Comix

The Fantagraphics website has the sad news that Kim Thompson has died. An excerpt from his obituary shows how important he has been for the development of comics as a medium suitable for actual adults:

Among Thompson’s signature achievements in comics were Critters, a funny-animal anthology that ran from 50 issues between 1985 to 1990 and is perhaps best known for introducing the world to Stan Sakai’s Usagi Yojimbo; and Zero Zero, an alternative comics anthology that also ran for 50 issues over five years — between 1995 and 2000 — and featured work by, among others, Kim Deitch, Dave Cooper, Al Columbia, Spain Rodriguez, Joe Sacco, David Mazzuchelli, and Joyce Farmer. His most recent enthusiasm was spearheading a line of European graphic novel translations, including two major series of volumes by two of the most significant living European artists — Jacques Tardi (It Was the War of the Trenches, Like a Sniper Lining up His Shot, The Astonishing Exploits of Lucien Brindavoine) and Jason (Hey, Wait…, I Killed Adolf Hitler, Low Moon, The Left Bank Gang) — and such respected work as Ulli Lust’s Today Is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life, Lorenzo Mattotti’s The Crackle of the Frost, Gabriella Giandelli’s Interiorae, and what may be his crowning achievement as an editor/translator, Guy Peelaert’s The Adventures of Jodelle.

Fantagraphics as a publisher has been important both for publishing The Comics Journal, the foremost critical magazine about comics as an artform, medium and industry and for the comics they themselves published. Love and Rockets alone ensures it has a place in comics history, but even more importantly, it’s Fantagraphics that pioneered the model of how to be a successfull, literary comics publisher. Kim Thompson, with Gary Groth, was instrumental in doing so. Like Groth he was a comics fan who wasn’t content with just celebrating what comics had already achieved, but set out to lift up comics, to make it into what he knew it could be, as publisher, as critic, as translator. It’s a hell of a resume and his death is an incredible loss to comics.

At 4thletter Gavok decided to try out the Before Watchmen project:

Whether you loved or hated the idea of more Watchmen comics, you have to admit that the audacity of it is interesting as all hell, else nobody would be talking about it.

I decided to give it a fair enough shake. I didn’t read every single comic. I didn’t even read every single series.

I don’t understand why anybody would do this, even if they had no problems with the moral aspects of this project. (The short version: Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons had been screwed out of the rights to the original Watchmen, which were supposed to revert to them, with Moore being vehemently opposed to any sort of sequel or prequel.) Because I don’t understand why anybody would think that it could ever deliver anything better than a series of perhaps well crafted, but pointless comics which would always come up short when measured against the original series. Then again, I also don’t understand why any respectable cartoonist, other than egomaniacs like JMS, would want to be involved with this either.

Or indeed, why DC has bothered doing this in the first place, other than as yet another fuck you to Alan Moore. I can sort of understand why back in 1986, once it became clear that Watchmen was a huge critical and sales success, DC wanted to do spinoff series, but to do this three decades later?