"Aaargh!" Denis Kitchen Speaks Out!

Below are some select correspondence from my collection concerning the history of Megaton Man, particularly issues surrounding Megaton Man #11, a crucial turning point in the series and narrative. Scholars are encouraged to explore the Kitchen Sink Papers at Columbia University (which I have not consulted) for a fuller context.

Denis Kitchen, letter to Don Simpson, March 1, 1984: One salient fact to point out is that, despite the publisher's optimistic projections of sales between 25,000 and 50,000, sales of Megaton Man reached their height with issue #3 at just around 23,000 and sales generally hovered between 17,000 to 19,000. What was left of my royalties after the colorists were paid was less than the coloring rate: $40-$48 per page for writing, drawing, lettering, and logo designing compared to $50 for coloring.

My response to this letter and much of my subsequent communication with the publisher was done by phone. I lived at the Kitchen Sink Press compound in Princeton, Wisconsin from spring 1985 to summer 1986, when obviously most communication was face-to-face except for royalty reports and the like. After my departure from Wisconsin, my files include a great many letters and faxes relating to Border Worlds as well as the formation of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, an option by screenwriter Stephen DeSouza (Die Hard) for Megaton Man, and other business.

I discuss the demise of Border Worlds and my plot ideas for Megaton Man #11 elsewhere, including here, here, and most recently, here. In early 1987, while still at work on Border Worlds, I submitted a plot outline for Megaton Man #11 and received positive encouragement from editor Dave Schreiner. The next relevant mention of Megaton Man #11 in my extant records is as follows:

Denis Kitchen, letter to Don Simpson, April 2, 1987: What is relevant about this document is that the publisher accepts Megaton Man #11 (then conceived as a 64-page black-and-white issue) without conditions, but with a suggestion that because it technically was an "annual," a new #1 might be in order.

Denis Kitchen, letter to Don Simpson, October 21, 1987: This is the only written document I have in my possession referencing the decline in sales of Border Worlds and the possibility of that series' termination. It is clear from the letter that Denis understood my "vacillation" on the series and that my decision to continue with it or not was up to me.

Press Releases, October 26, 1987: The above documents announce the discontinuation of Alien Fire and Border Worlds, respectively, the two original science fiction series that formed, along with Will Eisner's The Spirit and the anthology Death Rattle, a noir-sci-fi line that existed for about a year at Kitchen Sink Press. The black-and-white comics glut and implosion (or bust) is referenced as the cause in each.

Don Simpson, letter to Denis Kitchen, November 18, 1987: This copy of the letter was marked up by Denis and returned to with his 9-page response, below. I discuss these letters at length in the links in the third paragraph of this post. As shown above, Megaton Man #11 had been accepted for publication; by this time, I thought of it as three regular issues (#11 to #13) and possibly a fourth (#14). With Border Worlds on hiatus, I had most likely thumbnailed the entire first issue in the story arc (#11) and was well into penciling and lettering when, to my dismay, the publisher demanded that the issue have a new #1.

Denis Kitchen, letter to Don Simpson, November 25, 1987: This letter was written the day before Thanksgiving and shortly before my 26th birthday (happy holidays!). The letter mentions being intended for hand-delivery at the Dallas Fantasy Fair two days later; records show I was indeed a guest but I have no recollection of receiving the letter in person nor discussing the issues with Denis. My reply on December 1 (below) suggests it may have been mailed after the show, but I don't know.

I discuss what I consider to be several exaggerations, distortions, outright falsehoods, and a general tone of verbal abuse and bullying elsewhere in the above links. But a couple that might not be obvious to the reader include the demise of Megaton Man and Border Worlds.

Megaton Man came to an end after ten issues, by mutual agreement, when the color line ceased to exist. We had already announced that it would end with issue #12; this was hastened when The Spirit, which had started out profitable in color, and Death Rattle, never profitable in color, sank in sales. Megaton Man had been the only consistently profitable color title but I had run out of ideas to spoof. (Also, Denis's obstinate refusal to reprint the first two sold out issues had convinced me, as early as the summer of 1985, that Megaton Man would never enjoy more than a cult following and the publisher had no intention of making any effort to grow the audience.)

The notion that I somehow stopped doing Megaton Man and forced Kitchen Sink Press to publish a black-and-white science fiction series instead is patently absurd.

Further, Denis contends that I discontinued Border Worlds without giving "a single good reason" and simply because I had "grown tired" of it. This is an extraordinarily callous and obtuse remark. In fact, orders for issue #8 were 6200; this would have netted me an unlivable $34 dollars per page (when DC Comics, conversely, was paying me their "beginner" page rate of $260 for illustrating Wasteland) or about $620 per month. It was very painful for me to put Border Worlds on hiatus, a decision that was made only slightly easier knowing the publisher was eager to publish Megaton Man #11, an assurance it was now manifestly reneging on.

Although Denis alludes to other letters I wrote "filled with complaints and demands," I certainly have no copies of such missives; I tend to think this is another rhetorical exaggeration if not an outright falsehood. If such letters exist, they likely repeat the same few unresolved complaints; for example, I recall urging the publisher to do more to build a readership for my comics on numerous occasions, including reprinting the first two issues that sold out immediately.

In any case, I certainly don't believe at any time I resorted to the kind of abject verbal abuse and name calling Denis does in this response, which he describes as "in kind." It is simply in all respects uncalled for.

I was outraged that Kitchen Sink Press had accepted Megaton Man #11 for publication in several letters in January and February of 1987, and now, in November of 1987, after I had undertaken the painful step of suspending Border Worlds and was in the midst of penciling and lettering Megaton Man, and incidentally promising three more issues for the following summer, that he was for all intents and purposes picking a fight with me over his insistence on a new #1. If the matter was as trivial as he suggests, tie should go to the runner. Why a nine-page letter calling me at least seven derogatory names?

As for other suggestions, such as a minimum page rate, I was struggling to find a way to keep a roof over my head while supplying Kitchen Sink Press with profitable material to publish. And my choice of backup feature is also not an unreasonable "demand." I was open to discussion and reasoned argument, not this unfair onslaught.

At one point (on page 2), Denis refers to "the comic book field [I] voluntarily chose to enter." No, I agreed to have my work published by Kitchen Sink Press, publisher of Will Eisner, Harvey Kurtzman, and Milton Caniff. At no time did I accede to the worst, swindling marketing practices of bottom-of-the-barrel publishers such as fake #1s. As I wrote in the Afterword to an upcoming collection,

I can list innumerable instances of comic book series maintaining their numbering despite delays and interruptions, whether elected by the creator or not, and over longer hiatuses than mine. Scott McCloud’s Zot!, which broke off at #10 (in color) in 1985 returned eighteen months later in 1987 #11—in black and white—to run another twenty-six issues. At Kitchen Sink Press alone, there were numerous examples: The Spirit magazine maintained its consecutive numbering even after switching from Warren Publishing; R. Crumb took seven years to produce three issues of Mr. Natural; fifteen issues of the anthology Snarf appeared over eighteen years. Later, Mark Schultz’s Xenozoic Tales maintained consecutive numbering even when a year or more elapsed between issues. Kitchen Sink Press was virtually the House of Numbering Preservation.

Because I stood up for myself concerning the numbering, and because I raised for discussion the perfectly reasonable subjects of compensation and reprinting out-of-print issues, Denis called me a hack, a sellout, a traitor to my readers, a spoiled holdout, a prima donna, a "genuis" (with implied scare quotes), and a jerk. He denigrated my supposed artistic and literary pretensions (as if these would have been out of place at an arthouse publisher), my "bloodlust for continuity," and seemingly ridiculed the very notion that cartooning could be anything other than a money-making commodity—a perverse and shocking view.

 

Such verbal abuse can never be justified to my mind and can only make sense at all if one subscribed to the view, as Denis clearly did, that Megaton Man and Don Simpson were put on this earth to bring in revenue for him to squander on pet projects like Will Eisner's Quarterly and Death Rattle—money losers that the Direct Sales Market had never asked for. It certainly makes no sense within the context of creator-owned cartooning and independent and alternative comics publishing, which was ostensibly the stock-in-trade of Kitchen Sink Press.

Historical Note: According to Wisconsin Funnies: Fifty Years of Comics, a 2020 exhibition catalog, Denis and wife of seven years, Holly Brooks, divorced in 1987—almost certainly earlier in the year. My letter is marked as having arrived Monday, November 23, 1987; Denis’s reply is dated November 25, a Wednesday. 

 

Knowing what I know from having lived there during the winter of 1985, It seems extremely unlikely that art director Pete Poplaski (whose family was two hours away in Green Bay) or that Dave, who spent weekends two hours away in Madison, would been in the office on Wednesday before Thanksgiving, and likely were given the whole week off. This would have allowed plenty of time for Denis, alone in the office with no ringing phones or other interruptions—and no one to prevent him from cutting off his nose to spite his face—to compose a very ill-advised nine-page letter that forever torched the relationship with his most profitable and prolific creator.

 

I can't believe editor Dave Schreiner was ever privy to either communication; he never mentioned and I never asked him. He seemed out of the loop as to why my relationship with Denis never recovered. I have to believe Dave would have interpreted the sincere outrage and good-faith intentions motivating my communication in a completely different light from the way Denis reacted; at the very least, had Dave been on hand, would have advised Denis to take the long holiday weekend to cool off before mailing any response. Perhaps this is wishful thinking; I will never know.

Unfortunately, while I bounced back, my fondness and admiration for Denis Kitchen never recovered—not one iota. I found ways to work with Denis over the years, but nearly all of my fond memories of Kitchen Sink Press occur prior to Thanksgiving 1987 (indeed, prior to September 1985). For the next three years, I was constantly looking for an escape hatch. And it took years to fully recover my fondness for Megaton Man.

Don Simpson, letter to Denis Kitchen, December 1, 1987: This was my letter of capitulation, written two days before my 26th birthday. I respond to several of the most egregious falsehoods in the previous correspondence, but it is abundantly clear that I am fairly miserable and broken. Mission accomplished, one supposes.

Denis Kitchen, letter to Don Simpson, February 24, 1988: It is clear from this letter that despite my caving to the publisher's demands, I had lost all enthusiasm for a Megaton Man mini-series (I wonder why). I had begun work on Border Worlds #8 (eventually published as Border Worlds: Marooned #1 a couple years later), no doubt in response to the publisher's stated sense of betrayal at my having abandoned the series because I had "grown tired of it." As I plan to discuss further in the Afterword to The Complete Megaton Man Universe, Volume I: The 1980s, which covers the Kitchen Sink Press era, I somehow completed The Return of Megaton Man #1-#3, but only three more Megaton Man comics after that: Megaton Man Meets the Uncategorizable X+Thems #1, Yarn Man #1, and Pteranoman #1. Those, along with Marooned and Bizarre Heroes #1 were the final comics I completed for Kitchen Sink Press.

Hopefully, these supporting documents offer a more complete picture of "creator-owned" comics in the mid- to late-1980s. Further explication of this correspondence can be found here, here, and most recently, here.

For now, the less said the better.

Postscript (January 16, 2024):

I've always interpreted Denis's unmitigated attack on the numbering of Megaton Man #11 as a thinly-veiled attack on the character-driven direction I began to take with the series as a young creator as I found my voice (and that his own editor, Dave Schreiner, endorsed). This seems to have been borne out when, last year, he wrote to me in an email (October 24, 2023):

In retrospect, it might have been better to ditch the convoluted ongoing MM plot lines and instead put out three or four annual MM “specials” where you focused on self-contained issues/themes and/or parodied a different superhero or company each time. I think each special would have had stronger numbers and perhaps been easier to write within the confines of single issues, but of course it’s all speculation.

Of course, this wasn't speculative or retrospective at all; we'd tried it his way and it hadn't worked. He'd simply forgetting the position he'd always taken concerning my work: Denis Kitchen had been demanding artless commodification of Megaton Man all along, and seemed to resent any deviation from a formula he'd derived from reading the first couple of issues (it seems he would have rather published normalman or, considering his advice to lampoon the Dolph Lundgren Punisher movie, lame-ass Cracked parodies).

This one-dimensional view of the Megaton Man IP has always seemed to me perverse, coming from the arthouse publisher who promoted Will Eisner as a literary giant (spoiler alert: I happen to think that, while historically important to comics, Eisner is one of the most over-rated talents in the history of any field). But I suppose taking offense at this notion only supports the publisher's contention that I was a prima donna.

If I'd had any desire to draw the Punisher, I could have skipped all this nonsense in Wisconsin and penciled for Marvel directly, something I believe I've proven over the years I had the skill and opportunity, if not the temperament, to do. It may not have made me happy but at least I wouldn't have been miserable, and I'd have made six times the income or more, easily.

The shame of it are the stories and creative productivity that were lost. Megaton Man #11, if Dave Schreiner's view had prevailed, could have led to years more of comics, perhaps not at the bimonthly frequency before Border Worlds, but expressive of a deeper humanity than mere spoofs.

Clearly, calling me a hack, a sellout, a traitor, a prima donna, a spoiled holdout, a “genius,” a punk, et al (all in the same letter), were calculated to bludgeon me and turn me into a machine to reliably churn out formulaic superhero parodies that I had already found tiresome. If this can be reconciled with a concept of creator-owned comics and artistic freedom of the indy-alternative ethos of Kitchen Sink Press, I have always failed to see it.

It seems to me my job on this earth was make Megaton Man a cash-cow for Kitchen Sink Press and nothing more, and any artsy-literary pretensions that somehow seeped into my noggin only complicated this. (Never mind that the publisher was unwilling to keep the first two sold-out issues in print, a key obstacle in building a readership and growing sales past its cult status). It would have been better to have never been involved with such a conflicted, determinedly nihilistic, and obviously self-destructive (to the extent that he was so willing to shortsightedly burn his bridges with his most prolific creator) publisher in the first place.

At one point (page 4) in his November 25, 1987 letter, Denis says, "I'm not a fool, Don." I would submit the entirety of that document, coupled with the context surrounding it, as ample and sufficient evidence to the contrary.

Why the hammer had to come down at this point has always baffled me. What Denis Kitchen thought would be accomplished, why he thought the timing optimal, and how he could have convinced himself that this was the best means to achieve anything other than the most superficial, short-term results at the expense of longer-term dividends are questions for which I never expect to find satisfying answers.

I don't think it's too much to say that the November 25, 1987 letter marks the beginning of the end of Kitchen Sink Press as a publisher of a quality alternative to the mainstream. It would coast on its reputations for a few more years and put out a few more worthy things, but ultimately it would flame out altogether.

Addendum (April 23, 2024): It is worth pointing out that Denis very early on had an historical awareness, i.e., that his company and his correspondence had historical importance. For example, by the mid-eighties, a number of histories on underground comix and comics in general had already been written; MSU already had amassed a collection of comics-related historical materials; and Kitchen Sink Press itself was directly dealing with Lucy Caswell at Ohio State University and the Milton Caniff papers (the collection that would form the nucleus of the later Billy Ireland Museum) for materials concerning the Steve Canyon reprints. Denis, I am quite sure, always had in the back of his mind that his own papers would end up in a scholarly archive; in other words, he was conscious of the fact that everything he wrote was for posterity.

To that extent, what Denis was doing in composing his nine-page diatribe to me on November 25, 1987 was not only an effort to bully me into doing things his way or even to convince himself of a certain implausible version of reality--taking the benefit of the doubt at every turn wherever documentary evidence was scant or non-existent--but in fact a willful, completely unscrupulous effort to falsify the historical record.

Years later, I would happen to earn a PhD in art and architectural history for reasons completely unrelated to my career as a cartoonist (beyond a general interest in the history and traditions of art), and by no means with any specific concern to revisit moments in my own professional career. However, as a scholar, I am even more appalled in retrospect at the breathtaking, deliberate effort on the part of Denis to commit so many falsehoods to paper, since he could have only known this was exactly what he was doing at the time.

Denis obviously knew the reasons behind the demise of both the Megaton Man and Border Worlds series; he knew I was taking on freelance work not out of an ambition to "sell out" but merely to pay my rent; he knew while he was relentlessly scoffing at my artistic pretensions for nine pages that I had come to Kitchen Sink Press in the first place to have creative control over my work and express a personal, artistic vision, not to bastardize my product to the lowest common denominator of the industry and engage in the most gimmicky, unsustainable, ruthless, and rapacious business practices as he advised.

I'm not even angry about the past and haven't been for years, but I am even more ashamed that a publisher who had set out to provide an "underground" or alternative to the mainstream, mass-produced product of the time could have become so corrupted during the Jerry Rubin-Wallstreet greed-driven 1980s, and one so conscious of the historical importance of his enterprise would engage in what is essentially a kind of historical forgery.

It will be for others to research these topics in greater context and possibly explore the Columbia University archive of Kitchen Sink Press materials. In my view, as I said before, 1987 was the absolute end of any fondness I had for Denis or any sense of partnership I had with the imprint (in fact, most of my fond memories predate September 1985); the most astonishing thing is that I was able to finish what I started (The Return of Megaton Man #1-#3) or could bring myself to turn in any more work at all beyond that to be published under the imprint (five more comics, in fact). I don't believe it is too much to say that the November 25, 2024 letter expresses a creative bankruptcy at the imprint that is profound and near total; perhaps most astonishing is fact that the company managed to survive another decade or more before finally giving up the ghost altogether, having completely lost its way years and years before.