‘Oddly Compelling’ is Coming to Kickstarter, Tracing Denis Kitchen’s Fight for Horror Comics and Free Speech!
Denis Kitchen has always been the kind of creator who looks at a locked door and decides to install a new hinge. From the moment the self-described “hippie cartoonist” stapled together Mom’s Homemade Comics in 1969, through three decades steering Kitchen Sink Press, to the day he founded the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, Kitchen has championed work that polite society kept trying to hide. Now his long, strange odyssey is the subject of Oddly Compelling, a feature-length documentary that is soon to land on Kickstarter.
Directed by filmmaker Soren Christiansen and animator-publisher Ted Intorcio, Oddly Compelling stitches together hours of fresh interviews with Kitchen and an enviable roster of colleagues—Alison Bechdel, Eddie Campbell, MariNaomi, Carol Tyler, CBLDF interim director Jeff Trexler, and many more—while weaving in rare archival footage of Robert Crumb, Will Eisner, and Harvey Kurtzman. New animation brings Kitchen’s own irreverent strips to life, underscoring how the underground-comix movement he helped ignite still pulses beneath today’s indie scene.
Christiansen’s motivation is blunt: “Who would’ve thought that in the 21st century the world would watch Americans ban books, challenge free speech, and threaten its own democratic principles,” he says, noting that Kitchen’s story is “needed now more than ever.” Intorcio adds that Kitchen’s decades of advocacy—both on the page and in court—offer a playbook for any creator staring down censorship.
For those of you who frequent the site, Kitchen’s legacy hits home. It was Kitchen who proved that outsider art could survive—and even thrive—without surrendering its teeth. He published Will Eisner’s pioneering A Contract with God, Harvey Kurtzman’s satiric masterpieces, the barrier-breaking Gay Comix, and early work by Art Spiegelman, Alan Moore, Trina Robbins, and Scott McCloud, among others. When authorities seized books as “obscene,” Kitchen didn’t back down; he raised the legal funds that helped overturn a conviction against a Florida comics retailer and spun that fight into the still-vital CBLDF.
The film promises more than war stories. Viewers will tour Kitchen’s “Valley of Frankenstein Dolls,” scan rows of 100,000 vintage postcards, and gawk at the tin robots, political buttons, and celluloid curios that crowd his studio—proof that an artist’s obsessions can be both fuel and strange treasure.
Most principal photography is already in the can; the crowdfunding push will pay for the last few interviews, creature animations, sound design, and festival prep. Backer rewards range from streaming and Blu-ray copies to remarqued books, rare underground comix, limited posters, and original Kitchen art—catnip for collectors and a tangible reminder that independent voices flourish when readers and viewers invest directly in them.
If you write horror or any stripe of speculative fiction, Kitchen’s fight is your fight. Every boundary-pushing story we post, every unsettling anthology we publish, stands on ground he and his peers cleared with ink-stained fingers and courtroom grit. Oddly Compelling captures that history while sounding an unmistakable alarm: freedoms won can be stripped away unless the next generation steps up.
Once this Kickstarter goes live, help finish the film that chronicles the man who proved that “underground” doesn’t mean “buried”—it means digging tunnels the world can’t ignore.
