Pocketbooks

A trade paperback comic, also known as a TPB is usually a story collection which were first published in a comic book and then they were reprinted in the format of a book. This type of book usually captures the story arc from a series of titles or stories.

Even though the term of trade paperback is used for books that have a flexible cover and are usually bigger than a regular mass market paperback, fans of comics will usually use it to talk about the materials which are usually sold in the comic shops which have that format. The term for graphic novel is usually also used, even though some people think that these terms aren’t the same thing, especially since the graphic novel is usually considered to have original material and have square bound printing.

In most cases, stories from a trade paperback will use the same sizes which were used in the comic book. In recent times though, a number of trades were published in a format that is smaller, which is similar as far as size is concerned to a novel which appears in paperback form.

A lot of collections of comics will be published either in hardcover, or a combination of hardcover and paperback editions. When it comes to comics, using the term of trade paperback can be applied to any type of comics and it doesn’t always matter what the cover is made of.

For a long period of time, the trade paperback format was used when companies needed to reprint stories that were older and not available for sale in other formats. In such cases, the comics that were available were usually expensive, as they were quite rare, so they became a collection item. More recently though, publishers started to use this format to release story arcs and collections of stories.