Leaderboard

It's worth noting that the confusion over incorrect and inconsistent titles in ComicBase cascades over to Atomic Avenue as well. So while we ComicBase users can figure things out and learn to work with them as they are, random shoppers using Atomic Avenue may not have a clue. It requires a bit extra to find issues of Donald Duck published by Gladstone, for example, if you don't realize that they will be listed under the title Donald Duck (Walt Disney's...) where the publisher is listed as Dell. I'm not yet selling on Atomic Avenue, but I imagine that more clarity and accuracy would positively affect sales. There are also seemingly random titles that are sometimes assigned to specials and FCBD comics. I've had difficulty finding some of those in the database. My most recent example: I just picked up a copy of a Doctor Who comic book that was exclusively released for the 2015 San Diego Comic Con. The cover logo only says Doctor Who, with 2015 Exclusive San Diego Comic Con International in the bottom corner. The indicia says Doctor Who: San Diego Comic Con Exclusive. I didn't find this among the existing Doctor Who entries, so I added it with the title from the indicia to my database. Only later did I accidentally stumble upon its existing entry: it's under Doctor Who: The Twelfth Doctor as #0. There are a few problems with this: (1) There is no "#0" anywhere on the actual comic book; (2) The San Diego comic does not precede the publication of #1--it came out around the time of #10; (3) Although the San Diego comic features the twelfth Doctor and is related to that series, the words The Twelfth Doctor appear nowhere in its title, unlike the series; and (4) While I might understand an argument for keeping the San Diego comic under this series as a Special Edition instead of #0, other Doctor Who convention specials are listed under their own titles, not as special editions of regular series, so there would still be a lack of consistency. It's a problematic, hard-to-find entry, yet I don't think it can be fixed without screwing up someone else's existing inventory. Publishers have definitely made a mess of things to untangle, and they are not themselves consistent, so discrepancies are bound to occur. I only wish they were easier to correct when pointed out, with some mechanism to transfer users' existing quantities to the corrected title or issue number. I understand that there are technological limitations in place, and circumventing them is well beyond me, but I hope someday this can be worked out.

I *think* that in current practice the difference is that there is a function in the ComicBase program that allows you to change the media type of a title that you are viewing. This has the effect of allowing the user to shift their existing inventory for the old title that was in the incorrect media category to the new title that is in the correct media category. I suspect that this is relatively easy to program because the title name doesn't change at all, just the media category in which that title resides. For titles that get renamed, it's a little more complicated b/c you'd need to have a simple way for the user to point their inventory in the old version of the title to the new version since there are thousands of titles in the database... this is why I suggested that it might be easiest to do the inventory shift during the content update that actually adds the new version of the title. This isn't to say that the problem can't be solved, only that I am guessing that this is the reason why changing a title's name is more complicated than changing a title's format. (If I'm way off base on that, I am sure that @Peter R. Bickford can set the record straight!)

I definitely expected as much but I still think it's sad since ComicBase is the defacto comic book database. I realize that CB is nearing 30 years old but there is so much mess in it that it makes finding some things near impossible. One has to constantly think how some might have cataloged a title. Did they: Lop it on to the same title from another publisher (eg. Blondie) Throw multiple different titles under the same pot (eg. ... Spider-Man Comics Weekly #1-157 Super Spider-Man with the Super-Heroes #158-198 Super Spider-Man and the Titans #199-230 Super Spider-Man and Captain Britain #231-253 ( no title, number or date in the indicia) Super Spider-Man #254-310 Spider-Man Comic #311-333 The Spectacular Spider-Man Weekly #334-375 Spider-Man and Hulk Weekly #376-424 Spider-Man and Hulk Team-Up #425-449 Super Spider-Man TV Comic #450-499 Spider-Man #500-552 Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends #553-578 Spider-Man #579-633 The Spider-Man Comic #634-650 Spidey Comic #651-666 All this leads to is someone creating a new title because they can't find an existing one (e.g. Super Spider-Man and The Titans) Ignore the indicia and add it to the bottom of a different title. Not pay attention to how other titles were organized. In the case of Metal Men or Star Wars or titles that have multiple series, scroll through the list hoping that the logo on the comic associated with the title is representative enough that you choose the correct before trying again. One of the selling points that Pete, himself, makes is how labeling your comics makes it easier to organize and find them -- that may be true for a few titles but this lack of consistency makes that claim nearly preposterous in quite a few cases. Not know the start of a title and just guess locking the first issue in stone and making the addition of previous issues impossible (e.g. DC Coming Comics) And those are just a sample of the cases that I've come across. I have a monstrous collection that I want to organize and these inconsistencies make it difficult to do so. I can't believe that these issues can't be resolved in a database (which is really the point of a database and that is to resolve inconsistencies). I'm hoping the ultimate answer is not "well it's set in stone now" so we can't do anything about it. Because then everyone is at the whim and mercy of whomever enters a new title and all everyone can do is hope that they enter it correctly. That seems like the worst possible answer. --Walt

Randall is correct, changing longstanding titles now makes things problematic b/c existing users' inventory data would be turned into a mess. It's a legacy of a nomenclature decision that was made many many years ago when the re-re-re-relaunching of titles didn't happen and nobody could have predicted that it would become such a commonplace thing. I agree that designating repeated titles by volume # is much more cumbersome as compared to designating them by the year that they launched, and several sites already do this. (Marvel also does this when describing the contents of their trade paperback and hardcover collections.) Long ago (i.e., on the old CB msg boards) I suggested that this problem could be overcome if CB's content updates would (with the user's permission) move existing inventory to newly corrected titles... for example, if CB changed the existing Star Wars (1st series) to Star Wars (1977 series), then the update would give a pop-up window for the user to give permission for their old SW 1st series inventory to all be moved to the new SW 1977 series title. Nothing ever came of it, and my knowledge of programming is insignificant enough for me to have no clue as to whether my suggestion could actually be implemented. But if it could, it would allow CB to do a lot of clean-up that would make the program much more accessible to brand new users.