1984-1985: My Freshman Year in Comics

And the heyday of the Kitchen Sink Press color comics line

Jun 28, 2025

I don’t think I would have gotten the opportunity to create an ongoing color comic were it not for Will Eisner’s John Law, Detective, published by Eclipse Comics. Cat Yronwode scored such a big hit that Kitchen Sink Press, publisher of Eisner’s The Spirit, had little choice but to follow suit by following Eclipse into color.

Soon, the publisher was looking for other plausible material to flesh out a color comics line that would enable them to broker better deals with printers.

The first foray, Rand Holmes’ Harold Hedd: Hitler’s Cocaine, was a beautiful two-issue production featuring hand-cut color separations by the artist. Unfortunately, beautiful as it was, a color reboot of Holme’s bisexual hippie Canadian adventurer in an exploit concerning south-of-the-border lost Nazi narcotics wasn’t exactly what the fledgling Directs Sales Market was clamoring for—and it was a sales disaster.

Digression: A couple years later, when I moved out to Wisconsin, I used three unopened boxes of Harold Hedd: Hitler’s Cocaine #2 upon which to set my portable black-and-white TV; when I turned it on one day, me and editor Dave Schreiner watched the news coverage of the space shuttle Challenger explosion on it. End of digression.

When I sent in photocopies of Megaton Man #1 in early 1984, it apparently struck Kitchen Sink Press as a plausible color title, so much so that they were willing to offer a beginner (me) an ongoing color series. It was capes and muscles, which the publisher abhorred mostly for competitive and political reasons (as I said in another post, if you’re a bespoke bottler, concentrate on cream soda and leave cola to Coke and Pepsi), but it was also satire, which made it barely respectable. It also made fun of the competition, which was a bonus.

However that may be, I took the opportunity and have always expressed my deepest gratitude for it. Unfortunately, I didn’t realize how limited the opportunity was—Kitchen Sink Press was a boutique publisher with only four full-time employees, and continued to be beholden to Eisner, even though Megaton Man quickly became the cash-cow holding up the company.

As I explain endlessly in other posts, my relationship with the publisher deteriorated, particularly after an acrimonious exchange over the renumbering of Megaton Man after a brief Border Worlds interregnum. I’m convinced the conflict wasn’t really about numbering at all—I honestly believe had I demanded a new number #1, the publisher would have insisted on calling it Megaton Man #11.

It was more about my perceived betrayal—I had begun freelancing for other publishers in order to keep a roof over my head so that I could continue providing low-paying creator-owned material to Kitchen Sink Press, paradoxically—and about their painful recent divorce and need to show somebody who was boss.

Suffice it to say the relationship was never the same again.

After Kitchen Sink Press “acquired” Tundra Publishing from Kevin Eastman in the early 1990s, a 25-year history and retrospective of Kitchen Sink Press was announced. I recall a note from the publisher reluctantly conceding that—after all—I was an important part of that history. I no longer can locate the note.

In any case, I contributed a sidebar—blatant self-promotion for Fiasco Comics Inc. and Bizarre Heroes—and granted permission for images of my copyrighted work to be included. I’m convinced were it not for the late Dave Schreiner—who describes me as having made “the biggest splash” of 1984 and the “cornerstone author” of 1985—I may have been elided from the project altogether, no problem. Be that as it may, I don’t anticipate rating even a mention in the forthcoming documentary on the cartoonist-publisher’s career.

In any case, this selection recalls 1984 and 1985 and my first and fondest eighteen months in comics.

Thanks to James Banderas-Smith, here is a look at the relevant pages from Kitchen Sink Press: The First 25 Years: