The Nostalgia Journal becomes The Comics Journal, 1976–1977.

Fantagraphics began as a magazine publisher. Wikipedia says the company was founded in 1976 by Gary Groth and Michael Catron in College Park, Maryland, and that it took over an advertising fanzine called The Nostalgia Journal, which it renamed The Comics Journal; an issue dated January 1977 carried the line “Formerly The Nostalgia Journal” on its cover. A history of the magazine by Michael Dean, published by The Comics Journal in August 2000, described the transition engineered by Groth and Catron as a move from a hobby adzine to The Comics Journal: The Magazine of Comics News and Criticism, and noted that Groth had studied journalism.

A third partner arrived within a year. Wikipedia says Kim Thompson joined the company in 1977 and soon became a co-owner. Publishers Weekly, in an obituary published on 20 June 2013, said that Thompson was born in Denmark, grew up with European comics, and joined Groth soon after arriving in the United States in the 1970s, working on the Journal’s news reports, interviews and criticism before the company turned to publishing comics. The magazine described him as Groth’s copublisher for the next three decades.

The company moved several times before it found a permanent home. Wikipedia says it relocated from the Washington, D.C., area to Stamford, Connecticut, and then to the Los Angeles area, before settling in Seattle in 1989, in the Maple Leaf neighbourhood. Along the way it added a second magazine: Wikipedia says Amazing Heroes, published from 1981 under the Redbeard Inc. imprint, covered mainstream comics from a hobbyist’s point of view and ran until 1992. Catron, Wikipedia says, remained co-publisher until 1985, also handling advertising and circulation for the Journal from 1982, before he left the company.

From a single comic to a list of reprints and translations, 1979–2013.

Comics publishing started as a sideline to the magazine. Wikipedia says Fantagraphics began publishing comics in 1979 with Jay Disbrow’s The Flames of Gyro, and that it gained wider recognition in 1982 by publishing the Hernández brothers’ Love and Rockets. Publishers Weekly said in 2013 that by the early 1980s the company had begun building a list that included Love and Rockets, and that Thompson had a central role in acquiring and publishing those books. Later series named by Wikipedia include Eightball, Hate and Acme Novelty Library.

The list widened in the 2000s into archive collections and European work. Wikipedia says hardcover collections such as The Complete Peanuts, distributed by W. W. Norton & Company, became a mainstay of the business, and that a European graphic novel line began in 2005 with the co-publication of the Ignatz Series, edited and produced by the Italian artist Igort and named after Ignatz Mouse from the strip Krazy Kat. Wikipedia says the company announced a deal with Jacques Tardi in March 2009 under which Thompson would translate a large number of his books; Publishers Weekly credited Thompson with bringing European graphic novels to American readers, naming Tardi and Ulli Lust among the artists he translated.

The magazine and the shop changed shape in the same years. Wikipedia says the company opened its own store, the Fantagraphics Bookstore & Gallery, in Seattle’s Georgetown neighbourhood in 2006, and that in 2009 it ended the regular print edition of The Comics Journal in favour of a larger semi-annual format backed by a new website. Thompson stepped back from the company in March 2013, Wikipedia says, and Publishers Weekly reported that he died at his home in Seattle on 19 June 2013.

A long word, a horizontal bar and then a torch.

A comics or manga publisher’s identity usually reaches readers in small places. The company mark sits in a corner of the cover, at the foot of the spine or on the copyright page, often at a size of a few millimetres, while the title logo and the artwork take the rest of the space. Many publishers also run several imprints, each with its own name and symbol, so that a reader can tell a children’s line from an adult one, or a reprint series from new work, at a glance on the shelf. Where stories are serialised in anthology magazines, the magazine masthead becomes a brand of its own, redrawn from time to time and repeated on every collected volume that comes out of it.

Recognition, though, mostly attaches to the stories and characters rather than to the company. Readers tend to remember a series, its lettering and its cover style long before they notice who published it, and adaptations for screen or merchandise carry the title’s look further than the publisher’s name. That leaves the company mark with a quieter job: a consistent signature that links many different titles, appears on contracts, trade-fair stands, websites and licensing material, and has to work in one colour beside artwork that changes with every book. When a publisher sells its work in other countries, the same mark also helps foreign readers connect translated editions back to one source. For designers, the practical point is to plan the mark as a set of small, repeatable placements rather than as a single large logo.

Dropping “Books” and lighting a torch, 2020.

The company’s identity was redrawn in 2020. CBR reported on 18 August 2020 that Fantagraphics Books had renamed itself Fantagraphics, dropping the word “Books”, and had adopted a new logo called the Legacy Torch: a flame set above a pen nib, surrounded by the company name. The report quoted the company’s art director, Jacob Covey, speaking to Print magazine. Covey said that the classic horizontal bar logo had been familiar but impractical and dated, and that while publisher Gary Groth was proud of the name Fantagraphics Books, the full name sounded a little dusty and limiting, recalling the company’s fan origins.

Covey’s explanation of the new mark turned on the word itself. In the same report he said that the new logo “owns this weird, unwieldy word” without the qualifier, and that it left the company free to become whatever else it might in a changing multimedia world, adding that single, strong words carry a power that does not need to be qualified. CBR listed the range the new mark had to cover: The Comics Journal, Love and Rockets, the graphic novel Ghost World, licensed collections of Carl Barks and Don Rosa duck comics for Disney, and collected newspaper strips including Pogo, Nancy, Krazy Kat and The Complete Peanuts.

The founder is still at the head of the company in its fiftieth year. KUOW, Seattle’s public radio station, introduced Groth on 30 June 2026 as co-founder and president of Fantagraphics, in a programme marking the company’s 50th anniversary and its beginnings as The Comics Journal. A KUOW feature on 10 June 2026 spoke to Eric Reynolds, vice president and associate publisher, who Wikipedia says joined in 1993 as news editor of the Journal before moving to marketing, and pointed readers to the company’s shop in Georgetown. Wikipedia adds that since 2023 the company has reprinted 1950s Atlas Comics material under licence from Marvel.

For a design guide, Fantagraphics shows how a publisher can shorten a long name, replace a horizontal bar with a compact emblem of a flame and a pen nib, and keep a criticism magazine and a book list under one word. Compare Drawn & Quarterly, another publisher of literary comics, and MAD, a comics magazine whose title became its identity. For this guide we use torch flame, India ink and newsprint cream with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Fantagraphics’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.