Fantagraphics Blog Kim Thompson

[In this installment of our series of Editors Notes, Kim Thompson interviews himself (in a format he's dubbed "AutoChat"), with a special contribution by the book’s translator, Jenna Allen, about Gil Jordan, Private Detective: Murder by High Tide by M. Tillieux, now available to pre-order from us and coming soon to a comics shop near you. Thanks to Janice Headley for assistance with images in this post. – Ed.]

Tell me about Gil Jordan.

He and I were born at the same time. Literally. The week I was born, the first issue of Spirou magazine to run Gil Jourdan was the issue on the stands. I only realized this after decades of being a huge fan of the strip, I should add.

In terms of the history of the strip, I would refer readers back to my quick history of 1940s-1960s Franco-Belgian comics magazines. Remember how I referred to Spirou as the Marvel and Tintin as the DC? Well, for most of his formative years and a bit beyond (1947-1955), Tillieux basically worked for one of the Charltons of the day, an outfit called Héroïc-Albums, where he cranked out a detective series called Félix.

Why was he stuck there? Was his work bad?

For whatever reason he'd originally failed to sell to Spirou, his first choice, and had to fall back on Héroïc-Albums. I guess it's a judgment call as to whether Spirou was right in rejecting his work back in the '40s, but he quickly developed and certainly midway through his run on Félix he certainly would have been good enough to move to one of the majors.

Why didn't he?

From what I understand he remained ticked off at Spirou's rejection and stuck with Héroïc-Albums and Félix far beyond what was necessary. He may also have been concerned about losing his ongoing characters (which were owned by Héroïc-Albums), a Gordian knot he eventually sliced in two by making his new Spirou characters very slightly re-designed and re-named carbon copies of his Félix characters. (He was the Howard Chaykin of his day.) This was a decision that would later be very helpful because when he had some health problems and wasn't able to draw for a while, he was able to take old Félix stories and have helpers draw in the Jordan characters and re-letter them, and call it good. (He also recycled some of the Félix stories into his writing assignments for other characters, but let's not get bogged down.)

[In this installment of our series of Editors Notes, Kim Thompson interviews himself (in a format he's dubbed "AutoChat") about Isle of 100,000 Graves by Jason & Fabien Vehlmann, now available to pre-order from us and coming soon to a comics shop near you. – Ed.] I was surprised to see that the new Jason book was written by someone else. It concerned me a bit, and then I read the story and it reads like every other Jason book! If you hadn't told me it was written by someone else I'd have assumed it was pure Jason. Did Jason…

In a brave new world where practically every cartoonist by now scans his or her original art and sends us discs or drops files on our server, Gilbert Hernandez remains staunchly stuck in the 20th century, whence he FedExes us fat packages of art every time we have a new book of his to release. And thus today we were blessed with a FedEx carton containing his 50 count 'em 50 pages for the next issue of Love and Rockets: New Stories, premiering in San Diego in July. Here's one of 'em. (Click for a bigger version.) You'll get to…

Working my way through the Joost Swarte book, I stumbled across this panel (I'm showing the French version because the Dutch one I have only in black and white, and it needs to be shown in color for the full effect), in which a woman Joost's hero Jopo is trying to pick up leaves him a kiss-off message written in lipstick on a mirror. And I thought, uh-oh. This Swarte book is being printed in a "co-production," which means that two or more publishers simultaneously go to press on the same book in different languages. In order to achieve this,…

Between my own (ahem) vast accumulated knowledge and the marvels of the internet, it's rare that I find myself genuinely stumped by a line in a book I'm translating, but when I came across this particular panel in the Joost Swarte book Is That All There Is? that will (yes, it will!) be coming out later this year, I was mystified: Jopo de Pojo is trying to slip out of a movie theatre midshow, and while the latter two patrons' comments are are self-evident enough (an irate "hush!" and a complaint about Jopo's trademark quiff, mistaken for a hat), the…

Andrew Sullivan's always-entertaining mostly-political blog The Daily Dish has showcased an ongoing "Bugs or Mickey Debate," attempting to tease out why it is that Bugs Bunny, arguably a more interesting character, is so much less popular than the iconic Mickey Mouse (latest installment here). If the debate is still ongoing next month, I wonder if our release of the first volume of Floyd Gottfredson's Mickey Mouse strips, which feature a far feistier and more adventuresome Mickey than the wide public is used to, will re-orient the debate. (Even those who don't buy the book will get a glimpse of this…

[In this installment of our series of Editors Notes, Kim Thompson interviews himself (in a format he's dubbed "AutoChat") about Approximate Continuum Comics by Lewis Trondheim, now available to pre-order from us and coming soon to a comics shop near you. – Ed.] Now this is the material that was serialized in The Nimrod, right? Yes and no. The Nimrod #1, 6, and 7 featured the first three installments (out of six). So if you have all the Nimrods, sorry, you'll be buying half of it all over again. But the translation's been reworked and it's been re-lettered from scratch….