Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [91]
Kitchen’s gift for satire, along with his presence on a progressive college campus at the height of the Vietnam War, might have seemed like the perfect combination for his work as an underground comix* artist and publisher, but only a strange turn of events spared him from a much different fate. By his own description, he was as “straight as they come” when he enrolled as a freshman at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. His father was a World War II veteran, and as a result of his upbringing, Denis felt a sense of patriotism not shared by some of his friends, who were appalled when he joined the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, donned a uniform, and marched around the campus twice a week. As Kitchen tells it, he might have enlisted in the service if not for one minor issue: he was allergic to wool, and his uniform pants itched like hell. He dropped ROTC and started hanging out at a coffeehouse called the Avant Garde, where UWM’s hippies whiled away their hours and argued the finer points of the escalating war in Southeast Asia. Kitchen’s friends praised him for finally coming to his senses about the war. He didn’t have the nerve to tell them that his decision was based on itchy trousers. “Had the pants been made out of cotton, I might have been a lieutenant colonel today,” he quipped decades later. “It astonishes me how we pick these paths.”
Fate also played a role in Kitchen’s choice of academic pursuits. Since UWM didn’t offer art courses conducive to a comics career, Kitchen went into journalism, which, he reasoned, would prepare him for a career in cartooning. Thanks to the time he spent in his classes and at the coffeehouse, Kitchen’s thinking changed radically. He joined the Socialist Labor Party, and besides his work on the ill-fated Snide, he drew cartoons for the Post, UWM’s student newspaper. More significant, he began assembling his own comic book, a work called Mom’s Homemade Comics. The undergrounds were making a splash on the West Coast, where they fit nicely into the sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll milieu of Haight-Ashbury and, by extension, appealed to hippies all across the nation who were listening to the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service, or Janis Joplin. Kitchen didn’t aspire to reach a national audience with Mom’s; he was happy loading his comic book with inside jokes and references to Wisconsin. When Mom’s #1 came out in 1969, Kitchen distributed it himself, hoofing it around Milwaukee’s east side and setting up sales arrangements with drugstores, head shops, used-book stores, and anyone else willing to take a handful of the comics and sell them for a slice of the profits. Kitchen made a little money, but nowhere near enough to pay bills and self-publish a follow-up edition of Mom’s.
At this point, his ambitions were sprinting far ahead of the returns he was earning for his efforts. In 1970, Kitchen partnered with four friends and co-founded the Bugle-American, an alternative weekly newspaper initially issued from Madison before settling a short time later in Milwaukee. As the paper’s art director, Kitchen was responsible for many of the Bugle’s covers as well as a regular strip running in the comics section. The position put him in touch with all sorts of area cartoonists, and if he still wasn’t earning any real money for all the work, at least he was becoming well connected. Kitchen was an easy name to remember, and his work, although not nearly as polished as it would become over the next year or two, caught the attention of artists throughout the region.
Two of these artists, Jay Lynch and Skip Williamson, hailed from Chicago and published Bijou, one of the earliest underground comix and by far the finest to come out of the Midwest. The two enjoyed Mom’s, and they contacted Kitchen shortly after its publication. When Kitchen complained about how he was being worked to death yet starving at the same time, and about how he needed to find someone to publish and distribute his work if he ever hoped to birth another issue of Mom’s,