Big News, True Believers!

Strap your cap on and grab your hammer, ’cause the Marvel Reading Order is fully functional!

Including 2956 entries, many with links and information for softcover and hardcover printings, the list is sorted and tagged and all ready to help you get your collection in order. I’ve already got mine added, which you can see here!

Ultimate Marvel has its own separate list, but this list includes stuff like Marvel MAX, Marvel All Ages, What If? stories and even Companion Volumes. If you just want to see primary continuity books (IE, no companion volumes or kid’s stuff) go to the Primary Continuity list.

Every book is tagged with a Character and Creator and many also have a Series or Event – all of which can be used to generate a reading order just on that topic! Plus, don’t forget you can use the filter tool on the secondary sidebar to create your own specific lists or search the database. The ability to filter by Marvel Character as well as DC Character is coming soon.

I’ve added the new sub-categories to the filter tool, so you can now choose to see only books in the Marvel Modern Age, or if you want, you could search for books in just “Golden Age” which would give you Marvel and DC results. Or create a reading order for books just collecting “Uncanny X-Men” issues. Whatever you want!

The list is packed with all the Marvel favorites: X-Men, Spider-Man, The Avengers, Fantastic Four, Wolverine, Captain America, Hulk, Thor, Iron Man, Daredevil, Punisher, Deadpool, Nick Fury, She-Hulk, Doctor Strange, the Silver Surfer, the Sub-Mariner, Ghost Rider. And a lot more.

Once you’ve found the books you’re looking for, you can add them to your collection which will automatically be sorted alphabetically and by reading order – just click that little green plus button next to the book! Remember, you’ve got to be logged in to add books to your collection. (If you’re not registered yet, it only takes a second, and you can even use a fake name – accounts are only used for collection management and forum posting.)

The Age Of Conan

In addition to the Marvel list, there’s also an offshoot – the Conan Universe Reading Order containing comics for all of the Robert E. Howard inspired characters such as Conan The Barbarian, Red Sonja, Kull, Thulsa Doom, and Solomon Kane.

Conan comics were originally published by Marvel (and Conan does exist in the Marvel Universe!) but because there are so many books published by Dark Horse and Dynamite, the list has been given its own home on this website.

For Marvel continuity purposes, these books take place between Thor’s Age Of Myth and before the Marvel Westerns.

Major Structural Updates

The site is now running on an updated backend and the forum has also been redone. The amount of memory available has been increased as well.

The DC Quicklist and Marvel Quicklist are fully functional and all the new pages are now linked from the sidebar. In case you haven’t noticed, simple index views are now available for Primary List Reading Orders, DC Series Reading Orders, DC Character Reading Orders, Marvel Series Reading Orders, Marvel Character Reading Orders, and Creator Reading Orders.

The site has gained a ridiculously large amount of content in the past few days, but our work is never finished. Moving forward, I’ll be adding covers to every book and filling out the character tags. As always, you can leave a comment on any book with questions or advice, either on placement or about the information in the database.

We’ll also be getting back on the daily review schedule starting this weekend!

Stay tuned, dear readers!

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We’re currently in the middle of upgrading to wordpress 3.1, which will cause some difficulties. Most of the site should still work, but the individual book views and some other information may not. Feel free to let me know if you encounter a problem, otherwise everything should be set soon!

Update: Core update, plugins, and forum updates all complete. Everything should be working fine (with some small changes in link structure) but let me know if you run into any issues!

Comment!

Alllllright! Now’s a good time to reuse this Herc image. The marvel database is ready to upload. It’s not super simple (as it requires making about 3000 new database entries and about doubling the size of this entire website.) Plus there are going to need to be some structural redesigns and redone code for you to actually have access to all that information.

Please bear with us while these changes move through. At the earliest, I hope to get it up and mostly accessible by tomorrow afternoon. At the worst, it might take a couple days if we run into some problems.

Here’s some specific stuff:

1. Expect the existing marvel books to disappear first.

2. A few of the DC categories are also going to go, or change, which means you might have to update some of your links.

A. For example, there will no longer be the “recommended reading order” – that’s basically just going to be the DCU list. Same for the other two lists… we’ll be implementing sorting in another way soon.

B. the ages will be changed to say “DC Golden Age” etc. And “Marvel Golden Age” would be the equivalent.

3. A million books will be going up so the site might be a little slow.

4. The front page will be shifted around a bit, with the marvel character tag list finally showing up, etc.

5. Same for the sidebar, the real-estate will be split. Soon I will have dedicated pages to view ALL the character, series, etc, tags in a list form (instead of just the drop downs) but we’ll concentrate on the more important stuff first.

That’s basically it. There are a few more things, but the first goal is just to get all the information online. We’ll worry about making the site a little more user friendly again after that main step. Feel free to keep an eye on the Marvel Progress forum thread for specific updates. But I’ll post another blog post when everything is up, of course!

I hope you guys are excited! I sure am – I can’t wait to finally sort my marvel books!! :D

Also, I figure I misewell use this post to announce the Green Arrow: Road To Jericho Giveaway Winner! It’s Tim from California, MD (TRO User timjoyce2828). Congrats, Tim!

For everyone else, make sure you enter the current giveaway. That is, if you like free stuff!

Update 1: The books are up! They were uploaded in 12 batches, with the site going slow for a little, but it seems to mostly have recovered. Feel free to browse around and start adding stuff to your collection. I’ll be working to get all the info on the sidebar, get some header images in, etc. I’ll keep you up to date!

Update 2: Marvel info is now showing on the front page! As we expected, the X-Men Family is pretty solidly at number 1. I’d like to get the counts working again, I’ll see if I can.

Update 3: Marvel info on the sidebar is in! Expect the Marvel Quick List to go up tomorrow and to see the categories added to the top navigation. I’ll keep tweaking the sidebars as well.

And keep up the advisory comments, that’s the best!

(and also tomorrow, maybe first thing, I’m gonna treat my self to putting in my collection and sorting my bookshelf!) Now I’m going to sleep! It’s been 11 hours straight sitting here this session!

Update 4: All the stuff talked about in this post is complete! I’m going to try to create some character/tag archives, but besides that, consider it live!

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First, I’ve heard back from everyone and now can announce the winners for our January (and first week of February) giveaways!

You guys have been very patient while I’ve been working on the Marvel list, and I thank you for that. Without further ado:

Lex Luthor: The Unauthorized Biography

Ryan from Prospect, CT (TRO user Irishpanther)

The Batman Chronicles Vol. 8

Jason from El Monte, CA (TRO user hellboy)

Final Crisis Aftermath: Dance

Nate from Portland, OR (TRO user rageous)

Batman: Holy Terror

Michael from New Brockton, AL (TRO user Darth Davis)

Hardware: The Man In The Machine

Sean from Hamilton, OH (TRO user Skleefeld)

Congrats everyone!

To those of you who didn’t win this time, don’t be discouraged!

We’ll keep doing giveaways every week and often there will be more than one winner. So statistically, as long as you hang around, you’ll get something eventually!

With Chris and a couple more of you offering to donate a couple of their spare books, it’s quickly becoming a little weekly bookswap. Pretty awesome.

I also wanted to note that the Skleefeld up there is Sean Kleefeld, who you may have seen elsewhere around the comics web. You should check out his writing at Kleefeld On Comics! Thanks for dropping by Sean and I hope you enjoy your lucky win!

Now Some Updates

Most of my time is spent working on the Marvel List right now, just a few days away from being online, I think. Marc also updated his annotated list, adding some stuff in the 1970s.

I also took some time to tweak the individual blog post layout. The title of the post is now bigger and spans the space above the top of the page (across the filing info and share links.)

The filing info now takes three lines with the subcategory centered on the second. The share links, on the other hand, are now spread out across one line.

I took out the Digg and Delicious buttons to make this possible – honestly, they’re kind of dying services and anyone who still uses them probably has an add-on for them already installed. Facebook, Stumbleupon, and Reddit and twitter all give a fair amount of traffic to this site, so I’m assuming that you guys still find these links to be useful.

Seriously, thanks for all the sharing – bringing this site to the attention of your friends is the number one way you can help the project. Try and get em in on the forum too, the more viewpoints we have on updates, reading orders, and what we should do next, the better the site will be in the long run.

I think that’s it for now. As always, let me know what you think!

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We’ve all been spending a bit more of our free time over at the forums, which I originally though would be more of a trouble shooting / quick help area of the site.

I’m gonna bold the major points in this post, just in case you’re quickly skimming.

Since we’re socializing and goofing off, I figured I misewell have a little fun with it. I started some new off topic forums:

– Video Games

– Television and Movies

– Music and Audio

If you think there’s anything else we’ll chat about enough to deserve its own forum, let me know!

I sorted the existing off topic threads into those categories. I also sorted some others that were in the wrong comics category, etc.

I pinned the “Review Requests” thread at the top of the Reviews forum, since it’s a good one to have easily accessible.

For a bit of fun, I created some forum rankings based on post counts – so it won’t just say “New Member” or “Member” under your name anymore. They start off in increments of ten, but go alllll they way up to 20,000.

I don’t want to spoil the fun by telling you what any of them are. If you don’t like your current title, just stick around and it will change soon enough!

I’ll be uploading some badge icons to reward those with high post counts.

Also a big update, the editing interface is now more complex, with the ability to upload your own images. I personally liked the HTML editor, but it had some issues and required hotlinking.

But now every member has their own folder which they can upload images to – you can style your posts any way you like!

I added a New Forum Posts link to the sidebar, which you should see when you are logged in. It should help us keep up with the conversation (especially since I had to disable my email alerts so I could get stuff done!)

Let me know if you experience any bugs or weird formatting. The forum is a really complex plugin, so it requires a lot of careful tweaking. I’m happy to do whatever I can to make it easier and more enjoyable for you guys to use!

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