The Los Angeles–based independent publisher and animation studio Fantoons launched 10 years ago with a plan to become what founders David Calcano and Linda Otero call a “360” organization: a studio that produces works across multiple mediums, including film, merchandise, music videos, and, of course, books.
The company was initially established on a shoestring budget and dedicated to celebrating the works of musicians Calcano and Otero loved. Shortly thereafter, it saw crowdfunding success for its first print book, Rush Toons by Fantoons, Vol. 2112, by Calcano himself. Since then, Fantoons has inked a distribution deal with Simon & Schuster and has expanded its book publishing segment, growing to include 4-6 books per season across the art book, children's book, coloring book, and graphic novel categories.
Though the publisher continues to produce across multiple mediums, Fantoons has become a book publisher that punches above its weight: Neil Peart: The Illustrated Quotes, a further book on Rush by Calcano, hit PW’s bestseller list in 2021, and the press has published works on artists as wide-ranging as Billie Holiday and Mötorhead; a forthcoming title, The Extraordinary Life of Henry Mancini, will feature an introduction by the film composer Hans Zimmer.
PW sat down with Calcano to discuss the studio’s beginnings, present success, and future projects.
How did Fantoons start and what was the mission around the time of its founding?
We started with something I always dreamed about: I've always been a gigantic music fan and lover of animation and comics, and I always wanted to combine the two. I wanted to tell stories that are meaningful and stay with you. Both music and animated movies and cartoons made my life better, and I wanted to do the same for people. It's my true self in a way.
When I told my mom and my dad that I wanted to be a writer, they were like, “You are absolutely insane. You're going to be starving.” I understand they were just looking after me. Writing is a hard career, and it is extremely competitive. And at the time, there was not a lot of industry where I was living. I'm from Venezuela. I ended up studying and later working in engineering. I didn't like it. And to make it even more stupid is that I studied engineering at first because I like robotics and robots and stuff like that.
I was always a nerd at heart. Venezuela was going through a very rough patch, I didn't see any opportunities, and I was just married to my sweetheart Linda Otero, co-founder of Fantoons—I wouldn't have been able to start a studio without her. We didn't see future there. I started to look for opportunities elsewhere.
Being a creative, it really feels like an impossible career, at times. You ended up working in robotics. What led you towards animation, and books?
I found a job in London. Being an immigrant, you have to go through a lot of hurdles at the beginning. You feel like you're basically a Martian. You feel like you don't belong. But I couldn't get out of my job to pursue my passion, writing for animation and comics because I needed the money to survive; my visa was tied to my job. I mean, there's a million different reasons, but I started studying script development at night at the National Film and Television school in London. Once I got my residency, I started working part time to help start the studio.
I started doing cold calls; it was just me and Linda trying to get it started. It still breaks my heart just thinking about it. The beginning was really rough. There were people throwing the door in my face and, you're putting yourself out there and it's kind of like walking naked in the street. So it broke my heart a million times. But there's one thing I have, which is resilience. I'm like Rocky, I get up every single time over and over again, because I love this so much. I wanted to do this. And I knew that I would be unhappy if I didn't do this; it's the only thing I wanted to do.
Fantoons began in the animation space, long before it delved into publishing.
We started publishing parodies online of the bands that I loved. We created cereal boxes of Rush album covers; we would create animation strips of anecdotes a band creating a song... things like that. We made every possible mistake you could imagine, like going super-wide in genre thinking that people that would like Rush would like Nat King Cole because I love both, when that's really not the case.
So we started to focus on bands that I loved the most within a certain genre, and we started with rock more than anything. That's really what started the whole publishing thing.
This was before the Kickstarter that funded the first Fantoons book?
I said basically, “Well, why don't I do a Kickstarter?” We created a lot of the Rush-related illustrations and comics that started to go viral. It was really nerdy stuff, like we would do Geddy Lee as “Jedi Lee” like as a jedi and people really loved the lightheartedness of what we were doing. So I wanted to see if people would pay for a book and maybe I can approach the band because the goal for me was always to work with the bands that I loved, work with them to hopefully get more fans into the music that I love telling the great story behind making the music that they make. I thought we were going to get two cents, only to find out that the Kickstarter got 11 times what Fantoons originally asked.
I sent that book to the band and I didn't hear back, but when I saw Eddie Trunk at an event in L.A., he said he loved the book and contacted people in Rush's management. After that, they called me because they wanted to sell the book in their store.
After the Kickstarter, what came next? It's always so fascinating to see how a publisher evolves across its first couple years.
After the Kickstarter, I thought maybe we could turn Fantoons into a business. I honestly didn't think we could, because I was not part of the necessarily the publishing industry. I still feel like an outsider in many ways, but at the same time, that gives me the advantage to just do what my heart tells me. It's a lot of hard work.
II was jealous that movies get all these cool illustrated books and music is usually only biographies. There's not a lot in the music industry in terms of cool, geeky merchandise and books. So I wanted to do something along those lines. I wanted to create books that had the heart of a fan and that would allow fans to enjoy the music in different ways while also hopefully introducing new fans to the bands. S&S loved the idea, so we started working together ever since. I think we've done probably about eight books so far. Once you have distribution, the conversations with the other bands become a lot easier.
It really opens doors.
Yeah, there is a certain degree of consistency and luck, you know, you do it so many times, that maybe you get the strike of luck that somebody who likes the work will see it. I would still be publishing my books, regardless of Simon & Schuster or not.
The reality for a publisher is sometimes that when you sell directly, that's where you actually make more money to be able to make more books. But seeing our books in so many stores is a beautiful thing. I used to spend my vacation with my dad in Barnes & Noble, looking at all the books, and the fact that our books are there makes me think that my dad would be very proud. My father passed away before all of this; it would have been a beautiful thing for him to see it. He was my best friend, but he never understood my career choice, but he would have understood what this was about if he had seen the books in Barnes and Noble.
Is Fantoons looking to expand beyond music?
We started with animation; animation has always been a big part of what we do. In fact, a lot of what we do in animation helps us fund some of the books that we want to do. I've directed about 20 different music videos; we actively produce animation for different clients, including lots of music videos. We also produce a lot of visuals for bands going on tour. In fact, the very first job I got when I came to LA, was doing the production visuals for Mr. Big for a large tour in Japan.
We produced a music video for Steve Martin’s song, “Santa Fe.” We made Steve Martin laugh. You won't get any better than that. That opened some doors, like working with Universal Music. They wanted us to produce videos for Christmas-related music that didn’t have them. One video was for Frank Sinatra’s “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” That video is very special to me, because it tells a story of an immigrant coming to New York.
In terms of expansion, we have original stories we’re pitching. One of the projects we’re pitching is represented by CAA, a bilingual show we're pitching that dives a bit into my roots. We’re looking to work on bilingual books as well. So our expansion is more from a storytelling point of view. And at the same time, we still have animated projects that we are pitching, and we're hopeful that at some point one will get picked up. You never know.
Fantoons stands out for its "360" approach to publishing. There's such a wide range of types of books you publish. How do you approach the type of book and how it is selected? Is there some is there? Is there a method to the madness? Or is it really just a case by case scenario?
I think it has happened both ways. I mean, I think there's stuff that happens organically. Not every book is a gigantic success. But some of them… the process keeps surprising me. I think it shows in the audience. So, there is a method in the sense that. For example, we have a series called Women in Jazz. We’ve published the first volume, the story of Billie Holiday that I collaborated with the incredible Ebony Gilbert, one of the greatest collaborations of my professional career. Next we're publishing the story of Ella Fitzgerald as a graphic novel.
Ideally, I wanted to do one volume a year. The madness part, though, makes it clear that it doesn't work like that. When you have contracts and all that kind of stuff. It takes time.
How many books per season do you publish?
We normally do about six books per year, either at the beginning of the year, and for Christmas at the end. We tend to launch a lot of them at Comic Con. For example, this year we launched Ozzy Osbourne: The Official Coloring Book, which we're very, very proud of and was a lot of fun to do because they have a great sense of humor. We tend to gravitate towards bands that have a sense of humor. Yeah, we don't tend to work with overly way too serious bands because I guess we're not very serious people.
The "fan" in Fantoons I think really stands out. What's on the docket for Fantoons in the immediate future?
I wrote the official Henry Mancini graphic novel, The Extraordinary Life of Henry Mancini. We have the next volume in the Women in Jazz series, Ella Fitzgerald. We’re going to continue telling stories about film composers. We know their melodies. We know everything about what they put out, but we know nothing about their lives. Next year, were we're launching a new imprint for bilingual books called Ja-Ha, starting with children’s books, and later adults as well. We have the show we’re pitching with CAA called Ana and Robbie. And there's a big project that we are doing with Rush that I cannot talk about yet.
This article has been updated with further information.
