Print Your Own Comics

Are you an amateur artist just starting to draw your own comic? While drawing can supply great fun and be an amazing outlet for your creativity, you may soon want to reach out and let other people see your comic while making money off it.

Getting into the comic business can be very difficult. Many of the publishing houses are restrictive and you need a reputation to really get your comic seen. So what can you do to build yourself up?

Conventions, both for generic comics and anime if you are a manga artists, provide a vast amount of amateur sequential artists with the ability to sell their art to other people at a profit. Now the big question, how do you go about printing your comics?

There are professional comic printers to be found online, and while their quality is great there are a few problems to consider. One, they tend to be expensive. The price per comic is rather cheap, about $1, but the quantity they want you to order makes the price sky rocket. The usual minimum order is 1000, add that to the price of shipping and you've got a hefty investment that you may not be able to make (and a lot of comics you may not be able to sell).

Another problem associated with these comic printers, and this goes for select one and not all of them, is they tend to print their logo on the back of the comic. While this may not annoy some artists, others will be offended when they find their professional comic violated by their corporate slogan.

So what can you do? Thankfully there are many regular printers online that can print booklets, not unlike comics. SonicPrint, DocuCopies, and many others offer this service. Their paper is very good, they can provide coverstock for the cover (thicker paper), and they use staples for the binding. Going to one of these places takes the minimum from about $1,000 to a more manageable $200, more or less. This also allows to you print less comics, so in the event that you can't sell a single one you don't have one thousand copies to lug around and dispose of.

The problems associated with using these generic printers though is that the price per comic tends to be higher. Ranging about $1.50-$2.00, also the paper is usually thicker and not exactly the same as a comic (you can request a proof or sample to feel exactly what your comic is to be printed on).

For those just starting out, who have never sold one comic, I heavily suggest saving the money and ordering the lower quantity from other printers and not professional comic printers. They are good when you are bigger and know you can sell the higher amounts, but until then keep prices and possible junk amounts low with other generic printers.