The Basic Basics: Single Issues

I mean, I hope you do read it and find it entertaining, but I know going over the basics is not usually a clickapalooza.

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My instinct is to start with the basics of telling a story, because it’s fundamental to doing comics. But I realize that’s not actually the basics. The actual basics are the physical qualities of the comic itself.

This is both kinda boring, sorry, and very important. Which, in my experience, is a pretty common combination. But while telling a story in comic form no longer strictly means you’re going to be confined by the physical thing, webcomics exist, a lot of people who want to do comics are thinking of the actual objects.

So, let’s talk about them.

The Single Issue

In North America, the standard size for a comic is 6.625 inches by 10.25 inches. I mention this because a shockingly common rookie mistake is for artists to not quite get the dimensions right in the original art.

Yes, this happened to me, in fact. We were all young once. Well, youngish. I was younger, okay.

The original art doesn’t have to be drawn at that size, mind. It sometimes IS, although that’s rare, and I know one working pro who actually draws at smaller than the comics page, although he’s the only one I know of.

But you do need to hit those dimensions - the aspect ratio needs to be right for print. You fudge this some in production, but if your goal is to do comics in the standard size, the art needs to be in the standard size.

Length is a lot more flexible. Most US comics are Self Cover, which means the covers are printed on (and at the same time) the same paper as the rest of the comic. This is a change from older comics, which were usually Plus Cover, where the covers are printed on a different paper stock.

If you can have any comics laying around that were printed in the eighties or early nineties, you can see plus cover in action. Glossy cover, newsprint interior? That’s plus cover.

Most people, I’ve found, don’t actual notice that their comics are printed all from the same paper stock.This includes me, honestly, because my brain just thinks that covers should be a different paper, but they usually aren’t.

I say usually, because you can still do Plus Cover, and publishers sometimes do. The issue is that it’s a lot more expensive. Basically, it adds complexity to the printing process, and you will pay for it. Literally.

It’s actually cheaper to do more pages Self Cover than to do Plus Cover. For some inside baseball, the first issue of Legacy of Luther Strode is 48 total pages (and the word total is important, more on that shortly) because the story was oversized, and when we priced it out, we realized it was substantially cheaper to do 48 pages Self Cover than to do 32 pages Plus Cover. In that case, we had bonus story pages we originally intended to be a separate promo thing, so it worked out.

Your page count needs to be multiples of four, because of how comic pages are printed. If you’re a total monster and deconstruct a comic, you’ll realize that ‘pages’ are created by the staples - the actual piece of paper has four pages printed on it.

This also means your available page count will always be an even number. You don’t have to use all of it, but it’s going to be even, and this is actually built into the rhythm of how print comics work, from a story perspective. Webcomics, of course, are different.

The standard page count is 32 pages, and this is where things get slightly tricky. This 32 pages includes the covers, which brings the interior pages down to 28. So in the standard US single, that’s the real estate you have to work with.

And THAT is why I wrote this. This is the basic canvas you have to paint on. Can you do other stuff? Sure! I started with mini comics, which were eight total pages, and some of my creator owneds, like the Legacy of Luther Strode issue mentioned, have gone beyond that.

But generally, you’ll be working 28 interior pages, because most comics are self cover (and the covers aren’t typically used for story content) and 32 pages total, because that’s the most economical option. If you’re self publishing, you can vary this a lot more, but most publishers will be working with these expectations and economics.

If you’re now thinking “Wait, most comics don’t seem like they’re 28 pages” you are correct. The standard amount of story pages to 20 to 22 and yes, I realize that having a range is sort of defeating the point of the word standard, but here are. The rest of the pages are ads, backmatter and other miscellenia.

That,too, is mostly economics, although not print economics. Every page of content has a production cost associated with it, so they’re mostly trying to create the smallest satisfying chunk of entertainment at the cheapest per unit cost for both print and production.

Which is why, despite most Marvel and DC comics having 20 story pages, they still print at 32 pages. It’s cheaper to do that, and they have space for ads, which are potentially additional revenue.

This brief tour of the sausage making process is important for creators both from a systemic education standpoint and from a creative one. If you want to do comics appearing in single issues first, then the shape of your story will be partly defined by this.

Every chunk of story will be approximately 20 to 22 pages, and this means you need to account for that much space in terms of how you tell the story you’re telling. One of the reasons we complain about decompression is that when it’s done poorly, it feels like they’re just trying to fill space. Because when done badly, they are.

The point of all this is that the physical object influences the story telling, so you need that basic understanding of the object. So go forth and create, young padawan.

-Justin