My good news to myself right now is that I completely finished writing the script (give or take refinements) and that it runs up to exactly 44 pages.
The reason this is good news has to do with offset printing*. To maximize printing costs, the number of pages in a publication needs to be a multiple of 16. Printing 44 pages costs the same as 48, but 50 pages jump into a different price bracket. 32 pages would have been too little and 64 too much, so I set Malaak episodes to have 48 pages each for consistency in weight and pricing. Of these 48 pages, take out 1 page for the vocabulary notes which I include at the end, and 3-4 for the title pages. So the very maximum my story can run is 43-44 pages, hence my relief that it's going to hit exactly that. A shorter story is not an issue, as I can always find bonus material to fill the remaining. This is just one of the printing considerations that come into play before I even start penciling the first page.
* (which remains the highest quality and most versatile printing process there is and therefore what I use for the comic, despite the proliferation of digital printing whose advantages lie elsewhere).
