Pausing here to do something entirely speculative.
One of my very first books was black and white, 48 pages (I think!) with a heavy stock cover. I remember being sad at the time that it was being saddle-stitched (by which we mean just a few staples in the middle) rather than perfect-bound (the binding that provides the book its flat spine, which means you can shelve it and see the title printed on the spine).
48 pages, for me, is the lower end of the “graphic novella” length. I say “for me” because this stuff is all entirely personal and arbitrary, I’m sure. But when I’ve done 48-page works with a level of control, I’ve had them perfect-bound and called them graphic novellas. CRECY, AETHERIC MECHANICS, FRANKENSTEIN’S WOMB. I’ll get back to this.
There is, I think, a weird space just under that. Forty black and white saddle-stitched pages wrapped in a heavy stock cover. The saddle-stitching says it’s not a permanent shelf-life item. It’s a chapter, a periodical instalment. It’s not a novella. Bit it’s big. And black-and-white means you can probably sell it for the local equivalent of five American dollars.
I have a particular way I would do this. I daydream about it. I mean, I’ll never actually do it. But, as a hobby, I put the occasional note into a document that is becoming, basically, a thing I’m writing entirely for myself, which will never see print.
It is (probably) a five hundred page story, that would come out in this format monthly. Which is impossible, because a comics artist would die or take four years to draw the whole thing before release. And it would take a year to write it. Functionally Not A Thing That Can Happen. But, in my head, it does. It’s like my Bela Tarr movie on paper, with significant text elements, sitting in negative space next to panels.
No more than four panels a page. Each page should only take four hours to draw. Every four days an offering should be burned outdoors, on a grey stone.
Every forty hours the artist must stand by the window and listen to the loveless wind howl outside while slowly eating a boiled potato
And if you decide to borrow all this and do it before me? In the words of someone else: whatever the hell is wrong with you is clearly a lot worse than whatever the hell is wrong with me, so good luck and godspeed.
Seriously, though. Given that 20 pages of comics sell for four bucks now, imagine what would happen if a bunch of people went this crazy. That would, at the very least, be fun.