Spotlight on Gary Groth & The Comics Journal

09/12/2026 | 3:00pm – 4:00pm | White Oak Room

Gary Groth is one of the key individuals who thought that comics not only could and should be considered as art, but that its creators could and should be held up to an exacting standard. It all started with The Comics Journal, Fantagraphics’ flagship magazine of journalism, criticism, and interviews that set the iconoclastic tone of the company for the next 50 years. The Comics Journal turned out to be one of the most contentious magazines ever published about an art form at exactly the moment the comics profession needed a contentious magazine to inveigh against a fossilized status quo. Writer Marc Sobel (Reading Love and Rockets) interrogates Groth and revisits the 50-year-long wild ride of The Comics Journal—including its polemical origins, its critical mission, the multiple lawsuits filed against it by writers, artists, and publishers, its controversies, adversaries, milestones, and future.