who in their right mind

Personal Context

Last year I printed ashes & ghost - my R18 Fire Emblem Fates: Gunter/Corrin doujinshi. I've had a long familiarity with collecting (JP) doujin as well as working on western comics/anthologies; have printed ~3 such anthologies with Fireball previously to a&g.

Fireball initially was highly recommended by @kmclaude years ago and kept my attention for its consistent quality & lack of kink art restrictions especially back then when very few other printers operated in that space.

Over the years I've looked extensively into other commonly mentioned comics printers, going as far as getting print samples from most of them; however places like Mixam have heavy restrictions on kink content (which is different than "basic" NSFW) and the quality is often uneven. For now, Fireball and now MCE are the only two that consistently meets all of my criteria. Your needs may be different.

Another thing I should mention is everything in this post is done in linux and FOSS programs (krita, libreoffice). I do have decades experience in Adobe suite, but one of my personal goals with printing a&g was to show that it is viable to print professional quality works on a linux machine given the state of current censorship by big tech.

Photo Comparison

In all photos, Fireball is on the left and MCE is on the right for consistency. MCE's cover here was glossy; fireball matte so that may also influence differences.

Comparing covers; MCE was somewhat darker than I expected in-person, but takes better/richer photos for social media if that's important to you. Fireball's cover was more accurate to in-person colors.

Here's the back covers and spine difference too; I made a slight adjustment to centering the text + adding a note of the 2nd print run. Fireball's spine is thicker due to the thicker paper stock used; I've listed the spec difference below.

Fireball specs:

Color: Color Insides/Color Cover

Stock: 100lb Smooth Uncoated Text

Option: 1.0 Mil Matte Laminate On Front/Perfect Bind

Size: 6.25x9.5

Binding: PerfectBound

MCE specs:

Size: 6.220472440944882" x 9.448818897637796"

Binding: perfectBound

Interior Paper: 60# Opaque Text - B&W (58 pgs)

Cover: 100# Silk Cover (C1S) - Color

Lam: gloss

Interior ink closeups of both... MCE's inks are noticeably darker. No issues with a variety of screentones in either printing (something most US printers struggle with).

(Panels distance from the page border were slightly adjusted by me in the MCE run; that was not a printer issue.)

Speaking of inks, there is a slight amount of ink visible on back side of pages in both printers (note the rectangle panel by Gunter's boot and the speech bubble behind his knee). Personally it doesn't bother me but you may want to adjust printer stock if it does for you.

( excuse the fingers and the blob on my fingernail; had just finished painting custom nendos, and they left their mark :p )

Here's an interior section towards the beginning; text available to analyze.

Something to note that FIreball's printing run was ~70 and MCE's was ~7 (though likely more later). No printer consistency issues with either.

Both can do fully custom sizes of books.

Doujin Friend: Odd question: which printing was closer to your intent and/or computer monitor colors?

krad: HMM... (cover: fireball) (interiors: mce) keep in mind i use a linux laptop so my screen quality is of the 'yolo' variant x)

Something else that was a plus for MCE that's not showing up in these pages is their online prepress builder; I found it notably easy to handle, and it worked flawlessly on linux/firefox with a bunch of adblockers.

Fireball has you send in a collated PDF directly to them. Works great for people familiar with print work, but beginners may be daunted without a builder to hand-hold them through. You do have to explicitly ask for proofs for both printers.

However, a negative for MCE showed up in the order process re: payment processors. Fireball has a custom order/payment process so the same potential weakness did not show up there. (Deliberately being vague for specific reasons; I can elaborate for mutuals in private.) This is not an issue if you do not work with fetish/kink artwork.

Overall (tl;dr)

MCE is easier for the beginner-intermediate doujinshi creators due to the prepress guide and their print quality is exceptional (with the caveat that the inks/covers will be possibly darker than you expected), but Fireball feels safer for hard kink.

Both also offer print services for more than just doujinshi including postcards, posters, although Fireball is more geared towards traditionally US "indie" scene with business cards and brochures while MCE has more familiarity with the manga scene (offering manga and light novels defaults).