Worldwide Attention Over 'Funny Pages'
"It started just by being a diligent comics reader at a very early age," Thompson says.
In the late 70s he met Gary Groth, and together they put out a comics fan magazine.
"We both edited the magazine," he says. "We started publishing comics around 1981."
Their firm, Fantagraphic Books, has put out a number of titles over the years, including "Los Tejanos" and "Hugo." But last year, the pair hit what's considered the "mother lode" in their business, the "Holy Grail" of comics.
Fantagraphics will publish the entire series of Peanuts comics in chronological order.
The duo began talking to Peanuts creator Charles Schultz in the late 90s about putting out the entire collection.
"It was always, I think, a dream of ours, but we had assumed it would be impossible to do," says Thompson.
Schultz passed away before the project got off the ground. But thanks to his widow, the collection is now in print. Volumes one and two are out, and Fantagraphics is getting a lot of attention.
"We receive an enormous amount of publicity over this, more than we've received for everything else we've done so far," says Thompson.
Charlie Brown and the gang have been around almost five decades, so it will take about 12 more years to publish the complete series.
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