Bud Plant Inc. was a wholesale comics distributor active in the 1970s and 1980s during the growth of the direct market. The company also published a selection of comics and zines during the same period. Starting in 1970 as a mail-order distributor specializing in underground comix, Bud Plant absorbed some of his smaller rivals in the 1980s, and then sold his business to Diamond Comics Distributors in 1988. He still, as Bud Plant's Art Books, sells quality reprints and graphic novels.

Plant (born 1952) was a comics and illustrated books enthusiast from San Jose, California, who throughout his high school years bought and sold back issue comic books through ads in fanzines such as Rocket's Blast/ComicCollector. In 1968 he co-founded Seven Sons Comic Shop with five friends, John Barrett, Jim Buser, Mike Nolan, Frank Scadina, and Tom Tallmon, in San Jose. Selling Seven Sons within a year, Plant along with Barrett, Buser, and Dick Swan later opened another San Jose-based comics shop called Comic World in 1969.

In 1970 Plant founded Bud Plant, Inc. as a mail order company specializing in underground comix. (His Holly Drive address appears as the publishing address of the first issue of Promethean Enterprises in 1969.) In 1971, Plant and five friends spent the summer dealing comics at conventions in Houston, New York, Dallas, San Diego, Miami, Boston, and Washington, D.C.

Plant had met direct market pioneer Phil Seuling at the New York ComicCon in 1970. Nolan had met Seuling at the New York convention the year before, and he convinced Barrett, Plant, and Scadina to drive around the country during the summer of '70 with their stash of comix for sale the next year. Scadina canceled at the last minute and Nolan recruited his co-worker Larry Strawther, a fellow sportswriter at the Redwood City Tribune, as a replacement. (Strawther would later go on to be a writer-producer on TV shows like Happy Days, Laverne & Shirley, Night Court, and MXC: Most Extreme Elimination Challenge.) The foursome traveled around the country in Barrett's pick-up tuck with a shell, attending cons in Oklahoma City, Cincinnati, New York and Houston;. In New York they became good friends with Seuling. They repeated the journey in 1971, with Dick Swann joining them this time. In late 1973 Seuling called Plant to inform him that he had just cut a deal to ship Archie, DC, Marvel, and Warren comic books from a new distribution center in Sparta, Illinois. Seuling offered the West Coast region to Plant, but Plant turned him down, preferring then to concentrate on the proliferating underground comix market.

Plant entered the publishing field in 1969 as one of the three publishers, along with Al Davoren and Jim Vadeboncoeur, Jr., of Promethean Enterprises—a fanzine that attempted to straddle the comic/comix boundary. (Promethean Enterprises lasted from 1969 to 1974.) In 1972, Plant took over the publishing responsibilities of the fanzine Anomaly from Jan Strnad who had published three issues since 1969. Plant published issue #4 of Anomaly, evolving it into an underground comic.

As part of his retailing enterprise Comics & Comix (see below), in 1974 Plant co-published one issue of the underground/sword and sorcery hybrid Barbarian Killer Funnies; moving from there to the similarly themed The First Kingdom, written and illustrated by Jack Katz. (Under various publishing names, Plant published 24 issues of The First Kingdom, from 1974 to 1986.) Comics & Comix also published three issues of Jim Pinkoski's Spaced in 1974–1976; two issues of Dan O'Neill's Comics and Stories in 1975; and two issues of Alfredo Alcala's Magic Carpet in 1977–1978.

Around 1978, Plant was approached by Wendy & Richard Pini about publishing Elfquest, but he turned the couple down, as he was getting out of the comics publishing business. (The Pinis later successfully self-published their project.)

From 1980 to 1985, Plant's retail shop Comics & Comix also published the industry trade journal Telegraph Wire.