Dirty Pictures by Brian Doherty

Author:Brian Doherty
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Abrams
Published: 2022-06-14T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 12

THE GREAT COMIX CRASH, DEATHS IN THE FAMILY, MARVEL’S ATTEMPT TO CO-OPT THE UNDERGROUNDS, AND SPIEGELMAN AND GRIFFITH’S BID TO RESCUE THEM

The underground comix scene was flying high through 1971–72. Then things started to go wrong. Little things; Kitchen noted in April 1973 to artist Joel Beck, who might be wondering about the smallness of his royalty check, that sales were “generally slow due to a seasonal slump” but he expected things to pick up again by summer.1

Kitchen was wrong. By June he was $3,000 behind in royalty payments to Crumb and another $3,000 behind to everyone else.2 By July he was telling a writer he owed royalties to that May was their lowest single sales month in his company’s history, after gliding up and up through November 1972.3 To Spiegelman, he confessed that same month that “it appears that the underground comix phenomenon, which expanded seemingly without limit for a long while, has finally reached its peak.” The summer sales upswing he counted on wasn’t happening.

* * *

Bad news was coming through the underground grapevine from the big West Coast houses as well, including that Rip Off had reached “virtual bankruptcy,” Last Gasp was “losing money every month,” and even the “mammoth of the field, Print Mint, failed to meet its artist commissions this quarter.” That said, Kitchen wasn’t giving up. “I personally feel a total commitment to seeing u-g comix to their end, whatever that might be.”4

In June, the Supreme Court’s Miller decision put the fear of hundreds of local district attorneys and juries in the hearts of both publishers and retailers, and by August Kitchen was sending out a form letter to his artists/ creditors, summing up the perfect storm of woes haunting their little cottage industry, starting with the aftermath of that decision: “Underground comix have been the target of prosecutors in several areas. We have received reports of busts in New York, New Jersey, and Iowa, and unconfirmed reports of busts elsewhere. In one instance in New York, the owners of a head shop were arrested and dragged out in handcuffs for selling underground comix.”5

By September, “all we’re doing is struggling to survive in order to pay our debts, publish the remaining books we’re committed to, and hope that a clear legal clarification or some strong resurgence of interest will revive the comix biz.” In the existing legal environment, they had to cope with “the paranoia exhibited by most of our distributors and the resulting downward sales figures.”6

The downstream effects of those legal worries joined with a preexisting sales slump, which some in the industry blamed on a comix bubble resulting from low-quality overproduction as the result of the fat years of 1971–72. Sales started slumping for Kitchen in January 1973, which, he says, led to “$50,000 worth of underground comix sitting on our warehouse floor. We can’t pay anybody until that inventory moves.”7 Too many books in the system and too many bad ones (Print Mint and a plethora of fly-by-night publishers had the most fingers pointed at them).

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