Comics journalist Joe Sacco’s next book, The Once and Future Riot, was supposed to hit bookstore shelves in September, but it’s running about a month late. Publication scheduling delays are neither ideal nor uncommon—but the holdup on Sacco’s latest, which PW’s starred review called a “meticulous and beautifully crafted account of religious and territorial strife” in Western Uttar Pradesh, India, wasn’t due to any routine issue.

“We were going to print it in China,” Carolyn O’Keefe, director of publicity for nonfiction at Henry Holt’s Metropolitan imprint, told PW. “But they objected to maps that depicted borders in ways they didn’t like.” This isn’t the first time Metropolitan has dealt with this particular problem. In 2021, its planned printing partner in China requested changes to Elise Engler’s A Diary of the Plague Year: An Illustrated Chronicle of 2020 before agreeing to take on the book. After Engler rejected the request, Holt produced the book domestically, postponing its release until early 2022.

China dominates the global printing market for illustrated titles, from children’s picture books to coffee table books to graphic novels. Its stores of high-quality paper stock and specialized printing technologies give the country major advantages over the United States and Canada, its two main competitors in the space. The latter have comparatively few printers capable of achieving the quality expected by publishers and readers of illustrated titles—let alone inexpensively, quickly, and at scale.

Eric Reynolds, VP and associate publisher at Fantagraphics, estimates that 30%–40% of the Seattle-based company’s titles are printed in China. Running into issues at the printer, he said, is not uncommon. But, he added, it’s not really the printers that are causing the problem. It’s the bureaucracy: namely, the Chinese government’s General Administration of Press and Publication.

“Every printer in China must submit everything through GAPP,” Reynolds said. “Printers run work through GAPP as a matter of course, then come back to us and say, ‘We can’t do it; it was rejected.’ ”

GAPP is the regulatory body that oversees all media in the People’s Republic of China, from film and television to newspapers and radio to websites and books. It acts as the government’s central censorship agency, screening out sensitive subjects from pornography to politics. (Maps are a regular point of contention.) Anything printed, published, copied, or distributed in the country is scrutinized by GAPP—even if it isn’t intended for domestic sale.

“We have a pretty good idea of what they are looking for, so in the vast majority of cases, we already know whether we can print something in China before we ever send it to a Chinese printer,” Reynolds said. “But every once in a while, they find some capricious political image or bit of dialogue that gets flagged.”

Last year, GAPP flagged two Fantagraphics titles in line for the printer. One, Emil Ferris’s graphic novel My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, Book 2, was taken to task for snatches of philosophical dialogue GAPP considered problematic. Another, Atsushi Kaneko’s manga title Search and Destroy, Vol. 1, was criticized for “improper” use of Soviet-style architecture. In both cases, the books were printed elsewhere.

Suddenly shifting printers is both expensive and time-consuming. For larger publishers that can eat the costs, it’s more of an inconvenience than anything. But smaller outfits can be caught flat-footed. For San Francisco–based Silver Sprocket, that was exactly what happened with Mariah-Rose Marie’s 2023 title Cook Like Your Ancestors: An Illustrated Guide to Intuitive Cooking with Recipes from Around the World.

“The book included maps showing where the recipes and cultures featured in the book came from, and we were unwilling to censor the way we identified geographic regions that were a core part of the book’s story,” said publisher Avi Erlich. “It took a lot of work to find an alternative printer outside of China that was able to provide the quality, paper stock, cover effects, and binding options to have the book lay flat and have the best utility as a cookbook. It wasn’t primarily about cost, but simply making the book exist to our dream specifications anywhere outside of China was incredibly difficult.”

Hence China’s continued prominence as a printing destination. Still, the hurdles of state censorship are increasingly forcing publishers to develop backup plans. In the case of The Once and Future Riot, Metropolitan did indeed find a plant in Vietnam willing to print the maps on pages eight and 13 exactly as the author intended—a plant owned by the same company that couldn’t print the book in China.

Correction: An earlier version of this article listed Cook Like Your Ancestors as a 2003 title; it was published in 2023.