SEATTLE -- Peanuts turned to gold for Fantagraphics. Now the once-struggling comics publisher hopes another cartoon icon, Dennis theMenace, can follow in Charlie Brown's footsteps.
Fantagraphics will publish the first book in a 25-volume series,Hank Ketcham's Complete Dennis the Menace, in early September. Theseries will run 11 years and reprint every Dennis the Menacenewspaper strip drawn by Ketcham -- nearly 11,000 strips spanningmore than 44 years.
The 624-page first volume will reprint the first two years (1951-53) of the cartoon life of the mischievous lad who bedevils hisparents and neighbors. The company also will republish Ketcham'sautobiography as a companion to the first volume. The cartoonist wasborn in Seattle and died in 2001 at age 81.
"Dennis is everybody's kid," said Ketcham's widow, Rolande. "He'sa lovable guy who gets into trouble but in a nice way." She had neverheard of Fantagraphics until she saw its Peanuts anthology and itsproposal to reprint Dennis.
"They did a lovely job on Peanuts, and we are quite flattered thatthey are doing Dennis, too," she said.
Fantagraphics was on the verge of going broke just two years ago.Four best-selling Peanuts reprint editions and a boom in the graphicnovel industry helped turn around the struggling Seattle company.
"Compared to where we were two years ago, we're quite prosperousnow," said company president Gary Groth.
The first volume of The Complete Peanuts was published in spring2004 and has since sold 110,000 copies. It was the firstFantagraphics product to hit the New York Times list of best sellersin the company's 29 years. The second volume has more than 100,000copies in print, and the third and fourth volumes each have more than80,000. Each volume has a retail list price of $28.95.
Fantagraphics had long been known for underground and alternativecomics rather than family fare such as Peanuts, but a friendshipbetween Peanuts creator Charles Schulz and Groth helped the companyland the deal. After Schulz died in 2000, his widow, Jean, helped getthe project off the ground.
"She helped us cut through all the red tape and convinced thesyndicate that this was a good thing," Groth said.
"For a small independent publishing company to get a license forthe biggest cartoon character in the world was surprising," said EricReynolds, a special projects editor at Fantagraphics. "It's been thebiggest thing we've ever done."
Charlie Brown and his pals have an almost universal appeal.
"He has hope, but knows there is always the possibility offailure," said M. Thomas Inge, a humanities professor at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Va., who has curated exhibits on comics artfor the Smithsonian Institution. "He's a loser, but he's alwaystrying to get ahead."
Dennis the Menace, on the other hand, persists in being thetroublesome child but also has a universality. "Dennis explores newenvironments, he challenges parental authority. We can all relate tohim because almost every family has a child like this."
Marcus Hamilton, who took over the strip after Ketcham retired in1994, said that the first volume of reprints might surprise longtimefans who view Dennis as a mischievous but harmless little kid. "Thestrip was a little more risque when it first started," he said. Inone early panel, Dennis tied a swan's neck in a knot.
Inspired by his "rambunctious" young son, Ketcham created Dennisin 1951, and the strip started running in 16 newspapers. It reached100 papers by the end of its first year, and now Dennis trails onlyCharlie Brown in cartoon popularity. Dennis appears daily in morethan 1,000 newspapers in 48 countries, and is translated into 19languages.
Ketcham's autobiography, The Merchant of Dennis the Menace, wasoriginally published in 1990. The new version will have vintagephotos of Ketcham's childhood home, family photos, early sketches andmany other illustrations.
Fantagraphics hopes that the continuing boom in graphic novelswill help the Dennis books.
Graphic novel sales have quadrupled over the last five years, saidJim Killen, a buyer for Barnes & Noble, chiefly because the number ofmovies and other media projects based on graphic novels hasincreased. Also, the explosion of Japanese graphic novels hasattracted readership among diverse groups.
Fantagraphics began as a trade magazine called the Comics Journalin Washington, D.C., before moving to Seattle in 1989. It laterpublished comics by Robert Crumb and other underground artists.Alternative-type comics has remained its primary business, althoughit has also reprinted collections of classic newspaper strips Pogo,Prince Valiant and Krazy Kat.
Other Fantagraphics titles include Ghost World, which inspired a2001 film about two cynical teens. The screenplay by Daniel Clowesand Terry Zwigoff was nominated for an Academy Award.
Fantagraphics almost went belly-up in 2003, when it was about$200,000 in debt and facing the prospect of more losses from thebankruptcy of a distributor. The company was saved by a frantic last-minute promotional campaign, in which it implored customers andretailers to buy more Fantagraphics products. The campaign yieldedmore than $100,000 in new purchases, Groth said, and the success ofthe Peanuts book "got us over the hump."
The company now publishes about 50 books and 25 comics annually,with most of these publications being of the alternative orunderground bent.
"We're still a bunch of weirdos," Groth said. "We just hide itbetter these days."
AP
