Why have comic book sizes changed, though? I think most people who have any familiarity with the topic will give a pretty generic "cost savings" type answer -- if the pages are smaller, publishers are using less paper and therefore saving money. It makes sense intuitively, so no one really questions it much further. But how much money will a publisher actually save by doing that?
The first challenge in answering that question is that there are a lot of variables at play. Even the most stable comic titles fluctuate how many issues they sell month-to-month, so naturally how much paper you save is going to be dependent on how much you use. Additionally, the price of paper fluctates a fair amount so your savings is going to fluctuate a fair amount as well. Then there's other cost considerations; the per issue cost of a printer setting up their presses for a popular title like X-Men is going to be far lower than the per issue cost of a less popular title that sells maybe only 5,000-10,000 issues a month. Basically, there's bulk discounts for larger print runs.
All of which is to say that the numbers I'm going to be throwing out here are by no means definitive. They're a rough ballpark at best, and only meant to illustrate the general idea. So with that being said...
Let's start by looking at what kind of changes in page size are we talking about in the first place? It can't be much -- I mean, all my comics still fit in a long box, even if I have to get slightly different bag sizes. In the Silver Age, comics were 6.75" x 10.25" but now they're 6.625" x 10.25". That is 1/8 of inch (about 5mm) difference along one edge. That barely seems consequential, right? Well, let's then take a look at costs.
All US publishers combined printed 150,000,000 individual comics in 2022, with total sales at $1 billion US. Marvel accounted for 38.6% of that, or about 5,790,000 issues with sales of $38.6 million US. Printing costs will vary widely, of course, but depending on the volume of comics you're printing, a large publisher list Marvel can expect to be between $0.25 and $0.13 per issue. We'll average that out to $0.20 to make the math easier. Information on actual profits is even more sparse, particularly since all of the major publishers have been bought by corporations, but the data I have points to a per issue profit of between $0.90 and $1.42 per issue. Let's round that off to a dollar (again, for some easier math) -- that would put Marvel's profits specifically from their 2022 published comics at about $5.8 million US.
If we're talking about $0.20 for a 24 page book, that comes out to 8/10 of a cent per page. But if shaving off 1/8" saves you, say, 1/10 of a cent, then you're looking at 7/10 per page. Or $0.17 per book. A savings of 3 cents that gets added directly to your profits. Your dollar profit per book is now $1.03. Over an entire print line from a whole year, that comes to nearly $175,000!
Now, when you compare that against $5.8 million in profit, that doesn't sound like much. But that is $175,000 with effectively no extra effort. You're cropping one side of the page a little tighter, and that is done on the printer's side, not the publisher's. The artists can work in exactly the same way (although I'm sure they'd appreciate knowing a little bit more is going to get cropped), the file set-up and proofing process would remain unchanged... the only difference is that the printer moves the blades a fraction of an inch on their printing press, and they only have to do that once. From the publisher's side, the most effort they'd have to expend is maybe a couple phone calls or emails to let some of the key folks know there's slight change in the dimensions.
But that's why publishers have changed comic book dimensions over the years. It's a simple cost savings measure to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars every year. If I could save 3% of my biggest expenses every year without actually having to do anything different, I know I'd sure leap at the chance!
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