A panel of local artists and cartoonists came together at this year’s Emerald City Comic Con to discuss the history of Seattle’s underground comics scene, from its origins in the late 1980s to how it looks today.
Author, journalist, and University of Washington professor Rob Salkowitz moderated a discussion that featured Megan Kelso, a Seattle-based artist; Kelly Froh, cartoonist and co-creator of the Short Run Comix Festival; and Eric Reynolds, co-publisher at the indie comics label Fantagraphics in Georgetown.
Legendary Washington cartoonist Roberta Gregory and Mad Magazine’s Marc Palm were both originally scheduled to attend the panel, but were forced to stay home due to catching COVID.
Instead, Gregory sent a recorded video message to the panel, to share some memories of her time as a working comic creator in the Seattle community.
In the ’70s and ‘80s, Seattle was already a big city for American comics, owing to the presence of creators like Peter Bagge, Jim Woodring, Lynda Barry, and a young Matt Groening. The turning point, according to Gregory, came when Gary Groth and Kim Thompson moved Fantagraphics’ headquarters to Seattle from Los Angeles.
Fantagraphics has been a cornerstone of independent American comics since 1976, publishing cult titles such as Acme Novelty Library, Hip Hop Family Tree, and Love and Rockets. It’s also known for localizing European comics for the American audience, its erotica imprint Eros Comix, and its hardcover collections of classic newspaper strips such as Peanuts, Nancy, and Krazy Kat.
“A lot of the big boom in comics in Seattle happened when Fantagraphics came to town,” Gregory said. “By 1989, Seattle had its own sort of comics scene. There was a tabloid newspaper, the Seattle Star, that published comics, and Comics F/X, published by Edd Vick, a tabloid paper with comics, interviews with local artists, and ads for their comics.”
Gregory moved to Seattle at the same time Fantagraphics did, in 1989, and got a job working for the company. She subsequently published her anthology Naughty Bits through Fantagraphics from 1991 to 2004.
“There was a lot going on,” she said. “I was living in L.A. at the time and things were getting expensive. Seattle seemed like a place where you could have a high quality of life on not much income. People moved to Seattle just to get involved with its comics scene.”
That scene was created by what Kelso called a “perfect storm.” In the early 1990s, Seattle featured multiple small-press publishers besides Fantagraphics, such as Sasquatch Books; alternative newspapers and magazines like the Star, the Rocket, and the Stranger, all of which printed comics from area cartoonists; and the growing music community, which frequently hired locals to draw or paint album covers.
“While this was happening in the 1990s, there was an awareness that [Seattle] was a special place for comics,” Salkowitz said.
The Seattle scene was fueled by regular community events, such as Woodring and Bob Rini’s “Friends of the Nib” and the monthly Dune comics jam, which used to be held on the third Tuesday of every month at Café Racer in Ballard.
Dune’s organizers would gather the drawings created every month at Dune and assemble them into a mini-comic, which would be distributed to the attendees at the next jam.
The Dune comics jam managed to survive multiple upheavals over the years, such as a 2012 mass shooting at Café Racer, but has yet to officially reconvene after the COVID lockdowns in 2020. It does continue as a Facebook group, but according to Froh, it’s been difficult to get all parties to agree on a physical location for the revival.
Many artists in Seattle, in the 1990s through to today, put out short, self-published zines. Without easy access to inexpensive color printing, most of those early ‘90s zines were in black-and-white, and often made with a photocopier. A useful example from the period is Dawn Anderson’s Seattle music fanzine Backlash.
“There were a lot of people making zines in Olympia at that point,” Kelso said. “The whole idea of self-service copies was pretty new back then, so all the ‘zine girls clued me in. ‘You can just go in and do it all yourself.’ That’s how I made my first comic.”
Kelso subsequently received a grant from the Xeric Foundation, which had been created and run by Peter Laird, co-creator of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. That let her self-publish six issues of her comic Girlhero. Since then, she’s released several more books through Fantagraphics and created a mural, “Crow Commute,” for the Climate Pledge Arena in Seattle.
In the 2000s, both Seattle and its comics community began to change, due to the influx of money from the newly dominant tech sector, new innovations in color printing, and the growing prominence of the internet.
Some of the core members of the community subsequently left the city or the state. Peter Bagge decamped to Tacoma, while Jim Woodring moved to Vashon Island. Kelso left Seattle for New York in 2001, and returned six years later to a city that she barely recognized.
“The low stakes were a large part of the [comics] community,” Reynolds said. “You really saw it in the music scene, where the money really changed it. I don’t think the money changed comics, so much as the money that came into the city changed the culture for all of us.”
“To bring it more to the present,” he continued, “it’s remarkable how the city still has one of the most vibrant comic communities around. It’s managed to survive in a way that’s pretty interesting, because by all accounts it really shouldn’t have.”
In 2024, that community in Seattle is built around local fixtures such as the Fantagraphics Bookstore & Gallery on South Vale Street, alongside publications like Intruder, a free quarterly collection that’s exclusively open to Seattle-based contributors. New artists can visit Paper Press Punch in Georgetown for regular ‘zine exchanges and potentially free printing.
“If you move to town and don’t know where to start, just go [into the Fantagraphics Bookstore] and talk to Larry Reid, the curator/manager,” said Froh. “He’ll tell you the next thing he knows that’s happening in the comics scene, and he’ll help you to reach out.”
Froh also runs the Short Run expo, which will return to the Fisher Pavilion at the Seattle Center on Nov. 2. It’s a free one-day event that’s devoted to art and comics from local creators in Seattle and Portland. Froh co-founded Short Run with Eroyn Franklin, Martine Workman, and Jenny Gialenes in 2011.
“I’m very proud of how [Short Run] has unearthed how many comic artists we still have here,” Froh said. “I really try to bring as many people with any kind of footing in Seattle comics history to stay with us, and for new pop artists to keep coming in.”
The panel agreed, in the end, that while Seattle’s comics community doesn’t look the same in 2024, it’s working as hard as it can to stick around.
“I’m from Seattle,” said Kelso. “I’m a die-hard Seattleite. They’ll have to drag me kicking and screaming out… I teach a comics class at Hugo House now, and the one thing I keep hearing from my students is ‘How do I find a community?’”
“Well, start with Short Run,” she continued. “Go to the Fantagraphics Bookstore. Get your comics printed at Paper Press Punch. There are all these little locations and communities that are interconnected. We worry about Seattle’s soul and Seattle’s future, but we’re hanging on.”
“Everyone in this room knows what alternative comics are, but the best thing that any of you can do is reach out to the people in your life who don’t read comics,” said Froh. “We need to make more fans. If we want the survival of arts and culture, we have to show up for things.”