How I’d Run an Album-Based Comics Career

If you were a comic book creator thinking about pursuing a career in comics by only producing albums in North America, here are my suggestions for you.

Story Length

Each book should be between 48 and 64 pages. Traditional European albums are 48, but many will range higher up into the 60s. To keep both the price of the final book and your own workload down, though, try to stick to 48 pages.

Think about it: if each standard North American comic runs 20 or 22 pages, that means each album will be at least two comics’ worth of story. If you take advantage of the page size — we’ll talk about that in a bit — then you can get almost three issues’ worth of story in a single album. When someone complains that your album costs too much, do the math for them.

48 pages is enough space to give your story room to breathe, but restricted enough to get you to focus on the fundamentals and to eliminate the padding or less important parts you might otherwise be tempted to add in with a “graphic novel.”

Keeping the page count to a number like 48 also means you can be more prolific and have more releases. Those will come in handy later.

Story Format

If you’re doing a series: Each book needs to be self-contained, even if it isn’t. Let me explain.

In a perfect world, each book is an individual release, books could be read in any order, and a new reader could start with any book. (See Asterix, Lucky Luke, Tintin, etc.)

If you’re looking at doing one long series across albums, then make sure each book is a complete story that works up to an arc. If you keep going, make those smaller arcs lead into one bigger arc.

Don’t let any book have the chance of being called “filler.” Make each book a complete unit. Sure, throw in a cliffhanger as an epilogue, but make the individual purchase feel worthwhile. You can see this at work in series like “Harmony,” “The Campbells,” or “Alone“.

You might want to have each story arc run 3 or 4 albums. That makes for a nice collected package down the road. In France, they call them “Integrales” and the series of books in that storyline is generally referred to as a “cycle.”

Keep in mind that, like with monthly comics today, you’ll have some part of your readership who will wait for the collected edition, even when each album is already like a mini-collection.

That’s OK; you’ll get their money eventually… This career choice is very much a long tail one.

Publication Format

Take advantage of the album format. Publish in an oversized format and use that page space. Don’t draw the same three tiers of panels on each page when the page is 20% bigger than a standard Marvel/DC comic. Go with four tiers of panels. Put more story and energy into the book.

Make the book more impressive physically. It’ll help justify the increased cost from the page size and count.

Also, make sure your letterer adjusts the size of the font. You don’t want super large lettering on the page because the letterer assumed it was going to be on a standard-sized comic. This was my complaint with the short-lived run of Treasury-edition sized comics Marvel released about 20 years ago. (The Dan Jurgens Fantastic Four book comes to mind.)

Release hardcovers first, with paperbacks down the road, giving you two releases for the same book. Then you can do the collections mentioned above every couple of years as the backlist grows.

Your page count is short, but that can be offset with pages that have more happening on them. Classic techniques like right-page cliffhangers still work, no matter the page size. You just have a little more time and space to get to them.

With oversized pages in the album format, any time you break out of a strict panel grid, it’s going to look even bigger. Use those moments to your advantage.

Speaking of which — you may want to emulate the classics and take two pieces of Bristol board to draw each page. Turn each page 90 degrees on its side and that’ll be the top or bottom half of the page. It’ll give you a little extra space to cram all those details in.

It will also help keep you from creating full-page splash images. Think half-page splashes, at most, and use those sparingly.

If you’re working digitally, adjust your page size and specs accordingly. And then don’t feel guilty about zooming in to add details. Larger pages mean more of those details will be seen.

Publication Schedule

48 pages’ worth of work is the equivalent of three issues, let’s estimate.

The fastest you’ll be able to release books is quarterly. But you really need to build in some downtime or some development time. Three books a year is easily doable. That’s the equivalent of 9 issues of a comic.

It also helps make each volume feel more important or more like an “event” if you’re not continuously releasing new stuff. (Of course, the Direct Market’s pre-ordering schedule will still make it feel that way, but we’ll do the best we can here…)

After you’ve built up a good back catalog, you can slow down a bit. That’s also the career arc I’ve seen more Franco-Belgian creators go through.

Marketing

Every book release is a marketing push. So while you’ll probably have to be working on the next book already, you need to take time to push this new book.

Depending on whether you’re a “known name” or not in the industry, you have a couple of ways to go. Having a publisher behind you can help if you already have name recognition. The closer you can get to an Image style deal, of course, the better off you’ll be in keeping more of the back-end money. But if you really don’t want anything to do with marketing, you’ll need to partner up with a publisher.

Marketing is part of comics creation. Whether you like it or not, that’s just the facts. This is where having a publisher on your side is a good thing — like Dark Horse or Boom! or one of those.

If you’re more independent and don’t mind handling your own promotion — even if it’s just podcasts, YouTube channels, website interviews, and Local Person Does Good newspaper interviews — then go with an Image style deal.

If you can do this all through a Kickstarter or Indiegogo style campaign, then go with that. Obviously, it’s a lot more work, but it’s the ultimate in freedom. You won’t have to argue with your publisher that the book needs to be in album format and screw the retailers whose heads are so far up their you-know-whats that they don’t want to support a book that won’t fit on their stands. They didn’t have half-height shelves for manga books not that many years ago. Now, it’s where they make their money.

::deep breath:: Sorry, I hold grudges. Back to your album-formatted comic:

No matter which way you choose, you need to make every book release into an event of some kind.

I was struck by something I saw on Twitter last year: A French artist had a new book released and several other professional BD creators were cheering them on across social media. They celebrated their colleague’s new release. Imagine that…

While there are complaints in France that too many BD albums are released every year, it’s still a relatively small number compared to what we have going on here, where Marvel and DC might publish 50 comics a month each.

Book releases are special because they’re not monthly. It’s a success to publish a new book and a win you should take and celebrate.

There’s room for creators to cheer each other on without fear of picking favorites or being drowned out by everything else. Some collegiality would be nice. Of course, if everyone is on the same schedule doing their own albums, then more people would “get” it and it would naturally happen more.

Most importantly, though, is that you have to keep your backlist in mind. That’s the “free” money. That work is in the can and just sitting there. Let it make money for you. Keep the old stuff in mind while producing and marketing the new stuff. Whether it’s offering a sale price for buying multiple albums at the same time or just promoting an older book that has something in common with the new one, talk it all up.

Long-Term Career Planning

You can’t publish one album, call it a failure, and quit. This is a game plan for the long haul. You need to build up your library of albums. You need to cross-sell and sell up.

When you find a new fan, you’ll have a library of previous books they might also enjoy.

The key to this career is much the same as it is in independent novel publication: Your backlist is key. The best marketing for your old work is your new work.

This is also how Amazon Kindle novelists work: They often don’t start making money until they’ve written three books and can afford various tricks to make money with their whole catalog.

They would also suggest you work in series. Don’t ask readers to bounce around. Give them something they like with a book and then have multiple books like it ready for them to buy next. They also would suggest you stay in the same genre until you’re well established. Give them what they’re looking for and they’ll come back for more.

Others Who’ve Tried This

The closest anyone has seriously come to this model is Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips with their “Reckless” series.

That’s more patterned after the pulp novels of old, though. The format is different. The books are much thicker, but the page dimensions are smaller and there are fewer panels and less story per page. It’s closer to manga formatting than BD formatting, so retailers might be less averse to stocking it, because they’re scared simpletons who are afraid of change and never lead on anything anymore.

(Sorry, sorry. Sorta.)

Then, look at the backlog of books the two have produced. There’s usually an ad in the back of their books to show you most or all of them. It’s an impressive library they’ve compiled there, a lot of which is still in print. They still make money from the work they did years ago.

Warren Ellis had a go at this nearly 20 years ago through Avatar. “Crecy” was one of those titles. It was a smaller book, though, not album-sized. The thought there, I’m sure, was in part to keep the price down by keeping the paper cost low on a longer book.

It blows my mind that more people haven’t tried this more in the past twenty years. It’s the perfect middle ground between the monthly issue and the original graphic novel.

Yes, There Are Obstacles

Keeping a large catalog of items in print isn’t easy and it isn’t cheap. Nothing is a given.

Getting started when you know that your first two or three albums might not be the large money makers you need them to be will be tricky.

Some of the marketing and sales techniques might be more relevant to Amazon with its algorithm and built in audience, but in the broad scope of things they can still apply to comics.

The answers to all of these questions are the same as you currently deal with — producing work for the Big Two to keep food on the table while working on your own creations is hardly a new career move now. Working with publishers and printers to keep old stuff in stock is a case-by-case basis kind of thing that will be different for each artist and each series.

I wish digital were a bigger part of the comics industry, because that would help cover a lot of ground here…

But What About — ?!?

Yes, there are a lot of “Buts” in this discussion. I know all of the objections I’ll get to this article already.

But here’s the thing: The Direct Market is a creation of a market from the late 1970s and early 1980s. It doesn’t reflect the market that exists today. A majority of the growth is in manga and YA books and not single-issue comics, unless you’re seen as a good investment because somebody has a movie option and your book slabs nicely with a virgin remarqued cover and a witnessed signature.

(Again, don’t get me started, though I can partially see it.)

It’s about time some people tried to create the change that the market needs, rather than complain about it but continue to do nothing out of fear.

Comic book readers want to read comics. If the shape and style of them morph into something new that better reflects the changing times and allows for growth in readership, we shouldn’t nix it immediately because retailers’ shelves are one size or the hardcore readers only want the most number of items to purchase every Wednesday, week-in and week-out.

Your Homework – Study Amazon Kindle

The more I read back on this advice and the more I think about the whole set-up, the more parallels I see to the Kindle Store at Amazon. (They’d also suggest you create to the tropes and stay inside your genre, two things that I don’t think comics creators think about as much as they ought to.)

You should study how that system works and learn to adopt some of their practices to the comics world — the newsletters, the back catalog, the production, producing towards the expectations, etc.

Listen to some of the podcasts in that industry. Read the blogs. Watch the YouTube channels.

I think it would be very helpful for more independent comics producers to pay attention to that market and bring more ideas over.

Is It Possible?

I think so, and I think we see some people taking tentative steps toward creating this new model. It’s not even a new model. See Will Eisner and Raina Telgemeier for two obvious and well-known examples.

It’s not as crazy a reach as some might think, and many media consumption trends are lining up in its favor. It’s the kind of change that will have to happen from the independent side of things to prove its popularity before the Big Two co-opt it.

Slowly, ever so slowly, we see signs of this model creeping in, and I think it’s something that would work at all levels of the industry. Yes, even Marvel and DC, who talk proudly about how monthly comics provide an affordable comics vessel for their readers while charging $3.99 for 20 pages of story.

But that’s a topic for another day…