Kitchen, Lind Debut Agency, Packaging House
This story originally appeared in PW Comics Week on June 13, 2006 Sign up now!
by Heidi MacDonald, PW Comics Week -- Publishers Weekly, 6/13/2006
 Ellen and John Lind and Denis Kitchen. |
KLA is offering a soup-to-nuts range of services representing properties to publishers and a complete array of book-packaging support, from original concepts to production, marketing and distribution.
Their initial projects include works by Eleanor Davis, Drew Weing, Bernie Mireault and Todd Hignite. Davis and Weing are both up-and-coming artists known for their mini-comics and Web comics. Hignite is the editor of Comic Book Art magazine and the author of the forthcoming In the Studio: Visits with Contemporary Cartoonists from Yale Univ. Press. Mireault is a comics veteran whose The Jam is highly regarded.
KLA launched at this weekend's MoCCA Festival, and both Lind and Kitchen were on hand to talk about the venture and accept submissions. According to Kitchen, they have already been inundated with manuscripts from cartoonists who are looking to get into the book market.
Although specific projects have yet to be announced, there are several in the works. Davis is working on a children's book with an emphasis on science, and Weing, whose Web comic "Pup" has a devoted following, is working on an new project. Hignite's efforts will be more scholarly in nature.
One of the areas that KLA will be concentrating on is books for the YA market, which, as almost every observer has noted, is still underserved by the non-manga genre. Kitchen hopes to give an educational slant to some, as he feels there is great demand for this from educators and librarians.
Lind and Kitchen already have some experience working with children's material; and in fact, a child author—Kitchen's daughter, eight-year-old Alexa, who has been cartooning since she was five.
Alexa's Drawing Comics Is Easy (Except When It's Hard) debuted at MoCCA, and definitely qualified as one of the biggest buzz books of the show. At 176 pages, it's an exhaustive look at creating comics from a seven-year-old's viewpoint—Alexa notes her work has improved greatly since—covering such topics as making comic strips funny, backgrounds and anatomy.
For her part, Alexa had a fine time at MoCCA, signing copies of her book (they blew through nearly 100 copies) and meeting other cartoonists. Father Denis, a cartoonist himself, seems almost bemused by his prodigy. "She'll do it as long as she wants," he says. Asked if she would stop, Alexa said, "Stop drawing comics? Why would anyone ever want to drop drawing comics!"
