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In 1951, at the near peak of comic book sales in the United States, the two Goss high-speed rotary newspaper presses at Spartan Printing and Publishing, a new facility in southern Illinois, printed six million forty-eight-page comics a month (“Sparta Plant” 1951). The presses at Spartan required thirty-five thousand pounds of cyan, yellow, magenta, and black inks each month to keep up the demand for the four-color “funny books.” Spartan Printing was not exceptional: it was one of a series of presses across the United States that contributed to the one hundred million new comic book issues that were printed and then distributed to shops throughout the country. About a hundred employees at Spartan ensured that those copies of Archie, Dick Tracy, Black Cat, and other titles were trimmed, bound, and loaded onto trucks headed for a post office in St. Louis, Missouri (O’Keefe 2006). When one considers print in relation to comics, a first image might be of those offset lithographic printing presses like the ones at Spartan, which were the dominant means of the physical production of comics. But print is more than that physical production. Print is liminal, signifying elements of not only comics’ physical production but...
This essay may be found on page 169 of the printed volume.