DCML Digest, Vol 1, Issue 1294

[Gary Leach]

Dane:

> It's
> roughly the size of a traditional record "album," I believe... hence 
> the
> name.

The Gladstone album is 8 and one-half inches by 11 inches - the same 
dimensions as a piece of American typing paper. They're called albums 
after the fashion of European publishers to refer to their volumes of 
such features as Asterix and Lucky Luke as "albums". (At least, that's 
what the promoters putting these books into the English-speaking 
markets call them - I've no idea what they may be called in any of the 
European languages.)

For a while, the "album" format was a big deal in American comics 
publishing, but its popularity waned when the comic-book-trim-size 
trade paperback was introduced. Gladstone stuck with the album format 
for the republication of the Carl Barks Library in color, but I imagine 
that's one of the format's last hurrahs in comics here in the states. 
The formats ranging from comic book to digest sizes are what the 
readers and the retailers really seem to like these days.

Gary