TitleTales

CPSIA Amendment Excluding Ordinary Children's Books Signed into Law

On Friday, August 12, 2011 President Obama signed into law an amendment to the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSiA) of 2008 that excludes “ordinary” children’s books from the law’s third-party testing and certification provisions, and promises to make testing less burdensome for novelty and book-plus publishers. The legislation gives book publishers some relief with respect to the third-party testing requirements in the law.

Interview: Mike Richardson

Mike Richardson founded Dark Horse Comics in 1986 as an offshoot of his Oregon comic-book retail chain, Things From Another World. Richardson pursued the idea of establishing an ideal atmosphere for creative professionals, and 25 years later the company has grown to become the third-largest comics publisher in the United States.

In 1980, Mike Richardson used a credit card with a $2,000 credit limit to open a comic-book store, Pegasus Books, in the small resort town of Bend, Oregon. Richardson soon became frustrated by the lack of quality in the products he was selling, and so, using funds from his retail operation, he began his own publishing company. From the start Dark Horse Comics was a different kind of publishing house. Writers and artists were treated as partners, an unheard-of generosity in the comic-publishing field at that time. Soon the industry’s top creators were flocking to Dark Horse, where they became involved in the publishing and marketing of their creations.

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BWI: Your website tells readers that you began to publish Dark Horse Comics because of what you considered to be a lack of quality in products you were selling. What do you consider to be “quality” in the comic world?

MR: Generally, successful comics require the same elements necessary in other forms of storytelling: strong compelling characters involved in unique situations facing and solving some internal or external conflict. For many years comics were simply cranked out as product and it isn’t clear that the publishers who offered them cared or even considered “quality” when producing them. Because comics are a combination of words and pictures, the balance has not always been even. Often books containing great art feature less than compelling story and vice-versa. When I began Dark Horse, I wanted to publish comics that avoided the clichés inherent in the marketplace at the time, comics featuring the best artists in the world illustrating the most compelling stories possible while presenting a wide variety of content for a wide variety of tastes. In other words, “quality” comics.

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