Formats
Before the Second World War, comics were almost exclusively published as tabloid size newspapers. Since 1945, the "album format" gained popularity, a book-like format about half the former size. The comics are almost always hardcover in the French edition and softcover in the Dutch edition, colored all the way through, and, when compared to American comic books and trade paperbacks, rather large (roughly A4 standard).
Comics are often published as collected albums after a story or a convenient number of short stories is finished in the magazine. It is common for those albums to contain 46 or 62 pages of comics. Since the 1980s, many comics are published exclusively as albums and do not appear in the magazines at all, while many magazines have disappeared, including greats like Tintin, À Suivre, Métal Hurlant and Pilote.
Since the 1990s, many of the popular, longer-lasting album series also get their own collected "omnibus" editions, or intégrales, with each intégrale book generally containing between two and four original albums, and often several inédits, material that hasn't been published in albums before, as well.
The album format has also been imported for native comics in many other European countries, as well as being maintained in foreign translations.
Read more about this topic: Franco-Belgian Comics