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Published September 16, 2013

Remembering Kim Thompson

Kim Thompson, co-publisher of Fantagraphics, passed away on June 19th at the age of 56. Even though I briefly worked with the folks from Fantagraphics 5 or 6 years ago, I am sad to say that I never had the opportunity to meet him in person. I’m sure I would have learned a lot.

I recently linked to Seattle Weekly article about the future of Fantagraphics after Kim’s death, and so I also wanted to link to Robert Boyd‘s remembrances of Thompson in The Stranger:

I realize that readers might not understand why Kim Thompson was an important person—not just to me, but to art… [Fantagraphics] published Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez, Daniel Clowes, Chris Ware, Peter Bagge, Ivan Brunetti, Carol Tyler, and so many other great cartoonists, and are still doing it today. When you compare the publishing achievements of the underground comics generation (a brief brilliant flame) to Fantagraphics (and its peers, like Drawn & Quarterly), it’s hardly a contest. Fantagraphics is one of the greatest publishers of comics in any language of all time and one of the strongest promulgators of the art of comics in existence. And Kim Thompson was crucial to that 30-plus years of artistic success.

Sometime ago, the indefatigable Tom Spurgeon posted a long and comprehensive obituary of Thompson at The Comics Reporter that also serves as a potted history of Fantagraphics if you are interested in this particular corner of comics culture. There is a somewhat shorter obituary at The Comics Journal.


Ben Schwartz also posted about Thompson and the importance of The Comics Journal at the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Kim Thompson was born in 1956 to American citizens living abroad in Denmark, and arrived here in the US in 1977. That same year, Kim joined Gary Groth to help put out The Comics Journal, begun in 1976. The Comics Journal was the first forum for nothing but discussion, criticism, and journalism about comics to rise above the level of the zine (not to discount those incredibly vital fan networks). There would be no comics section here at the Los Angeles Review of Books, or anywhere else, without The Comics Journal. They were not the only comics-oriented publication, but they were the only one with actual journalistic standards that hired writers of depth and knowledge… Critical magazines have a way of stimulating creativity. From the heated, hyper-talkative culture of the 1940s and 50s Partisan Review, a Saul Bellow emerged to embody its aesthetic. From Cahiers du Cinema and its attempt to create a new critical language for film, the French New Wave filmmakers appeared. In a similar way, from the Comics Journal intelligentsia, a literary comics… movement began.

Finally, Tom Spurgeon posted (re-posted?) this 2008 interview with Thompson, again at The Comics Reporter. It is striking how much he still believed there was to be done:

“The industry has changed far more radically, and for the better, than I ever could have imagined, in terms of the respect accorded to comics, the level of work being produced, comics’ place in the market, the whole ball of wax. (You have to bear in mind that when we started cartoonists were literally wondering whether Americans would ever be willing to read comic books that ran beyond the length of an issue of Giant-Size Fantastic Four.)

The weird thing is that the idea of “graphic novels” and comics for adults has had so very little penetration into the general literate populace. Most regular people are, in my experience, still utterly stunned and confused at the very idea, New York Times Book Review reviews notwithstanding. There is a weird disconnect between the press’s enthusiastic embrace and promotion of the medium and its effect on actual “mainstream” readers… It remains an uphill battle, and if I’d known how much of an uphill battle it would continue to be, even with all of these victories, I might have become an advertising copywriter circa 1979″

He will surely be missed.

(pictured above: a portrait of Kim Thompson by Jim Blanchard; Eric Reynolds, Gary Groth, and Kim Thompson by Daniel Clowes commissioned for the (as yet) unpublished Comics As Art)

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Published August 26, 2013

Inside The Daniel Clowes Reader


At The Comics Reporter, Tom Spurgeon talks to the editor of The Daniel Clowes Reader Kevin Parille about compiling the book. The interview will be too esoteric for some, but it’s great to see Parille draw attention to the work of the book ‘s designer Alvin Buenaventura, and place Clowes work in a wider cultural context than just comics:

[It] was crucial that the book alternate between comics and critical materials, and that within the essays, text and images would be carefully integrated — and Alvin’s design does that. I also wanted a diversity of secondary materials: full interviews; interview expects; a piece on Clowes’s children’s literature precursors; a short feature on Clowes’s revisions of character faces (how he changes them from comic to graphic novel); full lyrics to songs that Enid listens to and sings; excerpts from a zine mentioned in Ghost World; and more. When I couldn’t find an essay on a topic I thought should be included, I asked someone to write it. I also thought it would be helpful if Ghost World, a comic more visually and thematically dense than some might recognize, had an index; so I created one with entries for key themes, words, phrases, and objects.

Since Clowes’s comics come from so many different artistic and social perspectives, I include essays that employ distinct critical approaches: personal narrative, literary theory, close reading, historical context, psychoanalytic, etc. In order to addresses a wide readership, I selected writers who are smart and write accessible prose. In unexpected ways, many recurring issues tie the essays together: gender, adolescence, music, punk, grunge/gen x/the ’90s, Clowes’s aesthetics, urban environments, etc. . . . The essays present readers with an expanded sense of what Clowes is about and offer new ways to appreciate his work.

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Published February 16, 2012

Midweek Miscellany

Tracing History — Alice Rawsthorn on the beauty of printed books for the New York Times:

Some things seem to designed to do their jobs perfectly, and the old-fashioned book is one. What else could be quite as efficient at packaging so many thousands of words in a form, which is sufficiently sturdy to protect them, yet so small and light that it can be carried around to be read whenever its owner wishes? The pages, type, binding and jacket of a traditional printed book do all of the above, as well as giving its designer just enough scope to make the result look beautiful, witty or intriguing.

(pictured above: Blaise Cendrars’s 1919 book ‘‘La fin du monde, filmée par l’ange,’’ designed and illustrated by Fernand Léger.)

Down bpNichol Lane — Founder and publisher of Coach House Books Stan Bevington talks to  The Varsity about the history of the storied indie press:

Coach House purchased a photo-offset lithography machine, which allowed images to be transferred photographically to aluminum printing plates. Oil-based ink adhered to the images on the plates, which were then used to print the pages of a book… In the 1960s, this was cutting-edge technology. According to Stan, offset lithography was a tremendous step forward in the publishing industry because it “drastically liberated” the process of creating printing plates. But the text of a book still had to be typeset by hand, which left publishers relatively restricted in other areas of design. As Stan thumbs through additional books that were printed using offset lithography, he laughs and points out that they are all set in the Helvetica typeface.

Captain Crunch — Alan Moore on DC Comics planned Watchmen prequels at Fast Company:

“There’s been a growing dissatisfaction and distrust with the conventional publishing industry, in that you tend to have a lot of formerly reputable imprints now owned by big conglomerates… As a result, there’s a growing number of professional writers now going to small presses, self-publishing, or trying other kinds of [distribution] strategies.

“The same is true of music and cinema… It seems that every movie is a remake of something that was better when it was first released in a foreign language, as a 1960s TV show, or even as a comic book. Now you’ve got theme park rides as the source material of movies. The only things left are breakfast cereal mascots.”

See also: Tom Spurgeon’s ‘21 Not Exactly Original Notes On More Watchmen, Written At A Slight Remove‘:

Watchmen is something of a perfect Internet-era story, and as such serves as a reminder of how much we’re driven by and limited to the nature and form of the way news stories develop now. You couldn’t build a story like this in a laboratory. The… Watchmen story is about a product; people like products. It’s about the hype for a product, which in many ways and for many fans has become the best part of any arts-product experience. Because the work itself doesn’t exist yet, arguments can be made on its behalf positing an ideal outcome or a disastrous one — your choice.

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