Page Count

I attended Wondercon this past Saturday and brought my son with me for his first comic convention. We got there when it opened at 10 and stayed until closing. It was a long day, but it was a good day.

We went around and did the normal fan stuff first. I snuck in the business stuff here and there throughout the day. I have been trying to plan the layout of my Xiola comic, and as I said, the story is written, but I still need to lay out the whole thing and think of how many pages I want the books to be. Now normally, I'd want to make a book with a page count of a mutiple of 4 for easiest printing. I'd originally thought I'd make each book 20 pages long which is short for a comic, but the more I look into it the more I think I should make it longer. 20 pages seemed reasonable because I wanted to give myself a realistic goal. 20 pages per book for 7 books is 140 pages for the entire story. That may take me years to complete.

Some comics are 40 pages per issue as in most Marvel books. (Speaking of which, where was Marvel this year? They had no presence at the con.) There's a new company called Radical which makes it's first issues 48 pages, then the rest are 24 pages. They try and suck you into their world with their first issue and then bring you back for a more normal monthly page count. But then there is Hellboy. I ran into Mignola and gave him a copy on my Wanderings short. After talking to him I realised that I'm going to do what he did; tell a story I want to tell over a series of books and in a manageable size so I can get it done. So I checked out his Hellboy Seed of Destruction series and found that they are 24 pages per issue.

Not too short for a comic, though short enought to be manageable for a one man team. In total it will be 168 pages for all 7 issues of Xiola. It is definitely going to take more than a year to complete, but I'm excited to see what I'll get finished by the San Diego Con this summer.

Now I've got to go back to my rough layout and reorganize my pages. I'll add a few more panels to cover the four more pages, but mostly I'll be spreading out the same number of panels over more pages. Less claustrophobic. I'd had some pages with more than nine panels, and more than nine starts to really get busy.

Once I lay out the first book I'll post it, so you can see what a rough draft of a comic looks like.