But just in what I already know there's a lot of material available, both new and reprint, comics and text (or a mix of the two), colour and black and white, featuring work by creators like Rick Veitch, Rob Walton, Steve Ditko, Stephen Bissette, Scott Shaw!, Robert Kanigher and Bernie Mireault.
For those not familiar, print-on-demand is pretty much what it says on the tin. The publisher prepares the material for a book, and in the traditional method they go to a printer, order the number of copies they think they need, then sell those copies to wholesale distributors, retailers and individual customers as orders come in, warehousing the unsold copies.
For print-on-demand, the publisher instead makes the files available to various retail outlets which have the ability to print single copies of the books, so when you order the book a new copy can be printed, probably at a printer close to your location (an increasing number of ones I order are printed in Bolton, ON, about a half-hour from where I sit) and sent to you. That retailer/printer pays a royalty to the publisher for every copy they print, and presumably charges you enough to make a profit after adding up the royalty, printing and shipping costs.
This reduces some problems associated with publishing, shipping books around the world, storing most of the print run for an indeterminate time, returns from retailers and more. Of course there's a tradeoff, printing is almost always going to be more expensive per unit, given economies of scale, and quality control can become an issue with production spread across the globe (though I haven't had any issues with books I bought yet).
(and yes, this is all simplified, there are a lot of other aspects, like the fact that the publisher or creator can probably order copies in bulk, possibly without the royalty, to sell on their own to various venues, wholesale, retail, conventions, just as they could with traditionally published books. And I believe many print-on-demand books can be ordered by retailers under similar terms as other books they buy (possibly not including returnability))
Anyway, print-on-demand has been around for a while, but for a while it seemed mostly suited to straight text. There seem to have been considerable advancements made more recently that make it much more suitable for comics, especially black and white comics but increasingly colour comics at a retail price not completely out-of-line with other books.
The tipping point for my awareness of this was, of course, SD Comics entering the field in 2019. This is the company founded by Steve Ditko and Robin Snyder, publishing Ditko's work since 1988. Since 2019 they've been repackaging the working in a growing library of print-on-demand books, including essay collections, five volumes of most of Ditko's work in the last decade of his life, collections of earlier works including Mr. A. and three volumes collecting, in colour, Ditko's work (mostly with Joe Gill) at Charlton comics from 1971 to 1973. They have 13 books so far, with more on the way.
Snyder has also recently expanded the line beyond Ditko to HOW TO MAKE MONEY WRITING FOR COMICS MAGAZINES and enhanced reprint of Robert Kanigher's 1943 ground-breaking book, plus a look at Kanigher's first decade in comics.
Rick Veitch has been in the print-on-demand game for a while, since about 2016, with quite a selection of books. He's had four volumes that continue his 1990s dream journal comic ROARIN' RICK'S RARE BIT FIENDS, four issues of BOY MAXIMORTAL, which serialize the long-awaited second book of his King Hell Heroica (after BRAT PACK (book 4) and MAXIMORTAL (book 1), both now available in print-on-demand editions), a collection of BOY MAXIMORTAL and several original standalone comics including TOMBSTONE HAND and THE SPOTTED STONE. More Heroica volumes are promised, so we might finally close that particular chapter of the 1990s...
Stephen Bissette did several books of his non-fiction prose writing through Black Coat Press over a decade ago (movie reviews in the BLUR volumes and a massive examination of Veitch's Heroica in TEEN ANGELS & NEW MUTANTS), which I believe were all print-on-demand, but mostly text with incidental illustrations if any. More recently he published more copiously illustrated books like CRYPTID CINEMA [2017], and in 2021 two sketchbooks, BROODING CREATURES [2021] and THOUGHTFUL CREATURES [2021], both with over 100 pages of his artwork. Both the books were available in several formats, pure black and white or in colour, and softcover or hardcover. I believe he's said if he gets back to publishing comics it'll be in a similar print-on-demand format.
Nat Gertler's About Comics has been publishing a variety of comics and related works for years, I'm not sure quite when they started going print-on-demand, but I recently picked up Bernie Mireault's THE JAM - SUPER COOL COLOR-INJECTED TURBO ADVENTURE FROM HELL #2 [2021] and SCOTT SHAW!S COMIX & STORIES [2023] which are right up my alley, and will probably soon get the collection of the original Mireault JAM comics (and hope for a follow-up, as there are several issues I've never found) and Mireault's TO GET HER (about a post-Jam Gordon Kirby). As noted above on distribution methods, these will also apparently soon be available to comic shops through Diamond (Shaw book, Jam reprint).
I just recently found out that Rob Walton completed his old 1980s series BLOODLINES in a three volume series of books, some 600 pages long. I haven't gotten any of them yet, but I'm planning to (they're also available digitally, so I may try that first).
Now I'm sure I'm just scratching the surface of what's available (you may have noticed that all the creators of these books are people I've been following the work of for at least 30 years), so if you have any more examples, I'd be curious. In particular are there any younger artists using print-on-demand to get their work out?
(by the way, I know there are a few companies that use print-on-demand to publish public domain comics, mostly using scans openly available on various web sites. That's a whole separate issue, I'm mostly interested in comics being done by the creators or people closely associated with the creators)
So much longer piece, or several, maybe coming up in the future on the topic, or at least individual reviews of several of the relevant books. I might also reach out to some of the people involved to get more details about the process, benefits and pitfalls of the system.
