I started reading the comic adaptation of The Stand by Stephen King. Wikipedia mentions “Marvel Comics adapted The Stand into a series of six five-issue comic book miniseries.” and I don’t understand what it means.
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American comics tend to be sold as “single issues”, something between a magazine and a pamphlet, about 32 pages total including ads. These are sold at comic book stores and other specialty stores generally once a month. A single issue is like an episode of a TV show or a chapter of a book. It might be a self-contained story that you can just enjoy on its own, but more often these days it’s part of a longer serialized story that requires you to read the whole thing.
A story arc can be very short, or very long, but has the idea of a story that takes place over multiple chapters. A collected edition will be a book version with many of those chapters reprinted in a single volume.
In the case of “The Stand”, Marvel originally released the comic adaptation as a series of six volumes, each originally serialized as five single issues. This was primarily for marketing purposes, rather than just saying that it would be a 30-part adaptation, they made it as a series of miniseries with the hopes that people would be more willing to buy it in that format.
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