Eric Reynolds is Fantagraphics’ PR guy. He also has editorial duties, and is an accomplished cartoonist and illustrator in his own right. He once wrote a comics news column for The Stranger with, um, Stranger founder James Sturm? Unfortunately, the columns appear to predate the online archive.

I spoke with Eric on February 17, 2004, in preparation for an article to appear in The Stranger.

Eric Reynolds

Last time I interviewed you for publication, we discussed the Fantagraphics financial crisis. Can you give us an update?

ER: Fantagraphics’ financial health, I’m happy to report, is getting better and better every day.

We’re out of the immediate crisis zone. Publishing is always a struggling sort of enterprise, but it really has been getting a little bit better every month since late last year. And now as we get closer and closer to some big books for the spring, like the first Peanuts volume, there’s the light at the end of the tunnel right in front of our faces.

Personally speaking, my own frame of mind is infinitely better than it was at this same time last year.

You are going to APE (the Alternative Press Expo) soon, right?

ER: Myself and Greg [inaudible] and Gary Groth are all going. Charles Burns is the sort-of star guest of the whole show, so he’s sort of our number one person that will be there. He’s got signing events the whole weekend and he’s got a big spotlight panel. Dan Clowes is coming on Saturday and he’s always our biggest draw no matter where we go. If he’s there you know he draws a crowd everywhere he goes.

So those are the big two. We’ve got Sophie – Sophie Crumb, she’s going to be there. I’m sure there will be a lot of people eager to see her.

Who are your top selling local artists these days?

ER: The Frank Book [by Jim Woodring] did really great. Our big books of 2003 were Palomar, The Frank Book, Quimby the Mouse, and and what was the other one. . . Well, there was the Bill Ward book, but really I’d probably single out Quimby, The Frank Book, and Palomar.

How did Krigstein [a coffee-table size biography and survey of the influential EC cartoonist Bernie Krigstein] do?

ER: Krigstein was actually late ’02. Krigstein did OK, not great. Palomar is still on it’s curve, so it’s kind of hard to tell where that one’s gonna fall when it’s done. And it’s a forty-dollar hardcover so it didn’t do gangbusters right out of the gate.

Are you going to be pushing it for reviews?

ER: It was such an expensive book that I sent out fewer copies than I normally do and I tended to send them to more national media.

The Frank Book did really phenomenally well, it sold out. We’re going to have to go back to press on it. We should have more copies, I think, in March sometime. So that was really cool, as far as the local angle goes. It was really important to me to see that book do right, you know because I just think so much of Jim. It was really rewarding to see that book get well reviewed and then subsequently sell out pretty quickly.

Aside from that – what’s big and new? We have this new romance comic collection that’s doing fairly well. I don’t know if it’s getting a lot of Valentine’s day driven sales or what, but the initial sales were amazingly strong for a bunch of nineteen fifties comics that nobody remembers.

How important to FG is local alt-comics scene?

ER: I don’t think it’s not important. But I don’t necessarily go out of my way to look for Northwest cartoonists per se. We just kinda look for good work in general. I don’t personally care whether a person’s from Seattle or Timbuktu. I know just from experience having Jim Woodring and Peter Bagge in your back yard – and Roberta Gregory – makes you feel really good and cool and special and it’s something. . . I personally enjoy having them in the same city as me but from a business point of view I’m not really sure it’s all that necessary.

I don’t think Fantagraphics’ reputation per se is contingent on its’ sort of Northwest connection, like it was ten years ago when the media was making it out to be that way.

Compare and contrast Seattle’s comics scene to Portland’s.

I think they are pretty similar really. I couldn’t really think of any marked divergences. I don’t know. I’m not sure how to answer that.

I mean they both have pretty healthy scenes and always have; Portland maybe has been a little bit smaller but, you know, so what. For whatever reason, the Northwest has always been a remarkably fertile area for not just comics but really all the arts.

Brad Beshaw is the owner of Confounded Books, currently Seattle’s best alternative print media outlet. Beshaw moved here from New Mexico several years ago, and although his drawings have rarely seen wide distribution in Seattle, is a talented cartoonist. He wrote the long-running column Hollywood Deathwatch for Tablet Newspaper.

I spoke with Brad on February 17, 2004, in preparation for an article to appear in the Stranger.

Brad Beshaw, Confounded Books

What’s the most interesting development in the local cartooning scene over the last year?

BB: There’s a bunch of ’em. I mean there’s – it’s not over the last year, but over the last several. . . David Lasky’s comics-as-fine art group (Fine Comics) has gone through a lot of changes and recruited more and more people and they’re definitely a force. I mean, they’re everywhere. I’d need to include of course Davey Oil and the Slide Rule folks as well. The Slide Rule is definitely something interesting too that’s relatively recent.

. . .

The idea of bringing comics to a live performance medium is pretty interesting.

You hosted some of the Slide Rule events at the store. What other live events have you hosted at Confounded?

BB: There was Fly, who came here with the Killer Banshee Studio. Killer Banshees adapted her comic to computer manipulations – they didn’t actually move but they manipulated them via computer while she read. They projected them while she read. Her book is called Peops.

Perpetual Motion Roadshow is the mastermind of Jim Monroe, he’s a novelist from Canada who used to be the editor of AdBusters magazine. He has a website called nomediakings.net, and through that he sets up groups of three readers – sometimes poets, sometimes novelists, sometimes cartoonists – and sends them off across the country.

There’s a west and an east coast leg; right now they are doing west; then they’ll be doing east.

The Bookmobile. Half of them are from Canada, and half are from – I can’t remember where. New York or was it Baltimore? I had it in my head that they were somewhere not quite New York but close [Buffalo?].

That’s an interesting group. They take submissions throughout the year and then tour with their favorites. Locals can also add stuff; our local cartoonists and zinesters added stuff. A couple of them were even called back to add stuff nationally.

Is Seattle taking part in something that’s reflected nationally, this performance/alternative press thing?

BB: Absolutely. I’d been talking about setting up some sort of national circuit for years and years, getting addresses of shops and so forth. Of course, they start up and go out of business quickly – See Hear in New York just closed, and they were one of the venerable stores. . .

We had talked about setting up some sort of a circuit and I had discussed it with my friend Juliet Torres who works at Last Gasp and publishes a series of minicomics that pairs comics artists with slam poets together. Dave Lasky’s done those, Ivan Brunetti’s done those – and we were talking about it and he turns around and does it, which is great. So he added us to the west coast list right away.

How interrelated are the Seattle and Portland cartooning and comics communities?

BB: Just in terms of output – Craig Thompson lives there and he’s pretty well known nationally; he’s gotten really big since the release of Blankets. Our big one right now – obviously Pete Bagge lives here, he doesn’t publish as much as he used to, but Dave Lasky’s gotten really large as of late; and then people like Jason Lutes are from here, and then around them are a group of lesser known zinesters or minicomic artists who kind of pop up and put out a lot of stuff or fade away. Like, Jennifer Daydreamer gets picked up by a major independent company like Top Shelf, and she’s doing really really well. She’s poised to become really big as well.

Both scenes are very – we get a lot of people from Portland down here. I would say they’re both twins in that we’re both big advocates of zines and small press. I remember years ago when I first moved here I pitched the idea of kind of doing a zine/comic crossover thing at the Hugo House for ZAPP, and a lot of the people who we asked about it were like, ‘why?’ you know, as if it weren’t just a natural connection.

But that connection’s very strong both in Portland and Seattle.