Wow - this is an amazing rundown of the life and times of Denis Kitchen. I had no idea that Kitchen once edited a Marvel-published underground comic for Stan Lee. For some reason, that kind of hurts my brain, just a little.

Kitchen Sink quickly earned a reputation for producing high-caliber material. By 1973 Kurtzman and Eisner were both contributing covers and contents. (Fig. 7) However, comix sales began to plummet around this time, largely due to a huge influx of shoddy books that glutted the market. Another factor was the increasing reluctance to carry the product among head shop owners who feared a new Supreme Court decision that allowed local communities to define obscenity.

Fortunately for Kitchen, this was also the year Marvel, publisher of Spider-Man and The Fantastic Four, approached him to edit the nation’s first underground comic magazine. Instigated by Stan Lee, Comix Book was a mutant attempt to capitalize on antiestablishment artists while staying newsstand-safe.

While some, such as Crumb, initially refused to work for Stan the man, Kitchen persuaded many others to compromise content for higher pay and circulation in the hundreds of thousands rather than their typical tens of thousands. Among Comix Book’s lineup were artists Justin Green, Kim Deitch, Sharon Rudahl, air pirate Ted Richards and writers Richard Meltzer and Nick Tosches. It also provided overground exposure for Art Spiegelman’s Maus, the three-pager that served as the foundation for his book of the same name.

Dealing with Lee on behalf of the artists, Kitchen had certain non-negotiable demands with regard to ownership of original art, trademark rights and character copyrights. Marvel’s work-for-hire staff naturally resented the fact that they were denied such benefits, and eventually mainstream publishers conceded similar rights to their regular artists. Comix Book also helped spur Spiegelman and Griffith to start their own similarly formatted, but less co-opted magazine, Arcade.

Poor sales and weak marketing support led Marvel to abandon Comix Book after three issues, and Kitchen’s Sink produced numbers four and five with the remaining inventory.

Comics