RIP, Kim Thompson

Kim Thompson, my publisher and translator at Fantagraphics, has passed away. I owe the man my career as a cartoonist. If he hadn't taken a chance on publishing Hey, Wait... back in 2001, I'm not sure where I would be today. The English and French editions of my books have made it possible for me to make a living drawing comics, a dream I was uncertain of ever achieving only fifteen years ago. Even the books he and Gary Groth published made a difference in my life. Love & Rockets, Eightball, Hate, Frank... I discovered these comics when I had grown tired of a lot of the French - Belgian albums I read in the eighties. They were well drawn, but there was also a distance to my own life. The Fantagraphics comics, together with the Drawn & Quarterly ones, spoke to me in a totally different way. So what do you do, when you start doing your own comics, in a small country of four million people? You hope maybe to reach a wider audience, in the rest of the world, translated into English, maybe even at... Fantagraphics?! And for some reason, it happened. I'm still not sure how. But I still remember the e-mail from Kim, saying they wanted to publish my book. And my life as a cartoonist began.

Thanks for doing a great job with the translation of my stories, for inviting me to Seattle, for meeting you and Lynn, for driving me out to Roslyn where they filmed Northern Exposure, for e-mail exchanges about Brian De Palma, and most of all for a dream come true. I will miss you, Kim. Hvil i fred...