Denis Kitchen - Kenosha Festival of Cartooning Guest Speaker For 2014

Wisconsin native Denis Kitchen began his career during the “underground comix” movement of the late ‘60s. He still thinks of himself as a cartoonist first, but he wears way too many other hats to pigeonhole. He is perhaps most associated with Kitchen Sink Press, founded in Milwaukee in 1969, where he published primary works by legendary cartoonists Will Eisner, Harvey Kurtzman, Robert Crumb, Al Capp, Milton Caniff, and countless others for over thirty years.

Kitchen also writes articles and co-authors books about the comics world. Recent examples include a biography of Al Capp (with Kenosha’s own Michael Schumacher), The Art of Harvey Kurtzman and Underground Classics (both for Abrams). He curates cartoon art exhibits in the US and numerous other countries.

Kitchen also edits and packages books. He founded the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, a non-profit First Amendment industry organization, and chaired it for eighteen years. He is currently a partner in two literary agencies and a third art agency. A natural archivist, over 50,000 of Kitchen’s letters were acquired by Columbia University in 2014. 

A 2010 Dark Horse Books published a monograph titled The Oddly Compelling Art of Denis Kitchen. In 2012 Kitchen was presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. An exhibit of his own original art, with other cartoons from his collection, will be open to the public in the Fine Arts Gallery of UW-Parkside, running concurrent with this year’s Kenosha Festival of Cartooning.