Why read for free what you can BUY?
—Advertisement for a book of The Non-Adventures of Wonderella
A webcomic print collection is a collection of comics originally found on the web in a print book. Since Fandom is very supportive they will gladly pay money for the privilege of holding the comics in their hands.
There are many advantages to buying a webcomic print collection as opposed to reading it for free on the Internet: you can take it with you outside the house, there are no load times, it doesn't need batteries, and you can still read it during a power outage. Some print collections also contain bonus material. There is also the advantage that you can still read it if the webcomic eventually is no longer available online.
Of course how long you can get said comics depends on the artist as sometime they can stop beyond an set amount of volumes, especially frustrating if the story leaves on a cliffhanger. This can also lead to Keep Circulating the Tapes because most webcomic volumes are almost always self-published. If you don't get it on initial release and the artist stops working on it, it can be a bit of a hassle to find the print editions (for example, Josh Lisnick's Wendy trade, Exploitation Now full trade, and the first volume of RPG World which are all out of print and extremely rare to look for). So protip, if your fave webcomic has a print version and you want it, GET IT EARLY!
Webcomic print collections are different from Writing for the Trade since most webcomic creators do not make webcomics just to make money by selling print collections.
This is Older Than They Think. The first Comic Books were just reprints of what was published in the newspaper.
Examples:
- Gunnerkrigg Court is, as of January 2012, up to three volumes of the print edition. In hardback, no less.note
- Image Comics has published some webcomics in print:
- Real Life Comics has the first two years. But the first is out of print.
- Nemu-Nemu has five books out. It's one of the few webcomics you can buy in stores... in select stores in Hawaii, California and Canada.
- Marvel Comics has released a number of its own webcomics (including some set in the shared Marvel Universe continuity), and sometimes reprints them as paper comics and collected editions. However, Marvel's webcomic formats can pose some problems with this:
- Infinity Comics use a single-column vertical Infinite Canvas layout, designed for easy reading on phones, so the art has to be rearranged into comic pages for paper reprints.
- Infinite Comics (2012-2017) used a horizontal navigation model with dynamic transitions. Moving forward in the comic might take you to a new page, or might alter something on the current page (e.g. changing dialogue or adding a new panel on top of an existing one). Paper versions without that feature tend to have a lot of duplicated art.
- Megatokyo has six and they're some of the easiest to find in stores.
- Many of the current and former Keenspot-hosted comics have print books.
- Penny Arcade is up to seven volumes, one for each calendar year, with commentary for most of the strips. Plus a hardcover anniversary volume that is mostly history, reminisces, and essays, but does include several strips including the one about American McGee's Strawberry Shortcake that's missing from the online archives and paperback collections.
- PvP had eight but the first five have been re-released in one big hardcover book.
- Spinnerette has two books that each collect four chapters plus a bonus fifth one.
- The Book of Biff has five books.
- Cyanide and Happiness has a couple print collections.
- El Goonish Shive has two; the first is out of print.
- The first seven chapters of Grey is... were published in a volume; a second volume is currently halfway to being ready to print.
- Randall Munroe published xkcd vol. 0 in 2009.
- Basic Instructions is on to its second volume. They have also showed up in a few comic stores.
- MS Paint Adventures has fully published
Problem Sleuth (The animated cutscenes are handled by showing every frame on one page.) and Homestuck's first five arcs.
- Newman raised enough money through Kickstarter to print a first volume collection.
- The Order of the Stick has six books and three print-only volumes. The seventh collected edition is planned to be its last—even if it has to be phonebook-sized to fit everything in.
- Platypus Comix had some books compiling every comic posted from February 2001 to May 2004, including many that Peter Paltridge removed from the website. Also, the 10th anniversary of the site saw a collection of 11 stories considered favorites by fans and/or Peter himself. Plans to publish books of comics produced after May 2004 went indefinitely on hold after Peter became the head cartoonist of local periodical, BANG! Magazine.
- Garfield Minus Garfield has a book containing some comics from Dan Walsh, and some from Jim Davis (who also weighed in with some positive comments of the series).
- Questionable Content has two print collections released so far, covering roughly 300 strips each.
- Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal did it as well, sporting the famous "Save yourself, mammal!" on the cover.
- Galaxion has two print volumes available for sale.
- Squid Row released a full-color print collection in 2011.
- The KA Mics came out with its first print collection in June 2013 with extra material.
- Diary of a Wimpy Kid started out about 2003 as a webcomic on FunBrain, before being adapted into a book series.
- Tails of Lanschilandia has a print-on-demand book containing the first three stories, the B Side Comic up to the point of the book's release and bonus material such as sketches and "behind the scenes" pages.
- Bird Boy: The print collections of Volume I and II from Dark Horse Comics were released in 2016. Atypically, this resulted in the collected strips being withdrawn from the website, possibly as a condition of the publisher, although they were later restored.
- Girl Genius started off as a print comic. It currently has 12 volumes, as well as a novel adaptation.
- Dumbing of Age has volumes for the first three years.
- Red's Planet is collecting its online strips — and going on from there in print.
- Housepets! has these, collecting all of the strips from a given year, which are followed by an On the Next consisting of bizarre out-of-context panels. Bonus content is sometimes included as well.
- Henchgirl did this when the comic was picked up by Dark Horse comics. As with Bird Boy, once the trade was released, the artist removed all comics beyond the fourth issue in order to convince people to buy the trade if they want to see the full story.''
- User Friendly had four volumes published by O'Reilly Press, a book of the earliest strips from Plan Nine Publishing, and a self-published large hardcover containing the first decade's worth of strips.
- Plan Nine Publishing was set up specifically to put out collections of early popular webcomics. Sluggy Freelance, General Protection Fault, and Kevin & Kell all had multiple volumes put out. As did Bastard Operator from Hell, which while not a webcomic itself did have the books illustrated by certain webcomic artists. The site has been unavailable since 2008 at least, and their books are long out of pr
- Sluggy Freelance has gone on to reprint the Plan Nine material and continue the series, though Pete's fallen a bit behind his original schedule.
- Ctrl+Alt+Del has had several print editions, but Schedule Slip meant that comics were coming out faster than they could be printed. The solution was The First Ten Years Kickstarter, which compiled every strip, including several exclusive ones, into a three book set. The third book was only the One Shots and Sillies, while books one and two were all of the Ethan and Lucas strips plus the Games Games Bowl written story. This allows the reader to go through the entire storyline without interruption. Since it only covered the first ten years, most of the Broken Base was appeased as it covered the most popular era of the webcomic.
- Extra Ordinary currently has three print editions thanks to Kickstarter, covering 100 strips per volume. The exception is the third volume, as strip #300 was printed as an individual, full colour book. The strip has now reached 700 strips, however volumes 4 and 5 have not been produced.
- Ignition Zero has been put into a physical format.
- Ménage à 3 and its spinoffs Sticky Dilly Buns and Sandra on the Rocks all earned printed volumes.
- Aoi House got two printed volumes.
- Bittersweet Candy Bowl has volumes for most chapters, a collected volume of all of the responses from their in-character ask blog, and an onmibus Updated Re-release of all material covered in the first three volumes.
- Brawl in the Family, towards the end of its run, crowdfunded a complete set of all the original comics collected into three volumes. A separate volume consisting of nothing but strips of Breakout Character Waluigi was made later on.
- Cucumber Quest managed to print volumes of the first four chapters of the comic, but no others were made following the series' hiatus in Chapter 5.
- Poison Ivy Gulch got its first book Poison Ivy Gulch Saddles Up in November 2022 complete with extra strips not available elsewhere.
- Sabrina Online has its original run collected in two volumes with more volumes for the post-main series strips. Print examples of the strip though do predate even the collected volumes though, with some strips having been published in magazines such as Amiga Format.
- 8-Bit Theater is an intentionally weird case. The series was collected into omnibus format to celebrate its 20th anniversary, but only as an annotated script. Unsurprisingly, it was because the pages were too low-res to begin with and series was using the Final Fantasy sprites which the creators would rather not be sued for.
- Litterbox Comics: had its first collection book Parenting Is Weird: Tails from the Litterbox published by Andrews McMeel Publishing in 2023.
