Bud Plant Inc.
| Comic book distributor | |
| Industry | Comics |
| Founded | 1970 |
| Founder | Bud Plant |
| Defunct | 1988 (as distributor; still operates as mail-order business) |
| Headquarters | San Jose, California, then Grass Valley, California |
| Website | budsartbooks |
Bud Plant was a wholesale comics distributor active in the 1970s and 1980s during the growth of the direct market. Starting in 1970 as a mail-order distributor specializing in underground comix, Plant absorbed some of his smaller rivals in the 1980s, and then sold his business to Diamond Comics Distributors in 1988.
Plant (born 1952) was a comics and illustrated books enthusiast from San Jose, California, who throughout his high school years bought and sold back issue comic books through ads in fanzines such as Rocket's Blast/ComicCollector. In 1968 he co-founded Seven Sons Comic Shop with five friends (including John Barrett), in San Jose. Selling Seven Sons within a year, Plant and three partners then opened another San Jose-based comics shop called Comic World.
In 1970 Plant founded Bud Plant, Inc. as a mail order company specializing in underground comix. (His Holly Drive address appears as the publishing address of the first issue of Promethean Enterprises in 1969.) In 1971, Plant and five friends spent the summer dealing comics at conventions in Houston, New York, Dallas, San Diego, Miami, Boston, and Washington, D.C.
Plant had met direct market pioneer Phil Seuling on the convention circuit; in late 1973 Seuling called Plant to inform him that he had just cut a deal to ship Archie, DC, Marvel, and Warren comic books from a new distribution center in Sparta, Illinois. Seuling offered the West Coast region to Plant, but Plant turned him down, preferring then to concentrate on the proliferating underground comix market.
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