Adventures with Kitchen Sink Press, 1995
One of the happiest moments of my comics career was when I hooked up with Kitchen Sink Press. They’re no longer with us today, but they were one of the few indie publishers that I respected from top to bottom. If I had to explain why in one word, it was authenticity. Rather than chasing fads, they stuck with what they believed in. Instead of throwing fastballs and spitballs and bouncers, every pitch was straight over the plate. And quality was a baseline, not a daydream.
The first Kitchen Sink comics I read were reprints of Will Eisner’s The Spirit, which led me to Mark Shultz’ amazing Xenozoic Tales. When that title somehow magically made it to TV as the animated series Cadillacs and Dinosaurs in 1993, it seemed like Kitchen Sink was no longer limited to ink on paper. (See the episodes on Tubi here.)
A lot happened in the years since I created Grease Monkey in 1992. I shifted my entire life from Michigan to California (Dec 92), survived my time at Malibu Comics (92-94), and set up shop with two friends to make comic books under the name Studio Go! Grease Monkey had been parked off to the side through all of that, but I never forgot about it. When I saw how Kitchen Sink had migrated one of my favorite comics to TV, it occurred to me that they might know how to do the same with mine.
In April 1994, I made my way to the second Pro/Con at the Oakland Convention Center in California. This was a short-lived event specifically for comic book creators and publishers to talk business in a way that we really couldn’t at a standard comic book convention. I’d been to the first one, and was eager for the followup. It gave me countless opportunities to hobnob with luminaries whose work I respected and whose names I had only seen in print before then. Now they were written on tags pinned to the people themselves.
One of them was Denis Kitchen, owner and publisher of Kitchen Sink Press. He was friendly and approachable, and one meeting was all it took for him to get interested in Grease Monkey. It was perfect timing; he was looking for something that could travel the same route as Xenozoic Tales, and thought this could be the next ticket to ride.
It was a very, VERY rare case of not only good timing, but square peg/square hole. I’ve run into the opposite far too many times, both in business and my personal life. When the peg and the hole actually line up, it feels like fate has come a’knockin.’ And this time, it came knocking TWICE (keep reading).
In a matter of months, I had a deal with KSP for a reprint of the Grease Monkey comics I had previously drawn in 1992 for Styx International. (I’m sure having them all done in advance was a big selling point in my favor.) So, since they didn’t have to be created from scratch, production time could be spent coloring them instead. Talk about frosting on top of frosting!
The work we’d been doing for Studio Go! projects had given me an opportunity to learn the new art of digital coloring in Photoshop, and now I could apply that knowledge to my own work. I somehow managed to squeeze it into my over-packed schedule in ’95, but it all got done. And when that was finished, Kitchen Sink had something else for me to do.
First, a flashback is required. Let’s drift back two years to 1993, when I was still working on staff at Malibu, managing the art department. There were all sorts of artifacts lying around there when I came in, including something I’d heard about but never seen in person: Duo-shade board. If you don’t know what that is, here’s a quick primer.
Five sheets of Duo-shade and their accompanying photo-chemicals were just sitting there waiting to be used for something, so I put them to use. First, I created my final 2-page spread for issue 6 of my SF series Cybersuit Arkadyne, and I loved it.
For my next trick, I decided to try my hand at a classic EC-style horror comic. Duo-tone was no stranger to EC stories, so I got in the groove and knocked out three pages of a story I just made up as I went. Everything about it aped the EC style, including the opening narrative, the title (“The Day I Lost My Head”), and the knife-twist that later became a staple of The Twilight Zone.
There were only three sheets of Duo-shade board left, so I stopped after page three and filed it away as an enjoyable experiment. I had a notion of how the story would finish, but didn’t foresee when or how I’d get the chance to take it there.
Then Kitchen Sink Press came along.
In addition to getting Grease Monkey on the schedule, they also planned to revive an EC-style anthology called Death Rattle. The first issue was set to debut in the fall, and sometime in the spring the editor (Chris Couch) asked me if I’d like to contribute something to it. Square peg, square hole.
I didn’t have any more Duo-shade and not enough funding to buy more (it wasn’t cheap), so I opted to start over with regular old ink and paper. But this time I went all the way to the end and completed the story in 8 pages.
It appeared in Death Rattle #1 (October 1995), sporting a cover by Mark Shultz himself, and earned me a tiny little footnote in the Kitchen Sink pantheon.
Grease Monkey #1 and #2 (in color) came out in early 1996. I was happy to see them back in the world, but disappointed that they were printed on cheap, yellowish newsprint that dulled down the color. And though they didn’t quite set the world on fire, they did open the gate into the world of animation via Kitchen’s Hollywood rep, Brad Neufeld. Developing the strip for animation turned out to be a thoroughly eye-opening, occasionally frustrating, and infinitely educational experience. I gained a front-row view of what TV execs insisted was appropriate for children and acceptable to sponsors. I won’t disgust you with the details just now. Suffice to say, the cart often came before the horse and the tail nearly always wagged the dog.
Nevertheless, this experience too handed me an unexpected reward. The Neufeld connection put me together with an animation writer (Jymn Magon), an animation talent agency (The Gotham Group), and ultimately a career in the cartoon biz. In the fall of 1995, Grease Monkey was pitched as an animated TV series to several networks and studios, including MCA/Universal. Producer Ralph Sanchez took a shine to it, particularly the artwork on my presentation boards, and he offered me a job on a series in development called Wing Commander Academy (based on a PC game starring Mark Hamill).
The timing couldn’t have been better. Things were getting rough in the comics industry because not enough had been done to broaden the audience (ah, you could cut the irony with a knife), and animation was the next logical stomping ground. I didn’t have any practical experience in animation storyboarding, but Ralph and Universal took a chance on me anyway, and I didn’t let them down. I ended up storyboarding several episodes of WCA and serving as a character designer for the series during the summer of 1996. The show debuted on USA Network that fall, and it gave me my first official screen credits. (Read all about it and see my work for the show here)
This led directly to a gig at Columbia/Tri-star TV animation. I began as a storyboard artist there at the end of 1996, but one look at Grease Monkey convinced producer extraordinaire Audu Paden that I had the chops to be a director. Some other comics still happened in the meantime, but I have to credit Kitchen Sink Press (and of course my own determination to create Grease Monkey) as the stepping stones that took me into a whole new life. My time with KSP was far too brief compared to the treasures it brought me.
Below are both iterations of The Day I Lost My Head for comparison and enjoyment.
RELATED LINKS
Kitchen Sink Press Wikipedia page
“The Entire Kitchen Sink” website
Grease Monkey website (See the color pages there. And everything else.)
Xenozoic Tales comics at archive.org
