Sociocultural goals are all well and good, but they don’t matter as much if the work doesn’t shine. However, as Mr. Sturm said, “D&Q’s list is like the ’27 Yankees.” Besides the cartoonists it nurtured in the 1990s, like Ms. Doucet, Seth, Chester Brown and Adrian Tomine, D&Q has also provided occasional shelter for established veterans like Chris Ware, R. Crumb, Daniel Clowes and Art Spiegelman. And the curatorial eye of Mr. Oliveros, who stepped down as publisher to focus on his own cartooning, has extended far beyond North America. D&Q has published cartoonists from six continents — no frostbitten funnies from Antarctica yet, though.

“They’re all one of a kind,” Mr. Oliveros, who will still acquire books, said of his artists. “In that sense, their work belongs together.”

As with EC in the 1950s and Marvel in the ’60s, a singular sensibility — in this case Mr. Oliveros’s — presides over a Drawn & Quarterly age of comics. Not bad for a company that started as one guy working in a corner in a small apartment in the Mile End neighborhood of Montreal. (D&Q’s offices now sit in a former garment factory just north of Mile End.) “Chris took for granted that an audience existed for art comics,” the veteran D&Q artist Seth said. “And Chris didn’t interfere. There was no second-guessing.”

Seth added that D&Q’s encouragement of women — its list tends to be 50-50, male-female — flowed from Mr. Oliveros. “Chris has such a gentle personality. It’s a nonmasculine, noncompetitive environment that reflects how art comics have become much more of a women’s world.”

Ms. Burns, who joined the company in 2003, said that gender change is also reflected in D&Q’s customers. “At least half of our readers are female,” said Ms. Burns, who oversees a staff of 16 women and three men that puts out 20 to 30 books a year. “Women just naturally gravitate toward our list.”