Comic Book Publishers

Some of the well known names in the field of comic book publishers include DC Comics and Marvel Comics. Darkhorse.com is the publisher of the Star Wars comics, Conan and the Incredibles. However, in spite of the success of the Star Wars comics, the third place comic book publisher is Image, a company formed in 1992 by seven of the best-selling artists previously employed by Marvel. This company publishes graphic novels in addition to comics.

There is an extensive list of comic book publishers ranging from A to Z. Some of these publishers cater to alternative comics while others are small independent presses that only have a limited run of each issue they release. Some of the companies only publish a particular comic book, such as Zero G Comics, which only publishes the comic strip Merde and others focus their attention on newspaper comic strips. These companies do not publish full story comics as we see in the Archie comics or those with superhero characters.

The genres of comic books that you can get from the comic book publishers is very diverse and crosses many boundaries in literature. When the major companies rejected many of the comics because of the outlandish and perverse storylines, some independent comic book publishers started to produce their own comics, especially in the 1970s. These comics reflected the culture of the youth counterculture and drug culture of the decade. The style was uninhibited and irreverent of everything that society respected. In these comics nothing was held back and they didn't seem to operate by any Code of Ethics. One example of this type of underground comic is Zap Cornix.

The emergence of the comic book retail store meant that many more comic book publishers now had a market for their material, no matter what genre it was. Some of the comics continued to be small enterprises, but with advances in computer technology many of them started to use the desktop publishing techniques to produce high class magazine type comic books that rivalled those of the larger companies in style and attractive designs. Comics became more widely recognized and as a result the artists began to receive the acclaim they deserved.