A showdown between Todrin and KSP president and founder Denis Kitchen led to Kitchen being fired from his own company in December by chief investor Fred Seibert. Shortly afterward, Todrin sent a letter to KSP's creators and vendors under the dramatic heading "Re: 'The End.'" The letter stated in part: "There will be no further cash distribution to any trade creditors, artists, authors, or creators of any sort for any amount. There are no remaining assets to liquidate; there are only the remaining bills that cannot be paid. We are sorry that it couldn't have been otherwise. This will be my last communication with you."

Todrin told the Journal, "I had a lot of hopes, but, frankly, it didn't work. I feel bad because I believed in the transition program. We took the warehouse inventory and started selling everything we could to people all over the country. We were going to use that money to pay off the artists and creators that we owed money to." The amount of money finally raised to pay Kitchen Sink creators, according to Todrin, was exactly zero. "The downsizing ended in nothing," he said. "The liquidation process itself ended up absorbing all of the money we made."

According to former Kitchen Sink Sales Manager Robert Grover, Kitchen, in his final days at KSP, designed a shut-down plan that made the payback of creators its top priority. It was not implemented.

Todrin told the Journal, "He might have managed to get a few artists paid, but a hundred or more were not paid. He wanted them to be paid. He lobbied for them to be paid. But when there's no dough, there's no dough."

Grover, who was in charge of the liquidation process, however, remembered quite a bit of dough coming in to the Kitchen Sink offices in its last days. He estimated that overhead costs could not have eaten up more than a third of the liquidation proceeds, though he was not in a position to know the company's total expenditures. "There were some shut-down costs, sure," he said, "but we doubled what we thought we were going to get."

According to Kitchen, three semi trucks full of Kitchen Sink inventory were sold to Logun Publishing Company. Large-volume purchases were also made by Bud Plant. "For Todrin to claim there were no proceeds from the liquidation - that's very disingenuous," Kitchen said.

A knowledgeable source at Kitchen Sink, who asked not to be named, told the Journal that income from the liquidation alone - not counting the Bud Plant sale, licensing and other income - was in excess of $50,000. Todrin was not available to respond to these assertions.

As for there being no remaining assets, Grover told the Journal that several books were held back from the liquidation process and that seven pallets full of books remained in storage, including most of the Kitchen-published Robert Crumb titles and some Spirit books. Grover said it was felt that these books might have greater value if sold at a later date.

Approximately 10,000 copies of Black Hole back issues, which had been held back from the liquidation by Grover, were purchased in May by Fantagraphics Books. In acquiring the books, Fantagraphics' Kim Thompson found himself dealing not with Kitchen Sink Press but with Kitchen Sink Konfections/True Confections. Buyers were told to make their checks out to True Confections.

KSP's candy bar line had been identified as Kitchen Sink Konfections, but did not become an officially separate division of the company until 1998, when KSP and KSK were split by parent company Disappearing Inc. According to Kitchen, Seibert and Todrin "believed that the candy division (KSK) was the portion of the corporation that could survive and thrive if it were not connected to the unprofitable publishing division (KSP)."

As Todrin described it, "We sold the KSK division, and it became a completely different corporation owned by different people." Asked what his role was in the new corporation, which changed its name to True Confections, Todrin told the Journal he was not an owner and had no stock in True Confections. His role, he said, was the same as it had been at KSP when he was first taken on as a financial consultant.

According to Kitchen, however, Todrin was made president of KSK. When pressed by Kitchen for details about the separation, Kitchen said, Todrin presented him in December with a 14-page memo outlining the plan, which Todrin called "Splitting the Uprights." Kitchen told the Journal, "As I understand it based on that letter, the premise for spinning off Konfections was that Fred [Seibert] would buy the assets."

In other words, give or take a few co-investors, Seibert apparently sold KSK to himself. The Journal has not seen this memo, but, if true, it would mean that Seibert retained ownership of the KSK assets while at the same time placing them beyond the reach of KSP creditors. Seibert did not respond to requests from the Journal for comment.

Adding insult to injury, a letter went out to Kitchen Sink creators in May that offered them an opportunity to buy the film negatives of their Kitchen Sink work. Signed by Kitchen and written on the letterhead of an enterprise identified as First Class Film Co., the letter stated, in part: "My brother Jim and I are no longer officers, directors, employees or otherwise associated with Kitchen Sink Press/Disappearing Inc. (KSP) or its candy division, currently called Kitchen Sink Konfections. However, given our unique familiarity with the published material over many years, Jim and I have agreed to act as exclusive film agents for KSP's film archive."

Film negatives of comics work are of no use to anyone other than the work's creators and publishers with rights to publish it. Possession of the film allows a publisher to reprint the work without having to generate new film, a process that can cost $5 to $8 per black-and-white page or as much as ten times that amount for color pages.

First Class Film Co. asks creators to pay Disappearing Inc. for film negatives of their work even if they are owed royalties by Disappearing Inc. Asked if this presented him with an ethical dilemma, Kitchen said, "If we had not agreed to take this on, the film probably would've been pitched or stored in a way that would've been ultimately destructive. My view is we rescued the film."

Todrin has denied to the Journal that Kitchen was authorized to sell film on behalf of Disappearing Inc. The Journal has obtained a letter apparently signed by Todrin, directing creators to contact Kitchen about buying the film. Kitchen said he has a signed agreement from Todrin but has not shown this agreement to the Journal. Although Kitchen is storing the film per his agreement with Todrin, Kitchen said, the film remains the property of Kitchen Sink Press, despite Todrin's claim to have exhausted all KSP assets.

Saul Steinberg Dies
By Tom Spurgeon
Posted June 28th, 1999

Saul Steinberg, the cartoonist and illustrator best known for his covers and illustrations for The New Yorker, died May 12 in his Manhattan home. He was 84 years old.

A barrage of obituaries in national magazines and newspapers, including the front page of The New York Times, lauded Steinberg as an artist on par with Picasso, Duchamp, and Daumier; and as a social critic on the level of Pirandello, Chaplin, and Nabokov. The New Yorker ran a final cover, the artist's 86th for the magazine during a relationship that lasted more than 50 years, on its May 24 issue.

Steinberg was born in Rumania near Bucharest on June 15, 1914 to Maurice and Rosa Steinberg. His father owned a printing and box-manufacturing business, where the young Steinberg became fascinated with typography and lettering, two hallmarks of his later body of work. The 1930s found Steinberg contributing to humor magazines in Milan, Italy, where his work assaulted the core values of fascism. It was the steadily worsening conditions in fascist Italy that forced the artist to flee to America in 1941. His first of over 600 drawings for The New Yorker appeared on October 25, 1941. In 1943, Steinberg became a U.S. citizen and married painter Hedda Lindenberg Sterne. The day he took the oath of citizenship, Steinberg became an ensign in the U.S. Navy. In the latter stages of the war, Steinberg received an assignment making use of his skills as a cartoonist. He was assigned by the OSS to North Africa where he made cartoons to inspire resistance fighters working within Germany.

Steinberg's discharge from the Navy in 1946 marked the beginning of a remarkable run of books and museum shows for the artist, culminating in a major retrospective at New York's Whitney Museum in 1978. Over the years, Steinberg1s work became progressively more abstract, often paring figures down to their symbolic essence. The two great subjects of Steinberg's work were America and the artist himself. One aspect of Steinberg's career that became more evident to many critics in the 1960s and 1970s was the artist's take on American culture and mores. A particularly sharp image that became more prevalent during this period was the Mickey Mouse face as a symbol of the emptiness of post-War generation Americans, a group he disdained for their having enjoyed lives made up of what he termed "inauthentic" experiences.

Steinberg continued with his art, both illustrations and mixed-media, until his death, and continued to participate in various art shows throughout New York and abroad. A final major book, The Discovery of America, was published in 1993. Steinberg also continued his relationship with The New Yorker, which ran contemporary Steinberg art through the '80s and '90s, culminating with never-before-seen work in May 24's memorial section. Adam Gopnik, writing of his personal and professional relationship with Steinberg at The New Yorker, made the case for the artist's importance in the strongest words possible: "Saul Steinberg was the greatest artist to be associated with this magazine, and the most original man of his time, and, leaving us, he takes a world away."