CSBG Archive
365 Reasons to Love Comics #282
Today’s cool comic company has an interesting pedigree of producing amazing comic book works, but for years, astonishingly enough, their biggest sellers were their porn comics. You would also be astonished by the Archive.
10/9/07
282. Fantagraphics Books

Founed by Gary Groth and Mike Catron in 1976 (Kim Thompson joined up the following year), Fantagraphics was an ambitious company from the start, devoted to demonstrating that comics could be an artform. That is something that is difficult enough to get across TODAY, so you can only imagine the difficulty of such an idea thirty-plus years ago!
For years, while they produced countless classic book after classic book, Fantagraphics’ highest sellers were their line of high class pornography comics, Eros Comics.
More recently, their highest seller has been their massive undertaking of collecting the entire run of Charles M. Schulz’ Peanuts…

In any event, the amount of classic comic books that has been collected by Fantagraphics is practically innumerable (not to mention their well-regarded comic magazine, The Comics Journal), but here, just for a sampling to blow your minds, are a few of their stable of artists (the amount of talent they have that I am NOT mentioning is practically enough to blow your minds!)…
Peter Bagge…

Daniel Clowes…

Robert Crumb…

Kim Deitch…

Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez…

Linda Medley…

Stan Sakai…

Chris Ware…

Fantagraphics’ collection of books is probably the single most impressive comic book collection there is today.
Here is Fantagraphics’ website, and here is FLOG, the Fantagraphics blog. And here is Journalista, the blog of the Comics Journal.






7 Comments
tom fitzpatrick
October 10, 2007 at 5:16 am
I’d have to say you guys are doing a nice job trying to fill in the 365 reasons to love comics.
Any luck with the missing ones?
Anthony Strand
October 10, 2007 at 6:40 am
Yeah, I agree with Tom. It’s great to see Reasons again.
Also, I gotta love Fantagraphics. Any company that gives me “Ice Haven” and four prime late-50s years’ worth of Peanuts strips in the same year is all right with me.
Richard
October 10, 2007 at 8:48 am
Gary Groth is a horse’s ass.
But his company does put of good stuff.
Richard
October 10, 2007 at 8:49 am
Put out, that is.
Free Comic Books
October 10, 2007 at 10:12 am
Yaa. Thats all folks .
I am one of the Serious comic lover .
Apodaca
October 11, 2007 at 5:30 pm
No doubt. Word up to the Serious comic lover.
Fantagraphics is my second favorite publisher, behind Drawn + Quarterly.
Comics Should Be Good! » 365 Reasons to Love Comics Archive
October 20, 2007 at 6:50 pm
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