An early sign of the future: Gary Groth’s Fantastic Adzine, 1971.
Editor’s Note: This is a two-part look back at 50 years of the comics publisher, Fantagraphics. Part One is by Paul Buhle. Next week, we’ll have Part Two by Henry Chamberlain.
Essay by Paul Buhle
2026 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the comics publisher, Fantagraphics, and that deserves more public attention, within the comics world and beyond. I would argue a larger point: when it comes to the scholarship of art, from art history to contemporary criticism, comics remain both recent and suspect.
The history of comics is, of course, full of interesting and sometimes depressing contradictions. Newspaper pages aside (not a topic here), comics as in comic books always seemed very much part of the larger pulp magazine world, at the low end where publications actually bought by kids would be found. As such, they were suspect from almost the first moment of publication, during the later 1930s. Trouble was always on the way, and dire warnings began to emerge in popular magazines already in the early 1940s, warning against the corruption of young minds.
The Comics Code (1954-2011)
The anti-comics crusade, or rather anti-comic book crusade of the early 1950s surely did not rise to the level of Hitler’s burning of modern art in 1930s Germany. For that matter, the spread of television broadcasting across the country by the middle 1950s would have marked the eclipse of comics’ Golden Age in sales and volume, in any event. That said, the enactment and industry-wide acceptance of the Comics Code brought the end of the most creative and artistic comic projects. Soon enough, the attacks on comics’ purported threats to culture and the young mind in particular would pass on to television (“chewing gum for the mind”) as a danger.
We can now look back on all this from some distance, and look back with scholarship on hand. Never considered an art, perhaps even by editors and artists themselves—even screenwriting was seen by the writers as a craft—it would not be treated as such almost until the close of the twentieth century and a bit beyond. We seem to be a lot further now, or are we?
The subsequent development of comic art has inspired a new and sometimes impressive scholarship. Two recent issues of scholarly journals, The American Book Review (Winter 2025, #46:4) and the Radical History Review (May, 2026, #155 ) offer serious, ongoing studies, mirroring the spread of scholarly efforts in several specialty journals in the US and abroad. Graduate students in a handful of fields, mainly English and Communications (under a variety of names like “Media and Communication”) work on college degrees, even advanced degrees, some doubtless hoping for jobs, teaching the subject.
Let us leave aside the glum prospect that the jobs may not ever come into existence in any real numbers. Undergraduates by the thousands nevertheless continue to take comics-study courses even as the liberal arts suffer assaults from within the academy and outside. Do conservative Christian academies teach conservative Christian comics? We do not know.
Comics history viewed clearly, a groundwork set for understanding what it means, might well start with Fantagraphics and its anniversary.
EC Fan-Addict Club
When I interviewed Harvey Kurtzman for the Oral History of the American Left archive (at New York University) in 1981, he kidded me about the use of the word “fan.” The word could only, he insisted, be a contraction of “fanatic.” True baseball fans, the category that I knew best and shared most in childhood, were clearly fanatics. And when EC comics launched its “Fan-Addict Club” in 1950, it pinpointed the most fanatical section of comics readers anywhere. Perhaps because Mad artists and editors met in person with fans, mostly in Greater New York, it was also a Jewish, cerebral thing, no matter how many members were geographically distant. The Letters Page in EC comics seemed to feature devotees from afar, including soldiers and sailors stationed anywhere in the Cold War world, doubtless probably seeking fellowship with fellow fanatics.
The Comics Journal, #58, 1980.
Here, then, we can jump ahead to the far-sighted founding of Fantagraphics in 1976. It could be seen as the successor to the EC Fan-Addict Club, for the good reason that the founders greatly admired a handful of the artists of the old EC days. But it was, in this light, also a successor of a different kind. It would itself publish comics. And it would encourage the study of comic art through the pages of The Comics Journal (TCJ), launched the same year.
The Nostalgia Journal, Number 22, 1974.
Founded by Gary Groth and Michael Catron in College Park, MD, TCJ moved several times before settling in Seattle in 1989. Groth himself had been a publisher, beginning as a teenager with a superhero fan magazine. There may be a deeply curious significance of actual TCJ’s launching by way of taking over an “adzine,” the Nostalgia Journal. But Groth had already been organizing comics festivals in the early 1970s.
The Comics Journal, Number 35, 1977.
There, in the festivals, is surely the hidden source of much else. We might trace the festival mode to the amateur writers (including sci-fi writers) creating and sending out their own fanzines—not yet called that—as far back as the 1920s. Were they lonely adolescent boys or older insular types nervous with people close up and eager to befriend at a safe distance? At any rate, fandom received a huge boost during the 1960s with new, mostly xeroxed sci-fi zines—replacing used Gestettners and ink— and, above all, fan gatherings.
The presence of fan sci-fi events in areas small or larger, in big cities or smallish towns, setting up their tables (and paying some fee to the venue) for other fan-publishers and just plain fans to look at, flip through, perhaps purchase or exchange for their own creations established a pattern. And the value of celebrity, alongside costumes among other curious behavior.
Groth was building upon this past, applied from sci-fi to comics, the two genres that shared a pulpy reputation with some “big names” that ordinary Americans would not likely recognize. The two genres also shared an avant-garde element previously unknown or at least little understood. Underground comix and their anti-establishment or avant-garde qualities could be viewed as counterparts to daring or rakish sci-fi novelists, Philip K. Dick and Ursula LeGuin among others. The 1960s, the popular anti-Establishment sentiment and the apparent collapse of censorship had opened the doors and young people in particular were eager to rush in, find new friends (or lovers) and dig into a kind of cultural examination.
Cultural Correspondence, Number 5, 1978.
My own small magazine, Cultural Correspondence (“the first cultural publication whose readers watched television without guilt”), 1975-82, largely the work of a group of history graduate students, set out the proposition that popular culture contained the possibilities of liberation, if we looked closely enough. To be theoretical: we were seeking to turn upside down Theodore Adorno’s insistence on the corrupting nature of of popular culture, and if anyone remembered, Irving Howe’s curse at comics (in a 1949 issue of Politics magazine) as inherently degraded and degrading. It was natural thing to interview Crumb, Bill Griiffith, Justin Green and assorted others, including women artists, of the underground.
We scholarly-minded comics devotees at large were all, in a way, following film studies’ rise during the 1950s-70s, from the mostly campus Film Clubs to scholarly endeavors. But with some of the same limitations: those who wanted to study the work and its creators constituted only a small portion of those who enjoyed films and comics. And also: film studies had rapidly developed a down side of aestheticism, scholars who competed with each other and argued about details but especially pointed the finger at fan-amateurs. What else would university-level specializations mean?
Fantagraphics, for its part, managed somehow to avoid the obstacles and unleash the popular imagination in re comics. The Hernandez Brothers, Daniel Clowes, Chris Ware and Charles Burns would pretty soon reach best-seller status, along with reprints from Peanuts, Donald Duck and many others.
Meanwhile, in the pages TMJ, later to be called, grandiosely, the “New York Times/Wall Street Journal of comics”— as a measure of value and sales—Harvey Pekar still had the space to curse Art Spiegelman and Maus. Even if any reader knew that Harvey, still making a living by working at the VA in Cleveland, was actually envious of Spiegelman’s critical and financial success. Even getting on Letterman repeatedly did not make Harvey any happier: he still had a 9 to 5 job and a mortgage.
By the middle 1980s, Fantagraphics had already launched the Jack Kirby Award for artistic achievement, a crucial step toward the award system and the giant Comic-Cons of later decades. The role of fairly early staffer Eric Reynolds became notable, first as news editor for TCJ and then as the small and financially uncertain company’s needed marketing expert. Reynolds helped the company past the cyclical downturn of comics (among others, Denis Kitchen’s firm did not survive) with a brighter future in promise.
The Comics Journal, #177, 1995.
The distribution deal with WW Norton in 2001 fairly reflected the rise of “comic art” prompted, arguably, by Maus, a global market hit, and by Raw Magazine, an aesthetic bombshell. Comics had come of age, and global comic art took off spectacularly as well, even more on the web than the printed page.
Not to make too much of a name, the “Graphic Novel” had been born. Marjane Sartrapi, among those who did not enjoy this term, considered it to be an attempt to win the respect of the gentility in every sense, by promoting comics as “novels.” A fair charge. Seen more narrowly, the “GN” soon came to function as the coffee table book of the new century, or at least a large handful of the more vaunted comics did.
Some of those active in comics with serious artistic and/or educational aims would say that after comics became the Next New Thing (the business section of the New York Times eager to report on adapted comics superheroes hitting big numbers in Hollywood), the interest in comics faded somewhat. The intermittent interest nevertheless has seem to have remained, up to the present day, in the Obituaries. That is, for fallen heroes and heroines of the field. Feature obits have always been a serious matter for the Times, artists as well as film-makers, advertising executives and scientists.
Today, over at Fantagraphics, Donald Duck’s further family adventures coexist with lesbian adventurers of another dimension or another century. More non-sequential comic art books seem to be emerging, further advancing the idea that comics and art, or for that matter comics and contemporary social drama (Joe Sacco’s real life depictions of troubled and doomed populations), have won a lasting place. Congratulations, Fantagraphics.
Paul Buhle is an American historian, who is (retired) Senior Lecturer at Brown University, author or editor of 35 volumes, including histories of radicalism in the United States and the Caribbean, studies of popular culture, and a series of nonfiction comic art volumes. He is the authorized biographer of C. L. R. James.
