Fifty Years at the Edge of the Panel: What Fantagraphics Got Right
I remember the first time I encountered a Fantagraphics book in Copenhagen, before the internet made every niche publication globally accessible. It was a copy of Love and Rockets, by the Hernández brothers, sitting between art books in a store that specialized in things you could not easily find elsewhere. I did not know then what Fantagraphics was. I only knew that the drawing looked like nothing I had seen in a comic before: dense with feeling, rooted in working-class California and Mexico, utterly serious about its characters without ever becoming solemn.
Fantagraphics turns fifty this year. Gary Groth and Michael Catron founded it in 1976, when, by Groth’s own account, American cartooning was at “possibly the nadir” of its history. They had a printer, a barn, and apparently enough conviction to be unreasonable. Kim Thompson joined in 1977 and the publisher gradually transformed from a critical journal into one of the most consequential presses in the history of an art form that still, in many circles, is not quite taken seriously enough.
What Fantagraphics understood — and what took the rest of the cultural world decades to catch up to — was that the comic strip is a literary form. Not a lesser cousin of prose fiction or illustration, but a medium with its own grammar, its own capacity for interior life, for ambiguity, for the kind of slow revelation that only works when image and word are held in precise tension. When they published archival editions of Krazy Kat and Peanuts alongside Joe Sacco and Dan Clowes, they were making an argument about continuity: that comics, like any serious literature, have a tradition worth preserving.
There is a particular sadness in learning that financial stability has always eluded them — Kickstarter campaigns, inventory sales, perpetual precarity. It calls to mind Tove Jansson, who for decades refused to let the Moomins become anything other than what she intended them to be, at considerable personal cost. The conviction to be uncompromising is not a business strategy. It is something stranger and more stubborn than that.
Fifty years is a long time to hold a line. One wonders what the next fifty might look like for a publisher that has always existed slightly outside the frame.
