I’ve been dipping into this book now and then over the past month or so.
It’s is a book about a Swedish 80s comics publisher. The publisher was called Epix, and published a bewildering array of anthologies with names like Pox, Maxx and Tung Metall. They mostly reprinted stuff from 70s and 80s French/Italian/Spanish anthologies, and also American indie/underground stuff.
So kinda like if… somebody like Fantagraphics published mostly anthologies like Weirdo and Heavy Metal? But a lot of them. Something like that.
They were controversial at the time, and were finally taken to court for publishing too many sexually violent things. Among the evidence was a strip by Dori Seda. So… normal 80s stuff.
But here’s the twist: They were acquitted, but still went under, because the distribution monopoly at the time did one of those wonderful late-yuppie post-deregulation things: It split into two separate companies, where one would distribute all indie things, and the other company would distribute all major publisher things (and the latter company would also be owned by those companies).
So what do you think happened? Yes, of course — the small press distributor went bankrupt, and the other distributor didn’t have anything to do with them, so Epix (among many other smaller magazine publishers) had to stop publishing anyway.
That’s a very creative solution to getting rid of competition. If the former distributor monopoly had said “no, we’re dropping all these smaller companies”, that would have been an outrage. Instead, by using these corporate actions, they could do exactly that, and nobody could object. Much. (Although Epix tried to sue them.)
Shades of what would later happen in the US with Diamond/Heroes World.
Anyway, this book consists mostly of interview snippets edited together. I think they call these things “oral histories”? I’m not fond of the genre, but it works quite well here. The main problem with this approach is usually that a person will say something interesting, but then there’s no followup because they have nobody else talking about the same thing.
This book does not have that problem: Even if it’s formatted as an oral history, and there’s no trace of the interviewer(s) here, whenever somebody says something interesting, they ask other people about what’s been said and get a response.
So it makes for an entertaining read, especially since the owner and boss of Epix got into fights with absolutely everybody. It sounds like every day at the crowded office was a shouting match.
Other things happened — his ex-wife took (he says “kidnapped”, which may be formally correct) their son off to Trinidad, and he used the cover of an issue to announce a reward for information about his whereabouts, for instance.
They were also prosecuted for distributing violent porn (Dori Seda and… Neil Gaiman! (a retelling of a Bible story)), and while acquitted, this led to a 30% reduction in sales.
And Gary Groth claimed that Epix never paid Fantagraphics for using their material. Epix claims that Kim Thompson found out that Groth had just put the money into an account he’d forgotten about, but the situation led to threats from Mary Fleener, anyway. Peter Bagge comments laconically that it wouldn’t be the first time that Fantagraphics put foreign royalties into some “wrong” bank account.
I’m not Swedish, so I’ve barely read any of what Epix published, but I’ve been trying to buy issues of Pox and Epix, but it’s not easy.
Looking over what I have managed to find, these seem like really good magazines. It looks like they basically have everything that’s good from 70s and 80s European and American underground/indie/art/etc comics. Their magazines were monthly, and usually around 100 pages each, so they just published a lot of stuff.
And the reproduction seems nice, and the hand lettering is fantastic.
I guess I should just start reading these comics, even if I don’t have a complete set. I’m kinda raring to go after reading this book about Epix. Hm!
Serier för vuxna – Epix och den svenska serierevolutionen (2024) by Robert Aman (4.16 on Goodreads)