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  Sunday  June 1  2003    10: 20 PM

comic books

Buy a book — feed a cartoonist. It's important.

Comics publisher Fantagraphics drawn into a financial crisis

This is a story about the comics business, but it's not funny.

One of the country's largest publishers of art comics, Fantagraphics Books in Lake City, says it's in crisis, facing debts of more than $70,000 and the possibility of shutting down or selling out.

The 27-year-old private company is one of the original forces behind the underground-comics movement symbolized by R. Crumb, whose infrequent new work it continues to publish.

Fantagraphics also published Daniel Clowes' "Ghost World," which formed the basis for the Academy Award-nominated 2001 movie of the same name. It produces a monthly magazine about the comics business, as well as 50 softcover books and 25 comic books a year by 50 artists nationwide, including three Seattle residents.
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Fantagraphics Books
publisher of the world's greatest cartoonists

Fantagraphics Books Needs Your Help!

Buy Books! Keep Us Alive!

To Comics Lovers Throughout the World:

Fantagraphics Books has just celebrated its 27th year publishing many of the finest cartoonists from all over the world as well as our flagship publication, the magazine people love to hate, The Comics Journal. We are proud of our long-term commitment to comics as an art form and our dogged determination to push excellence down everybody’s throats. This is all very well and good but it doesn’t mean much in the face of brute economics — and it’s the wall of brute economics that we’ve just hit, hard.
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