Items14The creator’s order
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Cerebus (1977)Published Jan 1, 1977Dave Sim started Cerebus in December 1977 under his own Aardvark-Vanaheim banner and kept going until March 2004, ending exactly at issue 300 without the aid of any publisher. That finished run of about 6,000 pages became the standing proof for later self-publishers that one creator could set a…0 - 2
ElfQuest (1978)Published Jan 1, 1978Elfquest shows what to do when your first publisher lets you down. Its first chapter appeared in Fantasy Quarterly in February 1978, and after that publisher tried to keep Wendy's original artwork, Wendy and Richard Pini borrowed from Richard's parents, founded WaRP Graphics and carried on…0 - 3
The Complete Maus: A Survivor's Tale (1997)Published Jan 1, 1997Maus as serialized in Raw, 1980 to 1991
Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly put out Raw themselves, an oversized anthology they edited and published through Mouly's own small press, and Maus ran in it as a small booklet tucked inside each issue. That do-it-yourself home gave Spiegelman years to…0 - 4
Love and Rockets (1982)Published Jan 1, 1982The Hernandez brothers printed about 800 copies of the first Love and Rockets in 1981 and folded and stapled every one themselves. They sent a copy to The Comics Journal for review, and within a year Fantagraphics had picked it up, reprinting that first issue in September 1982 with new color…0 - 5
Ed the Happy Clown (2012)Published Jan 1, 2012Ed the Happy Clown, from Chester Brown's Yummy Fur minicomics, 1983 to 1985
Chester Brown began Yummy Fur in July 1983 as a tiny minicomic, the first printings with the price penciled on the cover and a rubber-stamped back page, a few hundred copies at a time. Those homemade issues grew the…0 - 6
Teenage Mutant Ninja TurtlesThe original Mirage Studios comic by Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird, from 1984
Two friends with a few thousand dollars of borrowed money, trading as Mirage Studios, printed 3,000 copies of a black-and-white comic about four turtle ninjas in 1984. It was an immediate success, and the first issue was…0 - 7
Dirty Plotte (1991)Published Jan 1, 1991Julie Doucet's photocopied Dirty Plotte minicomics, from September 1988
Julie Doucet was working part-time at a Montreal copy shop when she realized she could make her own comics on its Xerox machine. Dirty Plotte began in September 1988 in runs of 150 to 200 copies, and in January 1991 Drawn &…0 - 8
King-Cat Comics and Stories (1989)Published Jan 1, 1989John Porcellino has been making King-Cat Comics and Stories himself since 1989, and it is still going more than 80 issues later. If the other entries here are about self-publishing as a launch pad, King-Cat is about self-publishing as a life's work that never needed a bigger publisher.
The comics…0 - 9
Bone (1991)Published Jan 1, 1991Bone reached the widest audience of any comic here. Jeff Smith launched it through his own Cartoon Books in July 1991, at a time when retailers were wary of any self-published black-and-white book, and he vowed to do six issues come hell or high water. Dave Sim helped by running Bone as a backup…0 - 10
Optic Nerve (1995)Published Jan 1, 1995Adrian Tomine's self-published Optic Nerve minicomics, 1991 to 1994
Adrian Tomine was still in high school when he began self-publishing Optic Nerve as small homemade minicomics, seven issues between 1991 and 1994. Drawn & Quarterly then signed him and relaunched it as a regular comic in 1995,…0