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In the American comic book industry, the term one-shot is used to denote a pilot comic or a stand-alone story created to last as one issue. These single issues are usually labeled with a "#1" despite there being no following issues, and are sometimes subtitled as "specials". On occasion, a character or concept will appear in a series of one-shots, in cases where the subject matter is not financially lucrative enough to merit an ongoing or limited series, but still popular enough to be published on a regular basis, often annually or quarterly. A current example of a series of one-shots would be Marvel Comics' Franklin Richards: Son of a Genius publications. This type of one-shot is not to be confused with a comic book annual, which is typically a companion publication to an established ongoing series.

In the Japanese manga industry, the same concept is expressed by the term yomikiri (読み切り), which implies that the comic is presented in its entirety without any continuation. One-shot manga tells its entire story in 15-60 pages, usually written for contests, and sometimes later developed into a full-length manga series (much like a television pilot). Many popular manga series that began as one-shot stories includes Hokuto no Ken (Fist of the North Star), Naruto, One Piece, Berserk and Kinnikuman among others. Rising Stars of Manga is an annual competition for original English-language one-shot manga, many of which have gone on to become full-length manga series.

Since the rise in popularity of online posting of prose fiction and poetry, which are often written in short chapters resembling comic book issues, the term "one-shot" has also become popular for describing self-contained works of electronic literature that are only a single chapter in length.

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