About
What this site covers
A history of the comic book as a printed object.
Two rules shaped the American comic book, and neither of them was about drawing. The first was self-censorship: after Seduction of the Innocent and the Senate subcommittee that followed it, publishers wrote the Comics Code Authority themselves, and its stamp decided what a wholesaler would rack. The second was distribution: an arrangement that let specialist shops buy direct, firm and non-returnable at a deeper discount, which ended the newsstand as the main channel and made a whole class of book possible.
Underneath both sits the physical object — four-colour separation, the Ben-Day dot, absorbent newsprint, the three-tier grid, the saddle stitch — and, in Europe, an entirely separate tradition of album-format bande dessinée, hardbound and kept in print.
How the site is organised
Five sections, twenty entries. Every entry is one decision about how the thing was printed or sold: a rule, a format, a discount, an ink. The register lists all of them; each section page carries its own.
Photography
The pictures are process photographs — presses, boards, benches, racks and shelves — and the captions are there to say the thing the picture cannot. Credits sit under the captions.