What are the most widely comic books formats?

Question

What are the most widely comic books formats? Let's say you want to publish online comics across multiple platforms such as Amazon and modern digital platforms. What standards should you use if you don't want to change the format and want to use a single one across several different platforms? By format, I mean image size (800x600) and type (png, jpg).

Answer 1

I used a crawler to analyze around 20000 webcomics listed on http://www.thewebcomiclist.com

Disclaimer. Take these results with caution: the crawler made guesses as to what constitutes the main webcomic content instead of, for instance, a website banners. Files of types not strictly meant as image file types were not processed, e.g. PDFs.

In any event, these are the results:

Image size:

       width  height
mean     491     429
std      455     587
25%      100      40
50%      449     238
75%      748     656

File type:

.jpg     46%
.gif     29%
.png     15%
other    10%

Note that there are at least three to four popular aspect ratios (here computed as height over width). From manual inspection on a very small sample size:

• the larger, e.g. the peak at 1.5 are likely webcomics that have an overarching story;
• the smaller ones (e.g. the peak around 0.3) are single strips

Another way to look at aspect ratios is to plot the contours, with a bit of jitter. The axes are in pixels. You can easily identify the long panels with high aspect ratio, the flat and wide panels and the square ones at the intersection with an emergent shape at 600 x 600.