#kimthompson

Are you ready for a 600 page oral history of Fantagrahics?

  That was rhetorical — of COURSE you are. At long last, after over a decade in the works, We Told You So: Comics As Art the oral history of Fantagraphics begun by Tom Spurgeon and finished by Michael Dean will be coming out this summer, just in time to celebrate the (gasp!) 40th anniversary of the house that Gary and Kim  built. This shocks and astounds me because it means that I’ve been reading…

One of the most important people in the Comics as an art form movement, Kim Thompson, died yesterday at the way-too-young age of 56. Thompson was the co-owner of Fantagraphics Books, arguably the most important English language publisher of comics in the last 40 years or so.

He was a thoughtful critic, a superb translator, and a staunch ally of every cartoonist who tried to do good work. He could also be a cutting respondent and commentator as he proved many times in the pages of The Comics Journal, and later, on the Journal's message boards.

I only met him a couple of times, but he was funny and gracious and he always left me with the feeling that I'd like to know him better. Now I never will, and that makes me beyond sad.

If you love comics, take a moment today to pick up something he was involved with, particularly one of his masterful translations of European comics*, and think of how much he'll be missed.