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Denis Kitchen: Alternative comics' unsung hero [1]

['Ruben Bolling']

Date: 2026-01-19  

Last week, Denis Kitchen spoke at New York City's Society of Illustrators, in conversation with editor Kim Munson, about a new book collecting the interviews he's given over his almost sixty years in the comics business: Conversations with Denis Kitchen.

Photo: Ruben Bolling

Kitchen has had a fascinating and extensively influential career. He started as a "hippie" underground cartoonist. When he got fed up with dealing with an unscrupulous publisher, he decided in 1969 to self-publish. He said that he may have been emboldened by his experience as a kid selling comics he drew and mimeographed to his classmates.

As he prepared to publish his own comic book, fellow underground cartoonist Jay Lynch asked if he would publish his comic book too. Kitchen said, in "one of the stupidest things I ever said," that publishing "two is as easy as one." But that moment is what launched his second career, as a publisher of comics, and the founder of Kitchen Sink Press.

Kitchen Sink would go on to publish such important figures in cartooning as Howard Cruse, Robert Crumb, Art Spiegelman, Justin Green, Trina Robbins, S. Clay Wilson, Harvey Kurtzman, and Will Eisner. And of course Kitchen himself.

And Kitchen Sink became known as an artist-friendly publisher that would allow comic book artists to own the copyright of their creations, unlike mainstream comic book publishers of the time such as DC and Marvel. Kitchen said that his was the first generation of cartoonists with a knowledge of comics history, and the cautionary tales of artists like Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster who created Superman, but signed away the rights to DC, or Harvey Kurtzman, who created MAD Magazine, but didn't own it. Kitchen and his contemporaries were determined to create comics properties that they would own.

Kitchen said that just being assiduous and honest about accounting set him apart in the comics industry.

Photo: Ruben Bolling

He added a third hat to his other two in 1986 when comic book store manager Michael Correa was arrested for possession and sale of obscene material, including works published by Kitchen Sink. Kitchen raised money for Correa's defense by packaging and selling a comic book featuring comics donated by him and his friends, and got Correa's conviction overturned.

Kitchen had raised so much money for the defense that he had surplus funds, which he thought he'd never need to use because the case seemed so unusual to him. But he soon found out there were many other censorship cases that he'd never known about because they "flew under the radar." He applied the surplus funds to those cases, and incorporated the non-profit Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, which to this day protects the First Amendment rights of comics creators, publishers, and retailers.

Denis Kitchen at the Society of Illustrators. Photo: Ruben Bolling

A documentary about Kitchen, Oddly Compelling: The Denis Kitchen Story, is planned to be released later this year.

Conversations with Denis Kitchen can be purchased here.

Previously:

• Dirty Pictures is a riveting look at the raunchy history of underground comix

• The Book of Weirdo — a history of the greatest magazine ever published

• The Art of Harvey Kurtzman: The Mad Genius of Comics

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