Adding comics to books

books
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I looked into the old Comicogs database to assess feasibility of importing comics into the books catalog. Here’s what I found.

What’s there: 56,387 comics, 23,065 credits, 3,002 publishers, and 8,152 series.

The good news: Most comic fields map directly to what we already have on editions — title, credits, format, language, identifying codes, page count, dates, and notes all fit cleanly. Graphic novels and trade paperbacks could slot in today with minimal changes.

The challenge: Comics are fundamentally organized around series and issue numbers (e.g., “Batman #47”). Books aren’t. To do this properly, we’d need to add:

  • A Series entity type with linked references from editions
  • Issue and Volume fields on editions
  • A Type field to distinguish Comic Book, Graphic Novel, Manga, Manhwa, etc.
  • Genre (80% of comics have this, books currently don’t)

The serialized issue structure is the main thing that separates comics from books — a standalone graphic novel is basically just a book, but a run of monthly issues needs that series backbone.

I think it’s doable. The series/issue model would actually benefit books too (think multi-volume series like Harry Potter or Discworld). More to come on this.

What do you think — does adding series/issue/volume to the books catalog make sense, or would comics be better off in their own catalog? Would love to hear your thoughts.

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Soooo... what's happening with
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Edition already has fields for Series Number, Issue Number, and Volume Number; things used with periodicals.

The Periodical ‘credit’ could become a more top-level property. Is there any reason this wouldn’t work?

edit: I also wonder if Contents ought to become more detailed. Anthology comics were very popular in the UK, historically - not sure how prevalent they were in the US - where a story was serialised across many issues, and each issue contained many serialised stories, each with their own set of properties (artists, writers, photographers, actors, episode numbers, titles, etc).

I’ve got a complete run of the UK Eagle comic from the 1980s with copious spares that I need to keep track of!

I’ve mused previously about formalising the structure of contents - making it its own entity. Maybe this is a more concrete reason for it.

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We do have “Series” on editions already. If it becomes an option on Books, would it apply automatically to the respective edition? Like the same way we have now with the unfortunate “English Title”? Because the issues might be numbered differently in other countries or even reprints. Or did translated volumes become their own independent series back in the comicogs days?
Also a little concerned about multi layered series like Star Wars, Star Trek or James Bond with all the sub-series/ spin-offs and reboots going on.

Any plans on how to handle the “Publisher” vs. “Credit” issue, which I guess was a result of the discogs differentiation of “Label” vs. “Company”?

4

Series entity

We are currently modelling this as a Credit entity in the books data, e.g. The Alexandria Quartet - books - ctlgs

I think it would be great to have a dedicated series entity available in the books model as it’s a valuable and real concept in book publishing.

What I would do…

  • Comic to Edition
  • Comic to new Book (as required)
  • Credit to Credit
  • Publisher to Credit (role: Publisher)
  • Series to Series (a new entity)

It might feel like overkill to create a book for every comic, but I think it has real-world value.

  1. A way of grouping cover variants, reprints etc.
  2. A place to store that comic Genre

Type, e.g. Graphic Novel, Manga etc.

I’d move this to the Book entity. For me it’s a high-level classification of form like Novel.

I think I’d prefer it in a new field, rather than adding more genres. Later we can migrate the book (genres) like Novel and Short Stories so they sits in the same field.

Volume and Issue fields

We do already have these as Identifier types. However I think they need more prominence for comics (and also magazines, periodicals etc. e.g. National Geographic).

I would add these two new fields separately to Edition entities.

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Do you want this separate from ‘just another Credit’ simply because it’s significant for comics, or because it needs its own set of properties - and if that, what would they be (given that we can already do “Series [Name]” and “Series Number”)?

We could model comics now using ‘Periodical’ for the comic title, ‘Series’, ‘Series Number’, ‘Volume Number’, and ‘Issue Number’ for the specifics of a run of a comic (one of which would be an Edition), and Book for when there are variant covers, trade-vs-newsstand issues, special editions, regional variants, etc.

There is also ‘Franchise’ and ‘Publisher Series’ that can be utilised if relevant.

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It might help if we could see diagrams for the schemata from comicogs. I can’t remember what was there.

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I think that Series is a more important concept than other credits, it’s closer to the Book entity in terms of metadata, e.g. with authors, genres, dates etc.

Since it exists as an entity for comics, I would aim to avoid potential data loss, which we already saw with the works that were not migrated.

Yes, it would be good to see a list of attributes on the Series entity.

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8

I wonder, would utilising a Series entity make allocating an Edition (of a book, comic, or magazine) to multiple series feasible?

I’ve already encountered a scenario where I need an Edition of a book to be part of two different series at the same time.

For example: Kharé - Cityport of Traps - books - ctlgs which is part of the overall series for the Wizard run of the FF books, and also part of the Sorcery! sub-series.

The problem here is that we can’t specify which “Series” the “Series Number” relates to. You have to already know for it to make sense. Adding a description field to the credit allocation would work, and was what I’d been hoping for (for many other uses too, as mentioned elsewhere). Perhaps the Series [Name] and Series Number can be combined in one Series entity, and providing multiple Series entities can be assigned to an Edition, it should help.

edit: I’d also quite like to see “Series Number” renamed to “Number in Series”, to avoid confusion.

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Wouldn’t the existing “Periodical Title” credit be closer than “Series”, at least for the single-issue ones? Similar to for example Mojo:

It would be great to be able to tie catalog/volume/issue/etc. numbers to an entity, at least for the following credits:

Periodical Title / Series / Publisher Series / Imprint / Publisher

I think Periodical Title and Series would be probably better on the Book level, as they will stay the same even if the publisher changes.

But if using the Series credit means that comics will be brought here, then forget the above. Things can be also adjusted later. :slight_smile:

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This isn’t true for books, and may well not be true for comics either, though I can’t think of a case example for comics. My previous link to Kharé illustrates the series only applying to some Editions of the title, and, for other titles, the series has a different series number for different Edtions.

Realising this makes me re-evaluate tying series name and number together so tightly. The same Book may belong to the same series, but with different Editions having different series numbers, and the same Book may have some Editions belonging to one series, but other Editions belonging to two. Also, translated Editions of a Book often belong to a different series than the original language Editions.

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The idea of having an umbrella for issues of a comic would also work for magazines. I entered quite a few magazines a few weeks ago as editions without “books”. I feel they should only have one “book” level entity, with all the editions of the magazine/comic/whatever beneath them.

The last time I actually used databases was on an ICL mainframe in the 90s, so I’m not sure how easy this is to do, but I assume it’s easier now :slight_smile:

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A “serialized issue structure” for comics is exactly the same as for magazines though. I think you essentially need a “periodical” entity at the same level as “book”, with the individual issues beneath that. I’m probably thinking in fairly hierarchical terms, but you’re right, it should be doable.

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I thought this at first, but there are some magazines which have multiple variants per issue - comics obviously have this, too.

Periodical magazine Warlock has territory variant issues (when published by Penguin - it changed to Games Workshop after a few issues). See issue #2 which has a UK-centric ‘global’ issue and at least two variants that I know of (one is in the database).

It makes sense to have Periodical Title as the umbrella grouping for a magazine, but I’m just not sure how it maps to comics.

(Fingers cross the forum software doesn’t balls up my formatting…)

Currently we might map a comic as:

Periodical Credit:
{
:title "Miracleman",
:profile "British superhero. Originally Marvelman."
}

Series Credit:
{
:title "Miracleman",
:profile "Classic British hero Marvelman, revived and renamed by Alan Moore in 1985."
}

Book:
{
:title "Miracleman #1",
:dates
[
{:date "1985", :type "First Published"}
],
:notes "Issue #1 of Miracleman"
}

Edition

{
 :book {:id 111111, :etype :book, :title "Miracleman #1"},
 :title "Miracleman No.1",
 :format "Magazine",
 :dates
 [
  {:date "1985 08", :type "This Edition Published"}
 ],
 :credits
 [
  {:name {:id 222222, :etype :credit, :role "Periodical Title", :title "Miracleman"}}
  {:name {:id 333333, :etype :credit, :role "Series", :title "Miracleman"}}
 ],
 :identifying_codes
 [
  {:code "1", :type "Series Number"}
  {:code "1", :type "Issue Number"}
 ],
 :notes "UK variant with monochrome yellow map on the back cover."
}

Would we have, in :credits[]
{:name {:id 222222, :etype :credit, :role "Periodical Title", :title "Miracleman", :issue_no "1"}}
and no Issue Number code?

or at the root
:series {:id 444444, :etype :series, :title "Miracleman #1", issue_no "1"},
and have a Series entity that encapsulates a whole series and replaces the use of the ‘Periodical’ Credit?

Do we need to model Volume differently for comics, too?

14

The difficulty is going to be setting this up in a simple way, that can be made more complex as required, rather than in a way that is always complex. Clearly some periodicals will just have a single numerical sequence of editions, which need to be entered easily, and some will have various reprints and/or editions that need to be findable.

I don’t know much about comics, but I imagine displaying these so different versions of the same thing actually appear different is going to be important too. Ideally I think there would be a simple way of entering magazines, fanzines (which are less likely to be reprinted), and periodicals, that can be expanded when required to cover more complicated cases…

15

Thanks for all of this! There are some interesting questions here and I’m really on the fence about including comics in books.

What strikes me about the discussion so far is that dzed’s Series entity, xceque’s Kharé example with one edition in two series, and steppenwolf’s point about magazines needing an umbrella are all circling the same thing. Comics are organized around a run of issues rather than around a title, and they may need their own unique sorting and display to make sense. That’s all doable. I’m just thinking about what it does to books along the way — more fields on the edition form, more concepts in the guidelines, more to think about for someone entering a paperback novel who’ll never touch a comic. It also adds up to more complexity in the codebase which makes it harder to maintain and change down the road.

I also looked into the old forum archives. Comics launched about four months before books did. And in the five years they were both running almost no comicogs users posted in the bookogs forum — I don’t think many of them knew it existed. The two communities hardly overlapped. Meanwhile plenty of bookogs users did ask for comics to be merged in, and the reasons were pretty consistent: they didn’t want to keep track of two websites, and they didn’t want their collection split across two places.

That last part feels like the heart of it to me, being less about the data model. Those were complaints about the old setup — separate sites, separate logins, separate collections. ctlgs is one site with one account and one profile. The missing pieces are unified collection and search. I will build both of these. The intention is that your collection work across every catalog at once, so a comic, a book and a gig poster can sit together in a virtual “shelf” or “box” without switching between anything.

I know there was also talk about needing duplicate credits for each catalog, and would be better to have a shared credit. We can explore this.

My general preference in running ctlgs is toward simplicity — a number of smaller, focused catalogs rather than a few large ones covering a lot of ground. It lets each one have a model that fits what it holds and have simpler guidelines. So I lean toward comics as its own catalog sharing the same site and the same collection, but I hold that loosely, and you’re all the ones entering the data.

So I’d like to hear, if comics were a separate catalog here, with a collection spanning both, what would you miss that merging into books would give you?

btw, I’ll follow up separately with the comicogs data model that was requested.

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16

If this can work, then I don’t really object to comics being separate. I do wonder, though, what is it about magazines/periodicals that sets them apart from comics that they must sit with books? And what of books that are graphic novels / collected comics? Do we split the catalogue around function or content? I can see it might be easier to go with content, but I just can’t see what comics need that periodicals don’t already have. Perhaps it will make more sense if I could.

To throw a spanner in the works, I have the 5 issues of 2000ADs Dice Man, which is a magazine, a gamebook, and a comic.

How feasible would it be to allow the same entity - books Edition, comics’ equivalent, whatever - to exist across multiple catalogues? To say ‘this Edition is a books Edition and a comics Edition’. Would I submit my Dice Man issues into books or comics? We already had that bug where a Book would render as an Edition and vice versa. It seems that it could work in principle.

17

For reference here is the old comicogs structure:

comic (56,387 docs)
- title — string
- types — enum
  - Comic Book | Graphic Novel | Manga | Manhwa | Manhua | Manfra | Comic Strips | Comic Fanzine | Original Graphic Novel | Periodical
- language — string
- Date — string
- series — [→series]
- creators — [{role, →credit}]
  - 74 roles: Author, Writer, Artist, Penciler, Inker, Colorist, Letterer, Editor, Cover Artist, Translator, Designer, ...
- format — enum
  - Hardcover | Softcover | Trade Paperback | Oversized Hardcover | Digital | Other
- genre — string
- publishers — [→publisher]
- issue — string
- volume — string
- notes — string
- identifying_codes — [{type, code}]
- page_count — string
- characters — [string]
- collects — string
- location_of_pub — string
- external_links — [{url}]

credit (23,065 docs)
- title — string (person name)

publisher (3,002 docs)
- title — string (company name)

series (8,152 docs)
- title — string (series name)

Relationships:
comic ──┬──→ credit      via creators[].name._id     (with role)
        ├──→ publisher   via publishers[].name._id
        └──→ series      via series[].name._id        (with issue, volume)
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Whether comics sit on their own or with books, could we please include the concept of multiple formally-defined contents sections to allow for anthology comics, like I mentioned above? Each issue would have multiple serialised stories, each like its own comic-within-a-comic, with its own creators, characters, series, title, episode numbers, genre, etc. All may differ from one episode to the next, so wouldn’t be appropriate to put in a Series, and just plonking them all flat in the Comic entity wouldn’t be good enough because there would be no way to know which story the credits relate to.

Probably the most well-known anthology comic is 2000AD.

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btw, you can use triple backticks to do a multiline block of fixed-width text (code block). I edited part of your post to show you. Also there’s a toggle option for markdown/rich text editor which may help.

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I don’t know if Fumetti is planned in the list of genres for comics, but it should be added.

Another minor point - one which add another small bit of weight to the need for complex contents sections - is that the Eagle (1982) comic - the comic of my youth and the origin of my avatar :slight_smile: - used fumetti (a term which has come to mean photo-stories) for some stories, and each of the early issues featured some stories in fumetti and some in regular drawn style.

Would there be any benefit in moving magazines/periodicals to comics, should comics be a separate catalogue? I can’t think of anything that is specific to comics that wouldn’t benefit periodicals apart from the specific genres/styles.