Comics Printing on Demand

There's a few services out there that are geared specifically to printing comics on demand, which I've been looking at specifically for having something polished and professional looking. There's a really good and in-depth review of the main ones at http://www.calamitiesofnature.com/extras/podreview.php written by a comic artist. He goes into quite a bit of depth, but the main points are:

http://ka-blam.com/printing/

Good price, good colour but let down by low paper quality, better for comics rather than their trade paperbacks which have a few cropping issues. Offer a store set-up with preview pages etc of your comic but this has its own problems such as slow order turnaround- better to bulk print on demand and then sell them yourself.

http://www.lulu.com/en/products/comics/

Nice paper, good printing quality. Will sell your book on amazon if you want but they take 40-50% of the money so you have to price high if you go that route, especially with colour, to avoid making a loss. Fairly pricy but apparently decent quality and quick turnaround

http://www.comixpress.com/

Specifically set up for comics unlike Lulu. Take at least 2 months to get your comic to you, and the print quality and paper is meant to be a bit shoddy and thin with overglossed cover. Setup fee of $30 but price per comic is fairly low.

https://www.printhouseexpress.com/

This was in the review but I don't think they're in business any more- the website doesn't work, anyway. Slightly annoying as they're supposedly good for short comics with quick turnaround.

http://www.udoprinting.com/

Naff flash site but fairly middle of the road in terms of paper quality, print quality, etc.

http://360digitalbooks.com/index.html

The service the reviewer went for with his book. More for full books than short comics like most of us will be looking for, however they offer a good personal service, wide variety of papers, and send you samples free of charge unlike Kablam which charges for samples. Minimum of 25 orders as well. So not really good for student purposes but very good if you ever get to a proper book stage with your work.