|
I sat down with Eric Reynolds at a pub in the U-District recently to discuss the unrivaled role Fantagraphics plays in the comics publishing world while we swatted fruit flies off our beers. A very apropos handful of older regulars swilled brews at the bar and shot pool in the corner of the room as we chatted about an industry that represents its fair share of losers, drunks and degenerates. (Whether there are more behind the pages or within them is anyone’s guess.)
“Fantagraphics has been the best comics publisher in the country. At least, since I was in high school,” Reynolds proclaims.
Before he joined the company in the mid-‘90s, he was a huge fan of the comics the owners Gary Groth and Kim Thompson were putting out, like the early Hernandez brothers (“Love & Rockets”) and Dan Clowes (“Eightball”).
“They have more integrity than a lot of people could ever imagine,” explains Reynolds. He maintains they aren’t driven by the almighty dollar like so many other publishers, comics or otherwise. “They just want to do books they like.”
Now, with the success of movies like “Ghost World” and “American Splendor,” and the triumph of the “graphic novel,” comics are starting to be taken more seriously. “I feel like people in the general literary world are coming around and realizing there are literary elements to comics,” says Reynolds. “It also doesn’t hurt that most of the world doesn’t read good literature anymore and suddenly books with pictures are palatable.”
In fact, the concept of the graphic novel, which he tells me is something of a misnomer, is one of the reasons for the ascendancy of comics. The graphic novel, far from being what its name implies—a novel with pictures—is simply a book with an ISBN, which means it will be carried by most bookstores, not just comic and specialty shops. It could be anything from a series of comic strips—like the much-ballyhooed “Peanuts” serialization—to an actual illustrated narrative arc with overreaching themes, like a novel.
This development has caused the publishing world to be flooded by a glut of mediocre and half-hearted products—and product is really what most of it is, not art. “There aren’t a lot of publishers out there that are really treating the art form with the seriousness it deserves, whether it’s satire, low-brow or whatever,” says Reynolds. Sometimes there’s genuine merit to the work being put out, but it’s undermined by the over-ambition of publishers trying to turn a profit. There’s plenty of good work out there that’ll just never sell a million copies, so the expected profit never materializes.
“The comics world is very insular,” explains Reynolds. “It’s in this endless state of arrested development and it wants to keep itself in this insular state where it isn’t threatened by larger artistic aspirations. It’s kind of happy churning out the genre entertainment it specializes in. But Fantagraphics has always been sort of outside of the comics industry and has always wanted to be a better kind of ‘regular’ publisher, for lack of a better word.”
This focus on the craft and quality of publishing is what sets Fantagraphics head and shoulders above other publishers. It just so happens that they use comics as their medium of choice.
|
