A Comics Roadtrip

The Funnies in America's Heartland

In the spirit of summer ending, we are taking a roadtrip through Wisconsin (where Nora is from and just visited) using a comics-centric map. Who would have thought that cheese, brats, and beer created such fertile comic grounds?!

People, Places, Things

There are many comics creators who at one point lived in Wisconsin. Some notable ones include:

Walt watches Skeezix sleep after he finds out the child has measles

• Frank King, creator of “Gasoline Alley,” which follows the lives of Walt and Skeezix, a baby left on Walt’s doorstep, lived in Tomah, WI. The strip captures the granularity of a slower, circumscribed life. King isn’t big on careening plots, or even regular gags. Notably, Walt, Skeezix, and those who live in their world age in real-time, unusual at the time for a newspaper strip (and continues to be now, too!).

  To do:

• visit the Tomah Area Historical Society and Museum to see an exhibit on King that includes his office furniture and early artwork!

• King and his wife are buried in the Oak Grove Cemetery in Tomah, if you care to check it out.

  

  An advertisement for a Lynda Barry class

• Wisconsin-born Lynda Barry is a comics and creativity dynamo—who among us hasn’t tried her diary exercise? Although she moved to Seattle in childhood, Barry returned to the Dairy State in the early 2000s. She currently teaches always-waitlisted courses at University of Wisconsin, Madison in interdisciplinary creativity and art. Her comics range from the fictional to autobiofictionalography to instructive (and beyond).

To do:

• check out the art on UW’s campus, from galleries to workshops.

• walk the Richland Center streets where Barry (briefly) lived!

Caption reads: “Surrounded by a small room, Denis Kitchen, creator of ‘Mom’s Homemade Comics,’ works on issue No. 2 of the moderately successful underground comic book. Kitchen, 23, of 2560 A N. Frederick St., Milwaukee, is Wisconsin’s first artist who’s branched into the field of comic book.”

• Kitchen Sink Press was started in 1969 by then-recent UW-Milwaukee graduate Denis Kitchen. Many underground comics creators of the era, like Trina Robbins and R. Crumb, were published by KSP, as well as Will Eisner (who did two issues of The Spirit with them). The press moved to Princeton, WI in 1973, where they continued to be a force in alternative comics.

To do:

• Visit the site where it all began but don’t stare too long, because you might creep someone out.

• Get some food and a drink at the pub that now occupies the space where Kitchen’s head shop, Strictly Uppa Crust, used to house the state’s largest selection of underground comix, among other delights. 

Other Links!

-Comics in Wisconsin is a fascinating and comprehensive history.

-If you’re teaching comics this fall and still need some resources, check out this open resource text, How to Study Comics & Graphic Novels written and drawn by Enrique del Rey Cabero, Michael Goodrum, and José Morlesín Mellado.