Smile
Smile
Kitchen Sink (1970-1972)
SHERMAN : There was a period where there seemed to be a series of syndicated strips that got reprinted in Smile magazine.
KITCHEN: Yeah. For a while we were syndicating strips to alternative newspapers and college papers…
SHERMAN: It sounds like the Rip Off Syndicated pages.
KITCHEN: Yes, it was, as a matter of fact. This was 1971. Actually, it lasted two years, and this was when one of my partners was Jim Mitchell, who did the Smile comics. He was in charge of the syndicate, and he wasn’t the most organized person in the world, but it still did fairly well. Five of us, Mitchell, Don Glassford, Bruce Walthers , Wendal Pugh, and myself, all did a weekly strip and we had at one point 50- some papers and that would have been enough for it to be successful. The problem was not getting them to carry it , the problem was getting them to pay for it (laughter] . We had something like a collection rate, and that just wasn’t enough. We ended up making three dollars a strip after expenses per week, and we just finally had to give up.
It was an experiment that could have succeeded if we had persevered, and I think if we’d had a good business manager at the time who knew how to collect and who knew how to get people to sign binding contracts (laughter) , it could be a syndicate to this day. But now Rip Off is doing something similar and they seem to be doing it successfully.
And then it also was where the Krupp Syndicate was based. The Bugle was our deadline on which the syndicate was based so that we gould then take that weekly package, reproduce it, and send stats Out to all the members. So the Bugle had the strips a week or two before any other paper in the Country and frequently had comics that we didn’t use elsewhere because they were either too local or sometimes we would so six, seven strips a week and we could only fit five on the proof sheets. Some day I might even like to go back and collect the best of those, because only a few were really reprinted in Smile, and even Smile was not a widely circulated comic. So there’s a lot of good stuff languishing in the files.
SHERMAN: Yeah, I think I’ve only seen about four or five Of your strips from that period.
KITCHEN: Yeah? It was probably my most prolific period ever, because I had to draw something every Week. That’s one reason I liked it: because somebody forced me to draw. wish somebody now would make me do a strip every week, but nobody will. [general laughter]
SHERMAN : At one point, some California artists were critical of Krupp —Roger Brand in particular.
KITCHEN: Yeah, Roger was probably the most vocal critic—he commented in Funnyworld at one point that he thought Krupp was the Charlton of underground comics, which really hurt, but I certainly understand why Roger was saying that. The San Francisco artists Were certainly the vanguard of the undergmund artist movement at that point in time, and the Midwest was an awfully dumb place to be in their view and perhaps even from my own point of view. Everyone was migrating out to San Francisco with good reason: it was a cultural mecca, it was a beautiful place to live, and why I stayed in Wisconsin was because I was stubborn and had family ties and was dumb laughter] . When I was covered with four feet of snow, I often wondered why I didn’t go to San Francisco too. But in Wisconsin I did stay and the distance caused lack Of communication and misunderstand- I think Roger felt what he and some Of the other West Coast cartoonists were doing was much more valid at the time, shall we say more “underground and I think probably it’s true. Had I published S. Clay Wilson in the Midwest, I probably would have been tarred and feathered out of Milwaukee, which is a large city but would have tarred and feathered me nevertheless. The San Francisco artists had a much freer situation. I was probably more conservative personally than many of them and I also, at that time, was certainly geographically isolated from the mainstream of underground cartoonists.
It changed as more of them began to travel and pass through the Midwest and as we met in person a lot of those misunderstandings began to clear up. I know that for instance a comic book like Smile at the time. which was mainly a collection of Jim Mitchell’s work, was considered horribly cute and juvenile by most of the San Francisco artists. in the same way Barefootz was criticized later on. I think part of it was a general California attitude toward the Midwest which still prevails, to a large degree, If you’re on the East Coast or on the West Coast, you’re
where things are happening and Midwest bumpkins can’t possibly produce anything valid. As the artists began passing through and Crumb began giving me books, and the Bijou books came out of the Midwest, more and more things began being done in Wisconsin, and the idea that the Midwest was a stupid place to be began to slowly disappear.
