We Told You So.

• Author: Doherty, Brian
• Position: BOOK - Tom Spurgeon and Michael Dean's "We Told You So: Comics As Art" - Brief article - Book review

Like most comics devotees of the late 20th century, Gary Groth--co-founder of America's leading publisher of high-quality comics, Fantagraphics Books--started off as a superhero obsessive. But Groth grew out of that passion, and he loved a good fight. So in the mid-'70s he started slamming his aesthetic foes and advocating for smarter, more literary, more adult comics in his pugnacious and brilliant magazine The Comics Journal. By the early 1980s, he was seeking out and publishing such comics despite the total lack of a demonstrated market for such things.

Over the next four decades, Fantagraphics launched or elevated the careers of many of modern comics' most vital and brilliant creators, including Jaime Hernandez, Gilbert Hernandez, Chris Ware, Daniel Clowes, Joe Sacco, Carol Tyler, and Reason's own Peter Bagge. Publications of Robert Crumb, Charles Schulz, and others have established the publishing house as the...