11 Comics Their Creators Published Themselves

In 1983 two friends sharing a house in Dover, New Hampshire drew a joke. One of them sketched a turtle standing upright with nunchucks; the other wrote "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" above it because it sounded absurd. They liked it enough to make a comic, and they paid for the printing with a tax refund and a loan from an uncle.

Nobody would have published that book. That was rather the point: in the early eighties the two major publishers bought work-for-hire and kept the characters, and anything outside superheroes had almost nowhere to go. So a generation of cartoonists did the only thing left, which was to become publishers themselves.

Here are eleven of them. Some made fortunes, some made careers, and one of them ran for twenty-six years exactly as long as its creator said it would.

Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird printed roughly 3,000 copies of the first issue, black and white, oversized, on money that came from Eastman's tax refund and a family loan. They named the company Mirage Studios because, as the joke went, there was no studio. They took out a small ad in the Comics Buyer's Guide and sold the print run.

It was a parody at heart, riffing on Daredevil's origin and Frank Miller's ninja obsession, and it turned into a franchise measured in billions. The first printing is now one of the most sought independent comics in existence, which creates its own hazard: second, third and later printings look extremely similar and trade for a fraction of the first.

TMNT #1 on eBay ›

Robert Crumb printed Zap #1 and sold it from a baby carriage on Haight Street in San Francisco, with his wife handling the money. There was no distributor, no Code approval and no newsstand; there was a guy on a sidewalk with a stack of comics.

That transaction founded underground comix as a commercial form. Everything that followed, from the head-shop distribution network to the alternative publishers of the eighties, descends from books sold hand to hand outside the entire industry apparatus.

Wendy and Richard Pini formed WaRP Graphics to publish ElfQuest after concluding that no publisher would take a self-contained fantasy epic drawn in a style borrowed from manga and animation.

It ran for twenty issues, sold in the hundreds of thousands through the new direct market, and demonstrated something the majors had not: that a comic could be aimed at readers who were not superhero fans and still be a business. The Pinis kept the rights throughout, which was almost unheard of at the time.

ElfQuest on eBay ›

Dave Sim founded Aardvark-Vanaheim to publish Cerebus, and then announced that it would run exactly 300 issues and end. It did, in 2004, twenty-six years later. No mainstream publisher would have committed to that, and no mainstream publisher was asked.

Sim also spent those decades arguing loudly for creator ownership in the back pages of his own book, at a time when the argument was neither settled nor popular. Whatever readers make of Sim's later writing, the 300-issue run remains the longest sustained self-published narrative in the medium.

Gilbert, Jaime and Mario Hernandez self-published the first issue and mailed a copy to the Comics Journal, essentially as a submission to a review. Gary Groth called them; Fantagraphics published every issue after that.

It is the rare case where self-publishing worked as an audition rather than a career. The book went on to run for decades and to prove that comics could sustain literary fiction about ordinary people, which nobody in 1982 was betting on.

Colleen Doran began A Distant Soil as a teenager and spent years fighting to keep control of it, a dispute that became one of the better-documented cautionary tales about what creators sign away. She eventually recovered the rights and continued the series under her own terms.

The record here shows the journey plainly: the book appears under three different publishers across its life, which is what a long fight for ownership looks like in a bibliographic database.

David Boswell self-published the first Reid Fleming before Eclipse picked it up. A belligerent milkman in a bow tie is not a pitch any publisher was waiting for, which is precisely why it had to start as a self-published book.

It became a cult item, was optioned repeatedly for a film that never arrived, and remains one of the funniest things the era produced.

Stan Sakai's rabbit ronin first appeared in an anthology and went on to its own series, running for four decades across several publishers with Sakai retaining ownership throughout.

The independent path was not a stepping stone here; it was the whole career. Sakai kept the character, kept drawing it, and outlasted most of the companies that published it.

Usagi Yojimbo on eBay ›

Paul Chadwick's story of a speechwriter's mind in a stone body debuted in Dark Horse Presents and moved to its own title. Dark Horse itself was barely a year old, founded by a comic-shop owner who decided that if the majors would not publish this kind of book, a retailer would.

That is the same impulse one step removed: not a creator publishing himself, but a fan of the medium building the company the work needed.

Jeff Smith founded Cartoon Books to publish Bone, drew all 1,300-odd pages himself over thirteen years, and finished the story he set out to tell. It sold in numbers that embarrassed books with far larger marketing budgets, largely to readers who had never bought a comic before.

Smith turned down offers throughout. The completed run is now a fixture of school libraries, which is a stranger and more durable kind of success than a movie deal.

Terry Moore's series began at Antarctic Press and moved the following year to Abstract Studio, the company Moore formed to publish his own work.

Those two entries in the record, one year apart, are the whole argument of this article in miniature: a creator with a modest publisher, then a creator who is the publisher. Moore has run Abstract Studio ever since.

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None of these books existed because a publisher identified a market. They existed because somebody paid a printer and hoped. The direct market made that possible: comic shops would order anything a distributor carried, and distributors would carry a book with an order form and a phone number, which meant a cartoonist with a few thousand dollars could reach an audience without permission from anyone.

The financial outcomes varied wildly. Eastman and Laird got rich, Smith made a living and finished his story, Doran spent years in a rights fight, and plenty of others whose names are not in this article lost money entirely. What they share is ownership: every one of these creators kept the thing they made.

A note on sources. This piece is comics history rather than database output, so the figures given are the commonly reported ones and every issue reference above has been checked against the record on this site. Where accounts differ, and for the exact size of that first Turtles print run they do, the number is approximate. Corrections are welcome at the address in the footer.