Before getting to the regular body of this blog post, please allow me to reproduce the following statement from Kim Thompson (introduced by Gary Groth) in full:
Kim Thompson has been my partner at Fantagraphics Books for 35 years. He's contributed vastly and selflessly to this company and to the comics medium and worked closely with countless fine artists over that time. This is a tough announcement to make, but everyone who knows Kim knows he's a fighter and we remain optimistic that he'll get through this and report back to report to work, where he belongs, doing what he loves.
– Gary Groth
I'm sure that by now a number of people in the comics field who deal with me on a regular or semi-regular basis have noticed that I've been responding more spottily. This is because of ongoing health issues for the past month, which earlier this week resolved themselves in a diagnosis of lung cancer.
This is still very early in the diagnosis, so I have no way of knowing the severity of my condition. I'm relatively young and (otherwise) in good health, and my hospital is top-flight, so I'm hopeful and confident that we will soon have the specifics narrowed down, set me up with a course of treatment, proceed, and lick this thing.
It is quite possible that as treatment gets underway I'll be able to come back in and pick up some aspects of my job, maybe even quite soon. However, in the interests of keeping things rolling as smoothly as I can, I've transferred all my ongoing projects onto other members of the Fantagraphics team. So if you're expecting something from me, contact Gary Groth, Eric Reyolds, or Jason Miles and they can hook you up with whoever you need. If there are things that only I know and can deal with, lay it out for them and they'll contact me.
On behalf of Kim, we would like to encourage anyone who would like to reach out to him to feel free to send mail to him c/o Fantagraphics Books, 7563 Lake City Way NE, Seattle, WA 98115, or email.
As an editor, publisher, translator, and writer, Kim's importance to North American comics (not to mention this magazine) would be difficult to overstate. He is not just a personally inspiring figure, but is also an extremely friendly, helpful, & enormously fun person to work with. We wish him a full and speedy recovery, and can't wait for him to be back.
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On the main body of this site, we have another installment of Richard Gehr's excellent and too-infrequent "Know Your New Yorker Cartoonists" column. Today his subject is Charles Barsotti. Here's a brief excerpt:
GEHR: How did you end up at Hallmark in Kansas City?
BARSOTTI: I answered this ad in Advertising Age and got a call from this guy in Chicago. Hallmark then sent me a psychological test but I just set it aside. Then they shot Kennedy, and the atmosphere I ran into the next day in San Marcos was a little too much. I figured, "It’s time to buckle down, take the psychological test, and get serious about this." Anyway, Holly [William Hollingworth] Whyte wrote a book called The Organization Man, and he had things to keep in mind when you’re taking a psychological test for a big organization. I remembered to say things like, "I love my father and my mother both, but I love my father a little bit more." That kind of thing.
GEHR: Was Hallmark your first real art job?
BARSOTTI: It was really writing, at first. I was in the editorial department and then switched to contemporary cards.
GEHR: Was that where you began cartooning seriously?
BARSOTTI: Rapidographs had just come out and I splurged and bought myself a set. I was doing some sketches, and a friend of mine in a different department of Hallmark asked me if I would use that style to illustrate a little pamphlet of Ogden Nash poems. So I did it on my own time, and it got me in trouble in my department. That’s the way Hallmark's bureaucracy worked. That sort of set me off, and I sent some drawings to Mike Mooney at The Saturday Evening Post — and didn’t hear anything. The next weekend, I sat down and did another big batch of these things. I sent it in and thought, "Oh, this is it. This isn’t working." But! I got a call from Mooney at work. I thought it was a joke, but he said he had turned the big hallway at The Saturday Evening Post into a gallery. "I’ve got your cartoons up and down it," he said. He was a very ebullient fellow. Then I went there and met the editor, Bill Emerson.
Elsewhere:
—Steven Heller writes about an interesting Thomas Nast project I don't recall ever hearing about before: a traveling series of murals used in performances to tell the story of the American Civil War.
—Carol Tilley takes to Boing Boing to explain her recent Fredric Wertham research.
—Colleen Doran has given a two-part interview to SciFi Pulse, in which she discusses her recent experiences publishing comics online.
—Ben Katchor has a new strip online.
—Paradise Valley, Arizona is trying to raise funds to build a bronze monument to Bil Keane.
—The Belgian cartoonist Didier Comès and Studio Proteus founder Toren Smith have both reportedly passed away.
—Via Drawn, here's a short clip from the upcoming Stripped documentary, dealing with how webcartoonists make money:
