For many years now, Andrew Farago has been the curator at The Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco, overseeing art exhibitions featuring some of the greatest artists in comics. He’s also written a number of non-fiction books including The Looney Tunes Treasury, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Ultimate Visual History, and wrote the introductions to the collections of Bobby London’s Popeye.

The Cartoon Art Museum has had to deal with the problem that so many people, businesses and organizations have had to deal with in San Francisco -- rising rents. It forced them from their old location, but the museum has just reopened in a new location in the city with new exhibitions, including Mike Mignola’s Hellboy and the Art of Raina Telgemeier.

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If that weren’t enough, Farago has three books he’s written out this fall -- Totally Awesome: The Greatest Cartoons of the Eighties, The Complete Peanuts Family Album and The Art of Harley Quinn -- so CBR caught up with him to talk about all of that.

CBR: For people who don’t know, what is the Cartoon Art Museum?

Andrew Farago: The Cartoon Art Museum was founded in San Francisco in 1984 by an art collector, author and publisher named Malcolm Whyte. He and some like-minded friends got together to start the Cartoon Art Museum as a way to share their collections and their love of cartoons and comics.

With the help of other collectors and artists, including Charles M. Schulz and his wife, Jeannie, they established the Cartoon Art Museum as the only museum of its kind in the western United States. We've got a full slate of exhibitions every year, ranging from 1800s illustration to contemporary animation and graphic novels.

Our mission has grown to include a big educational component, too, with classes and workshops for aspiring artists of all ages.

We left our previous location in the fall of 2015, when escalating Bay Area rents forced us to move out, but we've just reopened in a great new facility in San Francisco's historic Fisherman's Wharf district.

You have a busy fall for other reasons, as well. Do you want to say a little about the books coming out?

In the span of five weeks, the Cartoon Art Museum is reopening and I've got three new cartoon history books hitting the shelves. I started on the first one almost three years ago, the second a year ago and the third one back in February, and they're all coming out one after the other -- in the opposite order of when I started writing them. Go figure.

I like to keep busy, I guess. I fit in research and writing time whenever I can -- nights, weekends, lunch breaks, during my son's nap time -- it's rare that I'm not thinking about cartoons. I'm very, very fortunate that sitting down with a Calvin and Hobbes collection or kicking back with the new season of Voltron on Netflix counts as "work" in my world.

The first book out is The Complete Peanuts Family Album, a fun reference book for every Peanuts fan. It's a guide to all of the characters Charles M. Schulz created in his 50-year run on the strip. Every character who got a name, plus all the important unnamed characters, like The Little Red-Haired Girl. I provide an overview of each character's in-strip history, and the book's illustrated with relevant strips, spot illustrations by Schulz, rarely-seen production art and some new material created especially for the book.

Second is The Art of Harley Quinn, a complete history of Harley as a DC Comics character. I've been a fan of Harley's since day one, her first appearance as the Joker's sidekick in the Batman: The Animated Series episode "Joker's Favor," and it was a lot of fun reading all of her appearances in DC Comics, watching her evolve and grow as a character over the course of 25 years, and, best of all, interviewing the people who worked on those comics.

In addition to Paul Dini and Bruce Timm, who co-created the character, I talked to comics legend Denny O'Neil, favorite cartoonists including Ty Templeton and Karl Kesel, and the current Harley team supreme of Jimmy Palmiotti, Amanda Conner, Chad Hardin and John Timms. Amanda drew my all-time favorite Harley illustration for the cover, and it's an oversized 11" x 14" hardcover to really showcase all the great art from Amanda, Bruce, Terry Dodson, Mike Parobeck, Jim Lee and the other great artists who've worked on Harley's comics.

The third book, Totally Awesome: The Greatest Cartoons of the Eighties was either three or almost 40 years in the making. Chris Prince of Insight Editions, who'd edited my previous book, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Ultimate Visual History, called me up and asked if I'd be interested in doing a follow-up that covered TMNT plus a dozen more cartoons. I came up with a list of about 30 favorites, and we narrowed that down to about 20, in part so this didn't turn into a 10-year project.

I spent about a year conducting interviews and tracking down artwork for the book, about a year writing and revising the book, and then we spent about a year coordinating the publication with all of the different studios and copyright holders involved. No one's done an officially licensed book quite like this one before, and I'm glad I had Insight Editions to sort through all of that.

I feel like there are a lot of obscure Peanuts characters whose names none of us can remember. Like I know Snoopy had a lot of siblings but other than Spike and Olaf, I don’t think I could name them. Should we know any of these characters?

I'm biased, but Olaf's brother and traveling companion, Andy, has the best name in the strip, right? He's a fun character, though, and helps keep his brother grounded. Andy's drawn just like Snoopy, but shaggier, and was based on Charles Schulz's own dog of the same name.

Their sister, Belle, didn't get to show much of her personality in the strip, and she's had a much bigger impact in licensing than she did in the comic. The same is true of her brother, Marbles, who looks like a speckled version of Snoopy, and only figured into a week or two of strips in the early '80s. Out of all of Snoopy's family, Spike was the one who really seemed to click, and Schulz drew dozens of great strips featuring his adventures in the desert of Needles, California.

Having immersed myself in the strip for the past six months (plus my whole life before that), I can talk for hours about Peanuts, from Charlie Brown and Snoopy all the way down to Lila, who only appeared in a single, yet very memorable, panel.

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The subtitle of Totally Awesome is “The Greatest Cartoons of the Eighties” -- so I have to ask, what are the five best cartoons of the '80s?

Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends was my absolute favorite from the early '80s. I planned my Saturday mornings around that one, no matter how many times the episodes had already aired. The writing holds up pretty well, the character designs were inspired by John Romita Sr.'s art, and at least a few of the episodes had some of the top animation studios working on them.

Like most boys who grew up in the '80s, I raced home from school every weekday to catch G.I. Joe and Transformers, back to back from 4 p.m. to 5 p.m. where I grew up. I bought the toys, read the comics, and years before I even knew I'd be writing Totally Awesome, I bought the complete DVD collections.

The studio behind those shows, Sunbow, also produced Jem, a series that I watched every Saturday morning. Christy Marx created an outrageous cast of characters (had to say that), and since we didn't have cable when I was a kid, that was the next best thing to having MTV. Plus I had a huge crush on Jerrica, Jem's alter ego.

It's hard to pick a fifth one, just like it was hard to narrow down the list for my book, but I'll mention Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for my fifth choice, or Kevin Eastman will give me a hard time about it next time I see him. My three-year-old son loves TMNT, too, so that's a safe pick.

How is putting together a book like The Art of Harley Quinn like curating a gallery show?

At the outset of a show or a book, I have the basic concept in mind, then I start doing all the legwork. For a Harley Quinn exhibition, I'd make a list of the most notable artists who worked on her comics, then I'd track down artists and collectors to figure out what's available, and I'd build up a show based on what I could locate.

For The Art of Harley Quinn book, I had access to literally every page of Harley art that DC had ever published. It was tempting to just fill the book with nothing but Bruce Timm's art from Mad Love, but I had to pick a selection of images that illustrated each era of Harley. The early books based on Batman: The Animated Series, her first appearance in the DC Universe during the big No Man's Land crossover, the Karl Kesel/Terry Dodson solo series, all the fun alternate reality versions of Harley, the Amanda Conner/ Jimmy Palmiotti era... it was a lot of fun, but I was reading comics 'round the clock to make my art selections.

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You have three new exhibitions to open the new space at the museum. What are they?

The biggest show in our opening lineup is “Smile! The Comics of Raina Telgemeier,” and it features work from her four "solo" graphic novels as well as her Baby-Sitters Club graphic novels. Raina's a San Francisco native, a friend and a true comics superstar, and she was always my first choice for our opening exhibition at the new Cartoon Art Museum.

We've also got “A Tribute to Mike Mignola's Hellboy,” an exhibition featuring 35 artists who created Hellboy artwork for the Cartoon Art Museum for an online fundraiser auction we held this past spring and summer. Mike very graciously allowed us to organize the fundraiser, and through the tireless efforts of our board of directors, especially John Butler, and with a big assist from Felix Lu of Felix Comic Art and his stable of artists, we were able to hit the ground running when renovations wrapped up at our new space.

Our third exhibition features another of my favorite artists, Nidhi Chanani, a Bay Area artist whose first graphic novel, Pashmina, kicks off our Emerging Artists Showcase. Introducing our patrons to new and emerging artists has always been a high priority for me as a curator, and I'm glad we're able to continue those efforts at the new Cartoon Art Museum.

Art by Kent Willams.

Whose work is in the Hellboy show?

We've got a lot of great friends in comics and animation, and we were floored by how many of them offered to help out when we told them about our auction plans. Jeffrey Brown, Sam Kieth, Mike's longtime pal Steve Purcell, Cliff Chiang, Kent Willams -- every single piece in the show is a knockout. And Mike Mignola himself donated a piece for the auction, and that's the highlight of the show. I love that I'll get to look at a Mignola Hellboy drawing every day when I come into the office -- for the next few months, at least.

Tell me about what’s in the Raina show?

Since Raina lives in San Francisco, I was able to visit her studio and we were able to pick some of her favorite sequences from Smile, Sisters, Ghosts and Drama, as well as The Baby-Sitters Club graphic novels. Longtime fans of her work are going to love this exhibition, but I think anyone who sees this show is going to walk away with a deep (or new) appreciation of her work.

We've got some "deep cuts," too – copies of Raina's earliest minicomics, her actual dental records and photos taken by her orthodontist dating back to the period when the events in Smile occurred, plus I've got some other surprises we'll roll out as the exhibition progresses. The Cartoon Art Museum's program coordinator and education director Nina Taylor Kester has some fun interactive activities planned, too, and we'll be working closely with Raina to develop those.

The Cartoon Art Museum is (re-)open 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Thursdays through Tuesdays (closed Wednesdays) at 781 Beach Street, San Francisco.