Fantagraphics publisher Gary Groth

Initially when I broached the subject with him he just pooh-poohed it. He gave me like a Jimmy Stewart, “Aw shucks, who would want to read that?” I pressed him a little but because I thought it was an important project and he should have all of his work available on the bookshelf in a coherent way instead of the sloppy editions, which have been published over the years. Finally he shrugged and gave his blessing. But my impression was that he wasn’t going to be actively participating in it.

Especially with us. We’ve done a lot of books like that, Popeye, Little Orphan Annie and Krazy Kat. It would have been a hell of a lot more fulfilling if we had done it when he was alive so he could have seen it. It’s unfortunate we weren’t able to. All these kinds of projects seem to follow their own time.

He and Chris Ware were the biggest Peanuts fans I knew among cartoonists. Chris was already designing Krazy Kat for us so I thought it would make sense if Seth did the Peanuts book. His design is always subdued and low-key. I think we talked either jokingly or not that if we ever got the rights to do Peanuts he should do it.

[laughs] I don’t think it’s a matter of that. Chris Ware and Seth are free agents so they can associate with anyone they want. That’s never a problem.

If the pre-sales of volume one are any indication about 90 percent of the sales will be in the bookstores and the rest in the comic book market. Which gives you the level of cluelessness among comic book retailers. You would think every comic book store would at least buy a few copies. The first volume has sold really well and we expect that number to go down over the course of the series. But given Peanuts popularity we have no idea how much it will go down whether it’s ten or 40 percent. Then you get into different eras of Peanuts like the 60’s were popular and Snoopy came into his own with The Red Baron. Ultimately it’s not very important, we are going to do the 25 volumes regardless of whether they sell like gangbusters or if they go down.

I don’t think so. I guess we have a certain image. We publish Robert Crumb and Hernandez brothers so we have an image as an alternative publisher. But over the years we’ve published Popeye, Prince Valiant and Pogo so what we’ve really always wanted to do is publish good cartooning in whatever context. The people I know weren’t surprised at all because they know me. It doesn’t have to have some indie edge; it’s wherever you find it.

I haven’t thought about that. We published 11 small volumes of Pogo and I would like to reprint the entire Pogo in a similar format to Peanuts. We only published 11 volumes because the rights were a real labyrinth among the family members. I think that’s been straightened so I’ll be talking to them about it. I’d love to publish Cliff Sterrett’s Polly and Her Pals, which is one of my favorites. The color pages in that are gorgeous and are every bit as good as Windsor McKay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland or George Herriman’s work. Kitchen Sink actually published one or two volumes of that in the late 80’s and then quit because they didn’t sell well. But with bookstore distribution I think we could sell enough to make a go of it. I would like to reprint Percy Crosby's Skippy. That ran from 1925-1945 and sometime during that period it was one of the most popular strips in the world. Skippy Peanut Butter stole the name from them. The cartoonist Percy Crosby is fascinating because he was a painter and a brilliant writer. Drawn & Quarterly is publishing Gasoline Alley this year.

I skim the new ones. They are almost all pretty god awful except for Bill Griffith’s Zippy and Patrick McDonnell’s Mutts. Mutts is pretty fabulous and you're not even sure why because they’re not laugh out loud funny.

The only thing in the books is going to be newspaper strips. Schulz did a variety of other things that we were thinking of doing a separate volume of miscellaneous stuff he did.

Right, my son will do that for me. We wanted to keep the complete Peanuts pretty pure as just the strips.

We definitely had to do a lot of detective work. We found out all the newspapers Peanuts originally appeared in. There were only seven of them that they appeared in right from the beginning and one of them was The Seattle Times. That was great because we could go right over to the public library in Seattle and get the strips. We went over there and we pulled the microfilm of the days we needed and we gave them to a local place that specialized in getting the best possible reproduction from microfilm. We said to just pull the Peanuts strips. So the guy called me back and said he couldn’t find any Peanuts. We knew it had to be there. He calls me back and says he can’t find them. So we were going crazy and we found out that the Seattle Times had run it from the beginning but they dropped two months later. The ones we wanted were from two months to two years so we had to start over. It was really laborious. We had to find collectors and people like that. For the first book we were missing a couple hundred and future volumes were missing fewer and fewer. It was a real hassle.

[laughs] I never made that metaphorical connection. I don’t know. Mel Gibson might be the guy to ask.

I discharged him for complicated reasons. The bottom line was that working with Milo was just too difficult to continue.

I know. It was three years that felt like 30. We had our ups and downs but there was no one thing. It was just an accumulation of difficulties.

Well we’re unlikely to find a Comic Journal editor that everyone likes which I can live with. But the bottom line is that I have to like him.

I think he can work with people. We can actually sit down and discuss things. Since I don’t have time to edit the magazine what I am looking for is someone who can continue the vision of the magazine. In a situation like this you have to find some compromise between what I want and what the managing editor wants. With Dirk I think we can work together comfortably.

Not necessarily. We are going to revamp the magazine and change the format. We’re going to add more color to it. I thought there was too little art in the magazine. When we would run a review we would only show a few panels and we have to represent the art more than we do. In terms of editorial focus we will probably diversify the coverage a bit. I think one of the best things Milo did was start the column on manga so we will be covering a wider range of material. There are an awful lot of books that don’t get covered in the magazine and I don’t understand why. Blankets has been out for almost a year and we never reviewed it. If you ask me why, my answer is I don’t know.

I don’t remember specifically. But he wrote a story about one of his crazy escapades with one of the heirs of McDonald’s or something. The story was about this heiress of McDonald’s fucking goats or something. It was just crazy and if it weren’t true we could clearly get our ass sued. There were some questions as to what extent he was exaggerating. But for the most part we never had a problem. We published like 20 issues of Real Stuff.

Well first of all I don’t think that’s true. His stuff has relation to Peter Bagge’s work with the satire and early Clowes’ work. It was [Fantagraphics Director of Promotions] Eric Reynolds who suggested we look at it. At first I wasn’t that enthusiastic about it. I love the drawings so I thought we would give it a shot. The last issue I thought was a masterpiece and the best thing he had ever done. The humor just all coalesced there.

Because it seemed kind of obvious vulgar humor that the underground lived through. I thought we should be looking for stuff beyond it. You can see with the last issue that he transcended that.

We’re doing ok. As always we’re muddling through. The first volume of Peanuts will do well; we’ve printed 80,000 copies so that will turn us around. We’ve always been just short of struggling. We never had surplus money and then you have these ebbs and flows. I think we’ll be doing fine over the next few years.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

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