Casey Weston

I was printing some Collection Overview reports and was looking at Action Comics and noticed once the /A variations began, issues no longer aggregated, they simply enumerated. Rather than have Issue # - Issue #, it listed them individually. For some long-running series that will become a pain. I understand that for most there is a "regular" issue # and an /A variant, which makes this difficult, but I think there need to be a rethink and redefinition of what a "regular" issue is. You cannot have a system that uses the concept of "regular" issue and then stop using it. For me, and I am being a bit selfish here, I rarely get variants and I would prefer them to be subsheeted or sublined underneath a particular issue. For example, each issue should have a parent stub - Action Comics 1056 for example, that's the "regular" issue. Underneath that stub (or parent) are the covers. Whatever numbers in the sublines is summed in the stub. This way each issue will only ever have 1 stub/parent and have X lines for covers (regular, variant, whatever). If you want to view only the stubs on a grid, you can. If you want to expand to add information like quantity, you can. I vastly prefer this solution as it makes the grids much more browsable.

I understand and agree that this makes sense, however is there a way to just show the variant A covers and/or regular covers in addition to those that I own? I feel like the only place this feature now works are on Marvel comics.

The logic ComicBase is using to determine which cover to display is choosing incorrectly in some situations. Amazing Fantasy for instance is preferring the 1000 covers instead of the earliest issue - #15. Another situation I have seen recently involves Nth printings of the first issue somehow getting ordered before the first issue. I think this coincides with another issue I have seen recently and wrote about (in Contents and Corrections): I think there are other issues when issue # goes under 1, (0 issues, negative issues), but those are rarer instance, however maybe an ideal logic would preference the cover for the oldest issue in the series, rather than simply the lowest number in a folder. Not sure how easy that would as I don't have access to the logic. Note: I had to delete variant covers of #1000 on Amazing Fantasy to get it to choose the main cover of #1000 in the attached image.

I am a collector that really only collects the main covers for Marvel/DC. I noticed recently that DC comics listings have changed from just an issue # to Issue #/A for the main cover. 1. Is there a good reason for this? 2. It breaks the feature for viewing just regular covers (which I find very useful). Now I have a lot of variant cover spam in my grids. Can we go to a consistent numbering of main cover just being the issue # across titles so that when I want to just see the main covers, it actually works. Currently, it only consistently works for Marvel comics.