A guide to comics part 1 (publishers)

This is going to be the first part of my guide to comics. It certainly won't be an exhaustive guide, but it should give enough information to those of my readers who don't know a lot (or anything) about comics that they don't feel I'm having conversations that exclude them.

I want to talk a little here about comics, what terms are used and what they mean. Originally I was going to post my recent comic purchases but I didn't want it to be full of terms and ideas that left non-comic fans feeling left out of the conversation. I don't want to fit the stereotype of a comic fan that shuns outsiders, I want everyone to be able to follow along with the blog if they want.

It's helpful to break comics down into where they come from. Although comics exist all over the world I'm going to be talking here about what can broadly described as American Comics, British Comics, European Comics and Manga. This post is going to be almost exclusively about American Comics. Only almost because there's a degree of cross-pollination between them all, especially American and British Comics. In this post, and the next few, I'll be talking mostly about American Comics.

I'm going to do this one subject per post otherwise this will turn into a massive info-dump and I really want to avoid that.

Today I'm going to talk about Publishers. American Comics are pretty much unique in entertainment in that people really care about which company is making the product. There are examples in other media, but to my mind it is much more prevalent in American Comics. Publishers are normally broken down into The Big Two, Independents ans Small Press publishers.

The Big Two are Marvel and DC and they dominate monthly comic sale to massive degree. In the last released sales figures (May 2014) 90 of the top 100 comics were published by Marvel or DC. The Walking Dead (published by Image) was in the top 10 but it was the only book not published by Marvel or DC in the top 20. Marvel & DC publish basically all of the superhero comics that non-comic readers have heard of. Marvel has The Avengers, X-Men and Spiderman among others. DC has Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and Green Lantern amongst others. Almost all Marvel and DC books take place in some sort of shared universe where the characters live. Marvel & DC also own the characters in their books rather than the people who create them. Marvel own Iron Man and hire people to create comic books featuring him.

The Independents are a group of unrelated publishers. The biggest is Image, others are Dark Horse, IDW, Dynamite, Boom, Oni Press, Valiant and Archie, along with a few more. These publishers can be very different from each other.
Image for example tend to publish creator-owned books like The Walking Dead. Basically creator owned books are what you'd expect from the name, the creators of the characters own them rather than the company that publishes them. We'll talk about it more in a future post.
IDW tend to publish more licensed book, for instance they've licensed the rights to publish Star Trek comics and hire people to create those comics.
Dark Horse has a mix of both with some licensed titles like Conan and some creator owned books like Hellboy.
Independent  books tend not to be superhero books, although there are some. They also mostly don't have the same shared universe model that Marvel and DC do. Although some creations have more than one book taking place in the same universe, Dark Horse's Hellboy, B.P.R.D and Abe Sapien all exist in the same universe they don't belong to the same universe as other Dark Horse books, for example Buffy.
Valiant operate in a similar way to Marvel or DC with company owned characters that live in a shared universe. They are on a much smaller scale than Marvel or DC of course. They're worth mentioning as an example that superhero comics aren't incompatible with independent comics, just a much smaller part of independent comics than Big Two comics.

Finally small press publishers. These are exactly what they sound like. Basically, they are the smaller independent publishers that may only put out a few comics with small print runs. Self-published comics fit in here too.

Just to wrap it up, it is extremely important to some people which publisher a particular comic is from. There are plenty of people who will buy, for example, a Marvel comic just because it effects another Marvel comic they read. Some comics from the Big Two can be impossible to follow without reading other titles from time to time. It is one of the reasons I read very few Marvel & DC books.