Brenner Says No to Adult Comics

San Antonio, Texas-based Brenner Printing has informed at least one of its clients it will no longer publish adult-related material. To my memory, Brenner has long been a go-to printer for a lot of this material because it's in the country and therefore you don't have any of the hassle that might come with bringing porn across a border, and because they've updated their facilities while remaining basically affordable, which means that companies remain compatible and can use them for parts of their line even if they're doing their other books elsewhere. Also, it's just been a longtime relationship for a lot of the affected companies.

I've always heard that finding a printer for adult-content comics can be a hassle for some publishers because unlike related works in prose form, employees at the printer are more likely to see the material in the process of doing the work.

Update: Kim Thompson from Fantagraphics sent in a a letter on the subject, which I'll move into the proper letters place tomorrow but thought was good enough to share in the body of the blog today.

Regarding: Brenner's refusal to continue to print X-rated material. Yeah, I got one of those calls as well. The HOUSEWIVES AT PLAY will have to find somewhere else to play, printer-wise. It's too bad, Brenner did a fine job.

What happened at Brenner is actually what has happened at a number of Bible-Belt or Midwestern printers, which is that although the owners and managers have no problem with printing X-rated material (the accusation I've seen that "the owners must have found religion" is actually false), a certain proportion of their employees do, and at some point it becomes such a hassle to organize shifts so that the anti-porn employees don't have to deal with it, or reverberating community disapproval becomes so strong (I could tell you stories about one of our former X-rated printers that would curl your hair), that it's just not worth it.

Particularly since X-rated material sales (and thus print runs) have been going down, down, down these past few years. So it's increasing hassle for decreasing rewards. If you're doing tens of thousands of dollars' worth of invoicing printing porn every week, you're a lot more liable to ignore whining from the staff than if it's just a few thousand here and there.

Incidentally, Brenner has said they will continue to print the EROS catalog because it isn't hardcore. (In order to mail through USPS we cover up the naughtiest of the naughty bits.) The employees just don't like the "ten-inch dicks springing out of the pages," in the pungent words of the Brenner manager who lowered the boom; a page where the ten-inch dick is covered up by a ten-and-a-half-inch black bar is OK, though.

Incidentally, we lost Hong Kong as a printer for X-rated (or even a lot of the R-rated) stuff over the last few years as the Chinese government tightened the screws on permissible material, so we've had to move to (mostly) Singapore to get our filth-with-a-spine printed -- or for that matter even LOVE AND ROCKETS books.

-- Kim Thompson

Thanks, Kim.

 
posted 4:10 am PST | Permalink
 

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