I could give a long history lesson here, but I’ll try to keep things short. Page lengths began at 64 pages (with maybe a few of those as ad pages or house ads) during the golden age of comics. As the size of the package shrunk to combat inflation of costs, so too did the page count go down–first to 48 pages (again, with assorted ads and house ads) and then to 32 pages, with between 20-25 or so story pages. At Marvel, beginning in the 60s, page counts varied at first, but then standardized within a few years at 20 pages of story (plus assorted letters pages and Bullpen pages.) This shrank during the 70s first to 19 pages and eventually all the way down to 17 pages. Eventually, as we got to around 1980 or so, a larger-than-usual price increase allowed the story lengths to go back up to 22 pages, which was the industry standard for a long time.More recently, we’ve contracted again down to 20 pages of story, again primarily as a cost-saving measure and a way to combat the need to raise cover prices.

The sweet spot in any package is providing value-for-money for the consumer, as well as hitting the necessary margin to make the series profitable enough to cover its overhead and turn a profit. So we’ll go up in page count and price on certain issues and projects, depending on how our voodoo calculations indicate doing so is likely to affect the profitability of the pages, and what the needs of the story are.