Checker Book Publishing Group
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| Private | |
| Industry | Publishers of Comics Reprints |
| Founded | 2000 by Mark Thompson & Paul Dubuc |
| Headquarters | 217 Byers Rd., Miamisburg, Ohio 45342 |
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Key people
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Mark Thompson, Publisher Jason Drury, Art Director Sylvia Maye, Associate Editor/Publicity Dir. |
| Website | CheckerBPG.com |
Checker Book Publishing Group is an independent publisher of comics reprints, from newspaper strips to modern out-of-print titles and collections from defunct publishers.
Based in Miamisburg near Dayton, Ohio, CheckerBPG was established in 2000 by Mark Thompson, Paul Dubuc in order to bring back into print "dormant, unpublished, and under-published serial comics and cartooning."
CheckerBPG's publisher, Mark Thompson, (b. 1967/68) graduated from Miami University with a business degree, and worked for a newspaper before starting his first comics company - Checker Comics - in 1997. Based in the Oregon District, Checker Comics published original works including Danger Ranger and Mutator before becoming one of many victim of the collapse of the comics speculator bubble in the late-1990s.
Checker Book Publishing was incorporated in 2001, and set to work collecting individual comics' content into single collections, which are printed at an outside press, but shipped in-house after difficulties with outside distribution. Over the next five years, Checker published 43 titles. Sales between 2003 and 2004 doubled as Checker's output increased. Between 2004 and 2005, two of Checker's co-founders departed the company, and in 2010, Thompson decided to team up with Josh Blaylock of Devils Due Publishing to create Devil's Due Digital Inc.
While Thompson was setting up CheckerBPG, he compiled "a wish list of 900 comic books and strips and began contacting people who owned the rights." Investigating the works of Winsor McCay at the Cincinnati Public Library where McCay worked (as well as in New York), Thompson expected to obtain hard-to-reprint microfilm artwork, but instead discovered that the library owned bound original print copies. Where original artwork is unavailable (as is the case with much of CheckerBPGs output), print copies are the next-best thing, and Thompson and his employees were (and are) able to scan the artwork, and spend - on average - a month removing signs of aging before taking around three months to actually compile and print each of their volumes.
As well as publishing over a dozen volumes showcasing the works of Little Nemo in Slumberland-creator Winsor McCay, Thompson was also able to negotiate with Ohio-native Milton Caniff's nephew and executor Harry Guyton for the rights to Caniff's Steve Canyon. Typically, Checker is able to negotiate based on a "cash advance and a percentage of sales" approaching "the industry standard of 5 percent".
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Wikipedia