Comic Book Cover Size: Wraparound Dimensions, Spine and Bleed
A comic cover is back + spine + front + bleed: 13.5 x 10.5 in stapled, 13.76 x 10.5 in at 96 pages. Sizes for every trim, spine widths by page count, and a calculator.
Try it: Cover Size Calculator
A cover is one wide picture, not two
A printed cover is a single sheet wrapped around the book: the back cover on the left, the spine in the middle, the front cover on the right, with bleed around all four outside edges. The printer wants it as one file at that full width, with the fold lines where the spine meets each cover. Two separate front and back images are not a cover; a cover template with a spine that is the wrong width wraps the title onto the back.
So the width of a cover file is
bleed + back cover + spine + front cover + bleed
and the height is the trim height plus bleed top and bottom.
Trim is the finished page size. Bleed is the strip beyond the trim that is cut away; on covers it is nearly always 0.125 in (3 mm) on every side, whatever the interior uses. The spine is the only part that moves: it is exactly as thick as the stack of interior pages, so it depends on the page count and the paper.
Cover sizes for the common trims
With 0.125 in bleed and a 70 lb uncoated interior (370 pages per inch, the usual stock for a comic), these are the whole-cover sizes. Pixels are at 300 DPI, which every printer asks for on a cover.
| Book | Pages | Spine | Cover file (in) | Pixels at 300 DPI |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Standard comic, 6.625 x 10.25 in, saddle stitched | 24 or 32 | none | 13.5 x 10.5 | 4050 x 3150 |
| Standard comic, 6.625 x 10.25 in, perfect bound | 96 | 0.259 in | 13.76 x 10.5 | 4128 x 3150 |
| Trade paperback, 6.625 x 10.25 in | 128 | 0.346 in | 13.85 x 10.5 | 4154 x 3150 |
| Graphic novel, 6 x 9 in | 160 | 0.432 in | 12.68 x 9.25 | 3805 x 2775 |
| Digest, 5.5 x 8.5 in, saddle stitched | 24 | none | 11.25 x 8.75 | 3375 x 2625 |
| Digest, 5.5 x 8.5 in, perfect bound | 200 | 0.541 in | 11.79 x 8.75 | 3537 x 2625 |
| Amazon KDP, 6 x 9 in, white paper | 120 | 0.270 in | 12.52 x 9.25 | 3756 x 2775 |
The cover calculator above does this for any trim, page count, paper and bleed, and gives the fold positions as well as the size. If your printer quoted a spine width, type that in instead of picking a paper; a quoted figure beats any formula.
Spine width by page count
Spine = pages x thickness per page. Offset printers publish thickness as pages per inch (PPI): spine = pages / PPI. Amazon KDP publishes inches per page instead. Both say the same thing. "Pages" means pages as a reader counts them, both sides of the sheet: a 96-page book is 48 sheets.
Questions
What size is a comic book cover?
For a standard 6.625 x 10.25 in comic the full wraparound cover is 13.5 x 10.5 in when saddle stitched (two covers plus 0.125 in bleed all round, no spine), and 13.76 x 10.5 in for a 96-page perfect-bound book on 70 lb paper. At 300 DPI that is 4050 x 3150 and 4128 x 3150 pixels.
How do I calculate the spine width of a comic?
Spine = pages / pages per inch for the interior paper. On 70 lb uncoated (370 PPI) a 96-page book has a 0.259 in spine; on Amazon KDP white paper it is pages x 0.002252 in, so 0.216 in. Saddle-stitched comics have no spine.
Does the cover need bleed?
Yes, 0.125 in (3 mm) on all four outside edges, with the art running past the trim. Keep text 0.125 in inside the trim and 0.0625 in away from the spine folds.