LitHub: THE ORIGIN STORIES OF 21 INDIE PRESSES SUPERHERO SMALL PUBLISHERS AND THEIR FIRST-EVER BOOKS

DRAWN & QUARTERLY, 1992

The Playboy, Chester Brown

Origin story: “In 1992, D+Q was only a few years old, and our founder Chris Oliveros went after Chester Brown almost immediately. Chester kept holding Chris at bay because he saw no reason to leave Vortex [Comics]. Chris eventually offered Chester more money, which is funny to think about since the independent comics industry was so scrappy back then. After more than three years of publishing the D+Q anthology, which was a stapled comic book, The Playboy was D+Q’s first actual graphic novel. The book shows D+Q’s prescience of the coming graphic novel age. At the time, there were very few graphic novels. For a micro-publisher, books were also five times more expensive to print, so it really was a leap of faith on Chris’s part that this is what was right for Chester and the comic, and that The Playboy would find an audience.”  – Peggy Burns, Publisher