Comics for the connoisseur - Kitchen Sink Press - Company Profile

Nation's Business, May, 1993 by Michael Barrier

Last fall, the media buzzed over an event in the comic-book world: the temporary "death" of Superman. While the excitement over that issue of Superman was at its peak, a few thousand cognoscenti were savoring another notable comics publication: a book reprinting all of the 1948 "Li'l Abner" comic strips. It was in that year that "Abner's" creator, AI Capp, introduced the Shmoo.

In Capp's satirical vision, the Shmoo--a small, utterly benign creature--satisfied all human needs; and, in doing so, it spawned universal misery. The story of the Shmoo is still regarded as a high point in the history of a comic strip that had many of them.

The Shmoo was brought back to life by Denis Kitchen, a Princeton, Wis., publisher who works out of a converted dairy barn under the Kitchen Sink Press imprint. Compared with the big comicbook publishers, Kitchen Sink Press is a tiny operation--18 full-time employees and revenues "in the low seven figures," he says.

There is, however, nothing picayune about his books and comic books; he is, for instance, reprinting all of "Li'l Abner," in lovingly produced books each devoted to a year of the comic strip. He has reprinted many years of other comic strips, including Milton Caniff's "Steve Canyon," and he also publishes new comic books that have won success with the readers who haunt the small retail shops that specialize in comic books. One of his titles, Xenoziic Tales, will be transformed into an animated TV series (under the title "Cadillacs and Dinosaurs") by CBS in the fall; Kitchen says a multimillion-dollar toy deal is pending.

At 46, Kitchen has been in business for more than 23 years, but he has thought of himself as a businessman for a few years less than that. He started in Milwaukee, as a self-published "underground" cartoonist; that label was applied in the 1960s to crudely printed, low-circulation comic books with defiantly adult language and often raunchy subject matter.

When Kitchen Sink Press began publishing the work of Kitchen and other underground cartoonists, it was "what I call a typical hippie organization," Kitchen says. "I had literally no capital. In order to get people to work with me, I had to give them stock." He gave away three-quarters of the company to other Milwaukee cartoonists, "so within a month of rounding the company, I was a minority stockholder."

To his surprise, he says, making the cartoonists stockholders "backfired; there really wasn't the motivation I expected. I spent years reacquiring the stock." In other ways, too, Kitchen says, he got a painful education in business. When it came to granting credit, for example, "I trusted anybody with a beard and long hair." He got burned only a few times, he says, "but after a while it became clear to me that there were some long-haired sharpies out there."

The naivete of his early years was, however, a necessary part of his later business success, Kitchen says. "If I had just been a businessman, I wouldn't have been able to relate" to the cartoonists whose work he published.

Kitchen wound up in Princeton, a small town in central Wisconsin, 20 years ago when "my first wife insisted that we move to the country--against my wishes, because I loved Milwaukee." He grew fond of Princeton and found it also offered a very practical advantage: "The overhead was low. When times were tough, having extremely low rent could make the difference."

Tough times arrived in the middle '70s, when the market for underground comic books collapsed. To deal with that crisis, Kitchen says, "we diversified. We stressed distribution and mail order, and we began doing reprints of classic comics."

True to his underground roots, Kitchen publishes some comics--new ones as well as reprints--that he doesn't expect to show a profit. "I've always had this philosophy, in my business, that some things would subsidize others," he says. "Because ultimately I want to publish to satisfy myself. If I had to turn down something I thought was great, just because I thought its prospects for being profitable were slim, then it wouldn't be the kind of business I wanted."

His mail-order catalog has been whero Kitchen has made his biggest gains in the last few years; through it, he has been able to roach readers who may be repelled by comic-book shops with garish displays designed to attract teen-agers.

Next fall, Kitchen Sink Press will in fact start bringing out two catsjogs--one aimed at younger readers, and the other at an older audience with more sophisticated tastes. The catadog for older roaders will be devoted mainly to reprints of classic newspaper strips. "I'm looking for the audience that grew up reading newspapers 30, 40, 50 years ago," Kitchen says.

Kitchen thinks that such reprints differ profoundly in their appeal from the "death" issue of Superman, which thousands of people bought in the probably vain hope that its value will rise sharply over the years. "We've got to get back to the fundamental approach," Kitchen says, "Which is that you buy a comic book to read it, and not to put it in a plastic bag and stash it away."