, drawn by Richardson, isn’t fun enough, but Richardson’s artwork veers between compulsive rendering and dodgy figure work…

The Corben story is a lot stronger in all respects. Both stories have twist endings, as these things usually do, but the one in the Corben story feels less forced. And the story just reads a lot better.

And I never quite realised that Corben was so influenced by John Severin?

It’s a fun story, and I can see why the book went into six printings (totalling 50K copies, according to Comix Joint).

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

XYZ Comics (1972) #1 by Robert Crumb

The previous Crumb book published by Kitchen Sink, Home Grown Funnies, is one of the most beloved underground comics of all time. So how does Crumb follow up that?

I’ve got the seventh printing — from 1998, so if Kitchen stuck to his regular plan of printing 10K a pop, this sold much less than half of the previous book.

And I can understand why, because most of these 24 pages aren’t, strictly speaking, narrative. Crumb hints at a writer’s block, and we basically just get random associative imagery for the first half.

But man, such imagery. Perhaps Crumb wasn’t up to writing anything much, but this has to be just about the peak of this part of his career, cartooning wise. Every image is just… you know… interesting? And gorgeously rendered.

After that first associative ramble, we get a bunch of shorter pieces, some of which are narrative, and some are more… er… reductive…

But we end the book with a story about a bunny in a psychiatric hospital, and it’s difficult not to read what he’s saying here autobiographically. At least somewhat?

Reading this book now, all these years later, is kinda thrilling? I’ve read everything here before, but in different collections, and it doesn’t quite read the same there. This slim comic book, though, is just kinda perfect? It’s a downer, but it feels so… genuine: This is what Crumb could do at this moment in time, so it’s what he did.

Gary Groth interviews Crumb in The Comics Journal #121, page 86:

THE LOST DECADE

GR(JCH: Some Of the work of yours that I like best are
the biographies Of blues musicians.
CRUMB: Oh yeah?
GROTH: You did a great strip in Arcade…
CRUMB: What, “That’s Life”?
GROH-I: Yeah.
CRUMB: I’m uneasy with all that Arcade stuff I did. I’m
not all that crazy about it.
GROH-I: Why is that?
CRUMB: I don’t know. I did that right in the middle Of
all that shit with the taxes and all that. It was real hard
to concentrate. It was very confusing. I was just at the
point where I was quitting using drugs as a source of in-
spiration, trying to find something else. It all seems rather
uncertain. I don’t like the drawing style that much. It was
in-between, or something. The stuff I was doing in the
late ’60s is so much more assured and confident than that
stuff in the mid-’70s. The ’70s are the lost decade for me.
GROTH: Probably for everybody It that kind of
decade.
CRUMB: Actually, it was still the ’60s lifestyle, mystic
hocus-pocus, a lot of loose sex—
GROTH: only until about ’73.
CRUMB: Oh, further than that. The loose sex thing went
on pretty much up to the end of the ’70s.
GR(JI’H: 171ere bus a real conservative backlash, though.
CRUMB: Oh yeah, the conservative backlash certainly
started around then. Most younger people were still liv-
ing Off the energy Of the ’60s. A very confusing time to
me. Like I said, it took me eight years to figure out how
to deal with celebrity and the money thing and all that
stuff and get my feet back on the ground. All those com-
ics I turned out in the early ’70s—Hytone, Uneeda, XYZ,
Black and White—I look at all those now and I’m not real
happy with them. I like the early Zaps. first two issues
of Zap, and a lot of the stuff I did for underground papers
around that time I still really like when I look at it. But
all that stuff coming totally out of acid visions. There
was no doubt. I sat down and it just drew itself, so it has
a certain power. There wasn’t a lot of ego interference
or qualms or doubts about what I was doing. But there
was later. I really felt myself being thrown off the track
around 1969 and ’70. I could feel myself getting thrown
for a loop by all the craziness that suddenly flooded into
my life. It was dizzying. I was loosing that sureness about
what I was doing with my work, that kind of sure footing
you have when you’re on the track. You’re never that sure
of what you’re doing with it, but at least you know when
you’re on the track. Right now I feel like I’m on the track.
For a while I was just floundering around. Fucking ’70s.
[laughs]

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

O.K. Comics (1972) #1-2 by Bruce Walters

Kitchen had syndicated the OK Comics strips to various underground newspapers, and the strip also showed up in (basically) all the Kitchen anthologies. So I guess it’s natural to give him a solo book.

The humour is kinda between oldee tymey gags and spaced out hippie nonsense, which isn’t totally my cup of tea, but I can see the charm. There’s also something interesting graphically about the artwork: The hatching and the bulbousness of everything.

Oh, those hippies.

Things dissolve into nothingness all of the time, but in a pleasant way.

Whoa. I love that page on the right there.

The second issue is quite different. The artwork looks more sketch like, and the stories are … er… more story like.

And we end on a bad trip.

Very odd book.

Comix Joint hates it:

Bruce Walthers was 51 years old and the president of a corporation when he produced this one-man comic book for Kitchen Sink Enterprises.

[…]

Walthers was a competent comic artist, but with one exception most of the strips here are quietly conventional and sometimes vacuous.

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