The Seattle Post-Intelligencer looks at the locasl ‘tooner scene with a description of how Ellen Forney lets her freak flag fly, and looks at her excellent new tome I LOVE LED ZEPPELIN:
Certainly, Forney is no less interesting than the characters she draws. She’s not only a comic artist with a muscle car and hard-rock fetish, she’s a wrestler in an all-female wrestling league called the Pin Down Girls as well as a yoga enthusiast and a teacher at Cornish College of the Arts.
They they profile Fantagraphics, in a story they like to call “Comics are a hit for local publisher”
The Seattle-based business has gone from sinking in the red to surfacing in the black. It’s gone from publishing 25 books annually to publishing 70 books last year alone. After pleading with people to buy its comics in an attempt to raise enough money to survive, it landed a huge publishing deal that not only has helped it reel in several other big-name publishing contracts but also earned the company its first book on The New York Times’ best-seller list.
Most importantly, after decades spent watching their beloved comics and graphic novels suffer among the overlooked, underappreciated, misunderstood and marginalized, the folks at Fantagraphics are reveling in the American public’s newfound appreciation for the art form.
The story quotes someone named Calvin Reid and also points out the shocking fact that Eric Reynolds has worked at Fantagraphics for — gasp!–13 years. Holy frak. We’ll always think of you as the new kid, Eric.
