Indicia/Colophon Publisher

• Optional

• The indicia publisher (so named for the legally required small print in comics from the U.S. and some other countries) represents the actual official company or person who published the book, as opposed to an informal but commonly used name or publisher group.

• Ideally, this is the publisher of the comic as listed in the indicia of the comic (the small print which is usually on the first page) or the most official available source (the title page of a book).

• If the comic does not have an indicia or similar text, but the exact publisher is known through other sources, the other source may be used along with checking the "indicia publisher not printed" box.

• If there is no source at all to document the identity of the publisher, check the "indicia publisher not printed" box and leave the indicia publisher field blank.

• The indicia publisher of a self-published comic is the name (or names) of the person (or people) who self-published it.

• The Indicia publisher has to be added separately so it will be available in the drop-down. See Adding an Indicia Publisher for more details.

• The Indicia publisher is at the issue level because it can change from one issue of a series to another. It is not the copyright info.

• It should include all the words, including the words "Publications", "Comics", "Company", and even "Inc." and "S.A."

• Publishers listed in the indicia as a division of another company should be documented in this field using only the shortened version, which specifically does not include the name of the parent company.

• Examples:

* Marvel Entertainment Group, Inc.
* DC Comics, Inc
* DC Comics
* National Comics Publications, Inc.
* Pantheon Books (when the indicia reads "Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc.")

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Note: Indicia publisher was added to the database at the end of 2009, so any issues that had been added before that will need to have this added at some point.

Further information from the thread in which this field was last discussed on gcd-main in 2010, shortly before gcd-policy was created:

(a) Publisher listed in book (b) Publisher not listed in book, but known somehow (e.g. from reliable/secondary sources, facts can be given) (c) Publisher not listed, not known for surer, but reasonable guess (d) Publisher not listed, not known, no guesses (e) Publisher not applicable

(a)-(c) get an entry for 'indicia_publisher' from the list belonging to the publisher.

(a) has the checkbox obviously not clicked. Btw, this is exactly the behaviour originally intended for indicia publisher during the new schema discussion in recent years.

(b) and (c) have the checkbox 'not_printed' clicked. The difference in validity of the derived information should be given in the issue notes (e.g. information from ..., the issue before and after were published by this indicia publisher, ...). Note we do intend to better track the validity of derived information for this and especially credit fields in the future.

(d) has no entry for 'indicia publisher'. We set it here to 'not printed' so that the 'not_printed' field means 'no printed indicia publisher' (but for (b) and (c) we have a guess/know but it there is no printed ... there as well)

(e) is not valid. There always is a legal publisher in some way.

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