The typical album is printed in large format, generally with high quality paper and colouring, commonly 24 cm × 32 cm (9.4 in × 12.6 in), has around 48–60 pages, but examples with more than 100 pages are common.
While sometimes referred to as graphic novels, this term is rarely used in Europe, and is not always applicable as albums often consist of separate short stories, placing them somewhere halfway between a comic book and a graphic novel.
The roots of European on-paper comics date back to 18th century caricatures (mocking others styles or behaviors) by artists such as William Hogarth.
[2] Other precursors include illustrated picture books such as Wilhelm Busch's Max and Moritz (1865).
[3] Earlier, paintings, depicting stories in subsequent frames, using descriptive text resembling bubbles-text, were used in murals, one such example is written in Greek, dating to the 2nd century and found in Capitolias, today in Jordan.