Jacq Cohen ankles Fantagraphics; and more comings and goings

Shock waves rippled across the comics world late Wednesday when Fantagraphics Executive Director of Marketing, Communications, & Publicity Jacq Cohen announced she is leaving for a new venture:

After 15 beautiful years, I am ending my tenure at Fantagraphics. This was not an easy decision, but an offer has come my way that I can’t pass up. Endless gratitude to Eric Reynolds and Gary Groth for being more than my mentors, but two of my dearest friends.

In her position, Cohen was as synonymous with Fantagraphics’ line of literary and adventurous graphic novels as her fellow stalwarts, founder Gary Groth and associate publisher Eric Reynolds. There was never a bigger advocate for Fantagraphics and their cartoonists. It will definitely be a shock to stop by the Fanta booth at a show and not see a smiling Jacq in her amazing colorblock wardrobe, telling us all about their latest books. Whatever she’s up to next, it has to be a doozy of a job and they will be lucky to have her.

(Photo from The Comics Reporter – I know I have some photos of Jacq in my 50,000 photo library, but I’m going to swap it out later.)

Other comings and goings of late:

Tiny Onion, James Tynion’s IV new content studio, has added FOUR new staffers, DeAna Avila as production manager, Steve Foxe as editor, Greg Lockard as talent manager, and Antonio Guanaes as our executive assistant. They join Tynion, Courtney Menard, Eric Harburn and Jazzlyn Stone at what can only be called a mini-major with all that talent on board.

DeAna Avila, Production Manager

DeAna Avila is the Production Manager for Tiny Onion. She comes from a background in Production at Z2 Comics, and worked on titles including Miles Davis and the Search for the Sound, Iron Maiden: Piece Of Mind, and Broken Social Scene: You Forgot It In People. She works and resides in Los Angeles with her dog, Fincher. She enjoys the smell of a burger, and a brand new comic book.

Steve Foxe, Editor

Steve Foxe is the editor of W0RLDTR33, The Deviant, and the multiple-Eisner-nominated The Department of Truth at Image Comics. He is the co-creator of Razorblades alongside James Tynion IV. Beyond his work with Tiny Onion, he has been a freelance editor for First Second since 2020, overseeing New York Times bestselling titles like Agents of S.U.I.T.; was the editor for Paste Magazine’s comic section (when it existed); and spent five years at Knopf Books for Young Readers, an imprint of Penguin Random House. You may also know him from his writing, which includes titles like Dark X-Men, X-Men ’97, Spider-Woman, the Eisner Award-nominated Creepshow anthology, the Eisner and Ringo Award-nominated Rainbow Bridge, and the Spider-Ham series from Scholastic. He lives somewhere cold with his partner and their dog.

  Greg Lockard, Talent Manager

Greg Lockard is an editor and writer of comic books. He has written and co-created two graphic novels: TRICK PONY with artist/co-creator Anna David and LIEBESTRASSE with artist/co-creator Tim Fish. LIEBESTRASSE was nominated as an “Outstanding Comic Book” for the 2020 GLAAD Media Awards and listed by the New York Times as one of 10 Comic Books to Celebrate Pride. With over fifteen years in the industry, Lockard began his career at DC Comics in the Talent Relations department and later the editorial team of the Vertigo imprint. Working freelance since 2015, editorial clients and their publishers have included: Dark Horse Comics, Image Comics, Comixology Originals, DSTLRY, the Stout Club, and more. He lives and works in Jersey City with enough houseplants to qualify as “rainforest.”

Antonio Guanaes, Executive Assistant

A recent media business management master’s graduate with a background in computer science, Antonio Guanaes has done everything from helping develop an event-search mobile app startup, Minimap, to working on the development of budding film and TV projects at Hungry Man, one of the world’s leading commercial production houses. Now, he works as Tiny Onion’s executive assistant, ensuring tasks big and small are handled smoothly and on time. A resident of New York City, Antonio loves music and comic books, but his greatest passion is film.

I don’t know what Tiny Onion is cooking up, but they have already set the bar for hiring announcements with their fancy duotone headshots. Seriously, this is gonna be big.

§ Graeme McMillan has joined Popverse as editor, replacing the departing Tiffany Babb. Graeme was already employed at Popverse as #1 reporter/lid ripper, but he’ll have even more duties and time to plot and plan with EIC Chris Arrant.

This isn’t really a person, but last week Multiversity Comics, one of the stalwarts of comics coverage on the web, announced they would be shutting down in September after 15 years of invaluable coverage. Editor Brian Salvatore explained why:

The first reason is that, over the past four years, we’ve seen a precipitous decline in our staff, and a less robust field of new writers to step forward. No doubt the pandemic had a role to play in this, but also the changes in the general blogging and specifically comics journalism spaces online had a hand in it.

The second reason is that the cost of running the site has approximately doubled in the last two years. While our meager advertising used to cover 80-90% of site costs, in 2023 and 2024, it covered less than half most months. This is unsustainable. We did not add new services or features that we had to pay for, the cost of Google Business Suite and other subscriptions simply rose.

The third reason is exhaustion. Speaking personally, I’ve been writing for MC since 2011, editing since 2012, and running the site since 2015. But it’s not just my exhaustion; last year was the first time in a long time we didn’t have enough participants for a summer binge series. We had no quorum for Year in Review stuff; our staff is tired, too. Instead of everyone keeping up a good face, it seemed like the right time to pull the plug before we were even more depleted.

As I close in on 20 years of near daily writing/blogging, I can certainly identify with all of the above. It doesn’t help that Google is waging war on small sites that cover niche topics – and by waging war, I mean actively obliterating them. How will you train AI on content when you killed all the content, dumbass.

There are no real competitors in the tiny trenches of covering comics, just colleagues, and I mourn the loss of Multiversity and their talented staff – many Beat writers also wrote for them, and their coverage was always professional and thoughtful. And I always admired their smart homepage with the rounded thumbnails…how do you get WordPress to do that, anyway?

Every time I write one of these comics site obits I reiterate…the Beat is still here. But it gets harder every day.

Anyway, good luck to all the Multiversity ex-pats. I’m sure some of them will pop up again after they’ve rested up a bit..at least I hope so.