Audiences have become used to the idea that every series or story arc will, at some point, be made available to them as a trade paperback. This assumption is largely justified. A few books bomb so badly as serials that they never make it into trade paperback at all, but those are the exceptions. These days, the major publishers are likely to collect even the most obscure of miniseries into trade paperback format.

What's interesting about the "wait for the trade" mentality is a tendency to view the trade paperback as an equal format in its own right, whereas traditionally it was clearly a reprint format. They were aimed at audiences who had missed the stories first time around and didn't want to hunt down back issues. These days, trade paperbacks are part of the original publishing plan for many stories, and are coming out far more quickly than they ever used to.

There is much to be said for this, for reasons you've heard before. It keeps stories in print, with fewer adverts, in a more attractive format. Plus, it encourages the move toward graphic novels, which, at least in certain circles, seems to be seen as something to be encouraged on ideological grounds.

But there's a key difference between graphic novels and trade paperbacks. A graphic novel, at least in the pure form, was written from the word go to be a graphic novel. Traditionally, trade paperbacks weren't. They were written for monthly serialisation. The trade paperback is merely a collection of stories originally written for a completely different format.

Of course, in this day and age most writers will have at least a reasonable expectation of their story ending up in trade paperback form eventually. This has led to an increasingly blatant tendency to structure stories with a view to the trade paperback format.

Trade paperbacks are now part of the original publishing plan for many stories. Initially this took the form of simply making the book collection-friendly, by structuring the story into clear and severable story arcs that divided up neatly. Trade paperbacks of earlier material always tended to suffer from the presence of extraneous plot elements setting up unrelated stories, which couldn't always just be cut out. The rambling, never-ending soap opera structures that were so popular in the 1980s have largely died out.

But more and more, we seem to see comics being written in a way that implies that the writer sees the trade paperback format as the principal format. An increasingly common observation about a new series or story arc is, "It'll probably read better in the trade."

In other words, the story is structured and paced like a graphic novel. Now the trade paperback is the principal format, with some structural concessions being made to the necessity for monthly serialisation, rather than the other way round. Given that the trade paperback is going to be around for a lot longer than the monthly comic, the appeal of this approach is fairly obvious.

Writers of this school are presumably trying to produce a serialised graphic novel - something which is both a serial and will stand as a whole in trade paperback format for ever more. The concept is not unknown. Charles Dickens' novels were written in serial format (and sometimes it really shows). Nowadays the original periodicals are long forgotten, and the novel-format reprints live on permanently.

Dickens is, however, unusual. And there are problems with trying to write for both formats at once, particularly in monthly serialisation. Taking this route involves attempting to square a circle - or accepting that one or other format is going to be compromised.

The key difficulty is pacing. A graphic novel of 160 pages isn't really all that long. Unless it's an extraordinarily dense piece of work, a couple of evenings should do it for all but the slowest readers. But 160 pages in the American serial format is around seven issues. Six months from beginning to end. If you're an indie book publishing on a bimonthly schedule, it'll take a year. In other words, the audience that is reading this story in bimonthly format is experiencing the story something like 180 times more slowly than the audience reading the trade paperbacks.

Many writers seem to see the trade paperback as the principal format. Obviously, that's a rather misleading way of putting it. More accurately, the audience is reading the story in short bursts spread over a period of many months, and during the rest of the time, they are very probably not thinking about it a great deal. As a result, the pacing issues are wildly different from those arising in a graphic novel.

People reading the story in this format are likely to need more prompting to remind them of what they read in the preceding chapters. This entails a degree of recapping that will probably come across as irksome in the trade. Some books have tried to escape it by having separate recap pages that can be omitted in the reprint, and that's a good solution, but only a partial one.

Then there's the fact that monthly serialisation requires the story to be structured in a way that breaks down neatly into regular 22- or 23-page blocks. In the context of a graphic novel, this sort of regularity may not be the ideal way of telling the story. Every so often, a comic is published that seems to have embraced the trade paperback entirely in this regard and is just breaking up the story in terms of page count rather than because any natural stopping point has been reached. This relegates the monthly serial to a cashflow device.

Moreover, commercial reality is that readers expect the individual issue of a monthly series to be entertaining in its own right. This doesn't mean that it has to be completely self-contained, but generally readers will expect at least sufficient to happen in a particular issue to let them feel the plot has actually advanced that month.

In a graphic novel, creators can get away with the sort of slow-burn beginning that isn't going to work in a monthly. If nothing much seems to have happened in the first 30 pages of a graphic novel, the reader will probably stick with it. After all, he's already paid for the whole thing. If nothing much has happened in the first 30 pages of a comic, a lot of the readers probably stopped buying it after page 22.

In an ideal world, the audience might well have the time and inclination to buy the first three issues of every book on the off-chance that a brilliantly inspired turning point requiring fifty pages of set-up was coming towards the end of issue #3. But this is not an ideal world, and good storytelling does not simply ignore the realities of how audiences react. (On the contrary, storytelling is largely about controlling how the audience reacts.)

Monthly serials require stories structured in 22-page blocks. If a story desperately requires such a slow start, then it isn't suitable for the serial format. Of course, economics may dictate that the serial format is all that a particular creator can afford to publish in, but that doesn't provide an artistic justification for trying to hammer a square peg into a round hole.

All the above might suggest that serialisation is a stilted and dreadful format that we would be better off without. But serials can do their own type of slow burn, in time rather than in page count. A well-constructed serial can keep readers in suspense for months rather than hours. So long as there's something actually happening on an issue-by-issue basis, you can get away with subplots for surprisingly long periods of time.

It's not necessarily a less effective way of telling stories, but it's a different one. And equally, a story deliberately structured with its pacing along temporal lines is going to suffer in trade paperback format where that enforced pacing is lost.

The two formats raise issues of pacing that pull the story in different directions. The result is going to be a compromise for at least one of the formats (although obviously the significance of that compromise will vary from story to story). Which format should take priority? This is an issue highly distinctive to comics, and other media are of limited help. The closest comparison is DVD or video collections of TV shows. They fall down emphatically on the side of pacing for TV - their primary medium.

Increasingly, it seems to be fashionable for the trade paperback to win. Yet arguably a story written for serialisation will survive the transition to trade paperback more effectively than a would-be graphic novel going the other way. It's easier for trade paperback readers to read a story knowing it was intended as a serial, than it is for serial readers to approach the story the other way round.

Trade paperbacks do have a very valuable role, and may well help build a stronger market for original graphic novels. But they're a hybrid format, not true graphic novels - however tempting it may be to write them as such.

Paul O'Brien is the author of the weekly X-AXIS comics review.

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