I’ve decided that in order to be most useful to collectors, I’ll have to have two sets of information for books that have a hardcover and softcover that collects the same contents (different contents are always different entries in the database).
But for something like “Agents of Atlas: Dark Reign” and “Agents of Atlas: Dark Reign Premiere Hardcover” (which seems to actually be a fancy way to say not oversized, omnibus, or special edition – for the most part, premiere means normal I guess) – which is the most common release configuration – it doesn’t make sense to have two seperate entries. Rather, I’ll just have to make the system work with one entry, but two amazon links (and other links in the future), two sets of ISBN numbers, and a new custom taxonomy so you can sort books by Softcover, Hardcover, Oversized, and so on.
The collected edition publication date will remain one field and should be filled out according to whatever release was the earliest.
We’ve talked about some of this stuff before, but while I’m gathering information for the big Marvel update, I’m already getting both sets for these books. So expect the site to be changed to be ready for that future update, probably sometime in this next week.
The DC list won’t be populated with that information for some time (and links will be in the wrong field for a bit right after the changeover) but the Marvel list will upload with all this information already attached to each database entry.
So, just for fun (as opposed to all the other serious business we do around here), I figured we might make some guesses about the Marvel Universe trades before the reading order is up or all the books are tagged.
For reference, the DCU list includes 1782 books plus about 130 unplaced or unreleased.
I’ve currently got 1739 Marvel books in my offline Database. I’m just finishing up X-Men right now, and then I’m going to be going through Amazon and combing for any I may have missed (there are probably a lot!)
As another note, Oversized Hardcovers will have separate entries (most collect different contents as well, but a few are similar or the same as softcovers.)
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What about most popular books? What character will end up the most heavily tagged? For DC, it’s Batman! Of course, we’re not done tagging DC yet either.
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Any other predictions? Are you guys excited?
This has been going quicker than I expected. Mainly because I’ve been unemployed this past week – but that’s a story for another time. New job starts on monday!
Since they’re loosely based on a classic DCU property, and could possibly within possibility, exist within the DCU, The Losers have been added to the DC Comics Reading Order:
The Losers: Ante Up
The Losers: Double Down
The Losers: Book 1 (Includes the previous two trades)
The Losers: Trifecta
The Losers: Close Quarters
The Losers: Endgame
The Losers: Book 2 (Includes the previous three trades)
Currently at 1535 Marvel 616 books. Anyone wanna bet on how many trades and hardcovers Marvel has put out?
The Un-Men spun out of Swamp Thing, answering any questions you might have had about where Arcane’s grody little creations ended up. House of Mystery takes its title from the classic DC horror anthology book (and works in kind of the same way, but with more ongoing plot threads, I think.) They’ve both been added to the DC Reading Order as of this update.
The Un-Men: Get Your Freak On
The Un-Men: Children of Paradox
House Of Mystery Vol. 1: Room and Boredom
House Of Mystery Vol. 2: Love Stories for Dead People
House Of Mystery Vol. 3: The Space Between
House of Mystery Vol. 4: The Beauty of Decay
We’re currently at 1264 books for Marvel, all with their contents worked out and most with dates. On and on and on! I’ve been doing it parallel with Self Contained books and other smaller orders, but I think I’m gonna pause that stuff for now to concentrate on getting Marvel worked out.
Continuing with plugging the small gaps in the DCU TPB Reading Order, I’ve added these three Swamp Thing trades in and updated them with their respective dates:
Swamp Thing: Bad Seed
Swamp Thing: Love in Vain
Swamp Thing: Healing the Breach
The Marvel list in progress is going well! I’m planning to upload the entire thing with a light set of character tags (like the DCU one had) but also with series/event tags and creator tags, at least some to get us started. Then I’ll go through and add complete tags on each book one by one, but as soon as it goes up the Marvel list should be pretty close to as detailed as the DCU one is now.
