Young Entrepreneur - Alexa Kitchen

Alexa Kitchen became the world's youngest professional cartoonist at the age of five. Although she was young, Alexa clearly understood that a cartooonist should receive monetary compensation.

Her mother, Stacy, recalls:

Around this age she also showed her innate marketing side - drawing ISBN numbers and bar codes on the backs of her stories that featured fictitious "other books in the series" ads. She was, at the age of five, already trying to market her wares to would-be buyers: "Buy these books for YOUR kids! They'll have GREAT fun!"

Not only was she interested in creating for the sake of the artist in her, she (understandably) also wanted to be compensated for it. She tried to "sell" us daily newspapers for a quarter. She did this the hard way: she designed and drew a single page "newspaper" with made up stories and images. Then she drew the same thing on another piece of paper over and over until she had a small stack, apparently unaware of our Xerox machine.

Alexa's father, Denis, is a cartoon publisher. Initially, he thought that his admiration for Alexa's work was just parental pride. However, one of his colleagues, Will Eisner, visited Denis for a business meeting.

'Alexa walked into the room with a drawing and he looked at it,' says Dennis. 'Will said, "Oh, your father helped you with this, I see," and she very indignantly said, "He did not!" Will looked at me and I said, "I'm not allowed to touch her stuff, Will." Then he started talking to her and ignored me. That was not the Will Eisner I knew. If he had just been handed a little kid's doodle, he would have said, "Isn't that sweet?" and we would have got back to business.

As a major player in the comic industry, Eisner's interest reassured Denis that his admiration for Alexa's work was well-founded. Denis and Stacy took Alexa to the San Diego Comicon with two small volumes of her early work.

Alexa attracted major attention and rave reviews."Everyone [is] pretty flabbergasted by Alexa's work. Not only does she write and letter all her own work but she has an eye for detail and composition that many grown artists can barely match," wrote Heidi MacDonald in Comics Buyer's Guide (2004).

"She made a little sign," says Denis. "Drawings, $2. Super Fancy Drawings, $5. Professionals came over and said, 'OK, here's $2.' It created a buzz. Publisher's Weekly wrote up that fair: 'The hit of the fair was 6-year-old Alexa Kitchen."'

At the fair was Diana Schulz, of Dark Horse Comics, who was planning an anthology of female cartoonists' work. She immediately asked Alexa to contribute.

Encouraged by the warm reception, Alexa's parents encouraged her to produce "a real book", entitled Drawing Comics Is Easy! (Except When It's Hard!). Denis self-published a run of 5000 copies, and the family headed off for the big MOCCA (Museum of Cartoon And Comic Art) convention in New York City.

Not only did the book sell like hot cakes, it attracted the attention of a New York publisher, and was nominated for an Eisner Award - Alexa was the youngest ever nominee.

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.

--Publishers Weekly 6/13/06

Graphic artist Neil Gaiman, who authors the "Sandman" series and "Stardust," among others, is full of praise for Alexa's work.

"She can draw and draw well - well enough that she can write a book that teaches cartooning and comics, and not come across like an idiot," he told the Boston Globe in the summer of 2007, in an e-mail from China, where he was traveling. "The pleasure one gets from her cartooning isn't that of an adult smirking at a kid, it's that of a reader enjoying the work of a strong and intelligent and funny young cartoonist with an individual voice."

Alexa's latest book, Kidding Around, hit the bookstores in Spetember of 2007. It is a book of postcards, such as this one.

In July 2007, Alexa told Riverside Reads, When my paper piles in my bedroom and our living room get too big! Then we will go through them and sort them into a new book. I already have my next title: "Grown-Ups Are Dumb . . . . (no offense!)" I think it may be complete sometime in the next 6-8 months.

In June 2008, Alexa announced that she had just signed a deal with Hyperion (Disney) to publish her new book, entitled, you guessed it - Grown-Ups Are Dumb . . . . (No Offense!).

Alexa's parents are careful to shield her from too much publicity.

"I grew up in beauty and talent competitions in the South," says Stacy. "I was literally singing and dancing under a stage spotlight. Watching the pressure the mothers put on their daughters to win, no matter the cost, was a sad experience that stays with me today. Denis and I have made a real effort to shield Alexa from that kind of pressure and expectation. Alexa creates because she wants to, because she loves to. Creating books is just a byproduct of what she does naturally."

Alexa herself shrugs off the attention. She much prefers drawing to talking about drawing. She's not committed to a career in cartooning, though.

"A cartoonist is a possibility, of course," she says, "but I've always found I'm really good at finding loopholes in other people's rules, like with my parents and stuff, and it, like, totally tortures my headmaster at school. So maybe I'll be a lawyer."