Saved by the Beagle

It's easy to get lost looking for Fantagraphics' headquarters. Situated just off I-5 on Lake City Way Northeast, it's neighbored on the left by a, shall we say, imaginatively decorated house: hand-painted signs and bizarre metal tchotchkes leap about the exterior fence like a Dalí birdhouse explosion. Visiting for the first time, it's tempting to mistake that oddball unit for FHQ. Hey—maybe comics people really are all nuts!

That fantasy begins dissipating as soon as you walk up to the 28-year-old publisher's actual offices next door; go inside and it disperses entirely. For one thing, this office is a two-story house with a basement, an old place with a surprising number of rooms around a surprising number of corners. The kitchen is triangulated by a staffer's desk, a Xerox machine, and the refrigerator, which itself is a couple steps away from the office of Gary Groth, the company's president and the majordomo of The Comics Journal, the monthly news and criticism magazine. Groth's office window overlooks a back porch and the alleyway. The house is not brightly lit—the better, one suspects, to concentrate on the tasks at hand.

"You should have seen it before," says Eric Reynolds, leading me to a basement room full of newly built metal shelves. An affable, sandy-haired, 33-year-old Californian, who began as a Fantagraphics intern over a decade ago and is now publicist and special projects editor (he helms The Complete Crumb Comics, the ongoing series dedicated to the godfather of "underground comix," Robert Crumb), Reynolds is showing me the company's extensive, neatly kept library of old comics and research materials. "The old shelves were way less efficient," he says.

Until recently, the shelves weren't all that needed fixing around here. Since its inception in 1976, when a 22-year-old Groth took over a nondescript collector-listings tabloid, The Nostalgia Journal, and refashioned it into the sharply critical and frequently controversial Comics Journal, Fantagraphics—based first in Washington, D.C., then in Stanford, Conn., and Los Angeles, before Hate and Neat Stuff artist Peter Bagge convinced Groth and longtime business partner Kim Thompson to come to Seattle in 1989—has seen more than its share of financial trouble. "It was a shoestring thing early on," says Thompson. "Even when we were in the red, we were in the red by $200, you know? If you're a small operation, you really can't lose that much money."

But Fantagraphics stopped being a small operation sometime during the 1980s, after Groth and Thompson began publishing comics as well as comics criticism. Los Bros. Hernandez's Love and Rockets debuted in 1982; soon, Fantagraphics began amassing the most impressive and influential roster in the business: Daniel Clowes' Eightball and Ghost World; Peter Bagge's Hate (as crucial an artifact of Seattle's rock explosion as Nirvana's Nevermind or Mudhoney's "Touch Me I'm Sick"—Mudhoney's Mark Arm, incidentally, once worked for Fantagraphics); Chris Ware's dense, mesmeric Acme Novelty Library; Jessica Abel's Artbabe; Joe Sacco's Palestine; and reprints of classic Crumb, the '50s maverick Bernard Krigstein, and newspaper classics like Krazy Kat, Pogo, and Prince Valiant. All of which made Fantagraphics much beloved and universally admired (well, except by those stung by the Journal) and, frequently, put it on just this side of bankruptcy. Independent comics have never been big moneymakers, but with dozens of titles and top-quality printing—and sales that hovered around 3,000 apiece—Fantagraphics dangled over the precipice repeatedly, at one point issuing an e-mail plea for fans to buy their back stock in bulk.

Then, a few months ago, Groth and Thompson nailed down the multiyear rights to reprint, in its entirety and in chronological order, another newspaper classic: Charles M. Schulz's Peanuts. It's a blockbuster deal that guarantees Fantagraphics will actually be around for another 12 years. Until this spring, no one at the company was certain if it would be around another 12 weeks.

The second volume of The Complete Peanuts is due out next month.

It is no exaggeration to call Peanuts the most successful comic strip in human history. Charles M. Schulz Creative Associates, the late cartoonist's management branch, approves more than 24,000 products for 900 licensees a year; when Schulz died in 2000, he was earning $20 million a year. Two years ago, a U.S. study determined that the only cartoon character more recognizable than the Peanuts cast was Mickey Mouse. And it's difficult to overstate just how important it's already proven to Fantagraphics. Prior to 2004, the biggest title on Fantagraphics' roster was Clowes' Ghost World, whose Terry Zwigoff–directed 2001 film adaptation spurred it to sales of 100,000 four years after its initial release. The Complete Peanuts 1950–1952, issued in May, has sold more copies in four months, hitting No. 19 on TheNew York Times best-seller list; the second volume, covering 1953–54, is due next month and should sell comparably.

"Schulz is a rare breed of cartoonist," notes Reynolds. "Even though he comes from this very mainstream place, every cartoonist loves him, underground or overground. He's the Beatles of comics, absolutely."

If that's the case, though, Fantagraphics is more like Sub Pop—a well-known, highly regarded, but still relatively small publisher, most of whose best sellers wouldn't sell enough to stay on a major label for more than an album or two. For Fantagraphics, being put in charge of The Complete Peanuts is akin to Sub Pop being handed the Beatles' master tapes for reissue. And Fantagraphics has done the strip right, with gorgeous design (the art director is Palookaville artist Seth, aka Gregory Gallant, whose style was deeply influenced by Schulz) and ambitious outlay (Fantagraphics is planning two a year for the next 12 and a half years, 25 volumes covering 50 years of weekly strips, including Sundays).