Today the situation is certainly better, but not ideal.\u00a0 Publishers in the last 10 or 20 years have tried to shape their story lines so that they fit nicely into collections, for those readers who want the stories without the bother of buying monthly or who missed the original run.\u00a0 They also offer a dazzling array of comprehensive reprints of classic material in publications with various price points, ranging from inexpensive newsprint (DC Showcase & Marvel Essentials) to trade paperbacks to glossy high-end, hard-cover publications (DC Archives & Marvel Masterworks).<\/p>\n
So, if you are a fan of the stories, there are certainly a lot of choices to find what you may have missed in the first go around, but there is also a lot of opportunity for confusion in figuring out what you have and what you need.\u00a0 Of course, you can make lists on paper or in spreadsheets, but sorting and cross-referencing is a real hassle, and how do you make annotations for cameos and split stories.\u00a0 Well, the answer is a well-thought-out database schema and a relational database.<\/p>\n
For those unfamiliar with these terms, let me give brief informal definitions and then apply them to the art of comic collecting.\u00a0 A database is any method of storing and retrieving data associated with some object being described.\u00a0 Common examples of a database include lists, spreadsheets, card catalogs, phone books, and the like.\u00a0 A schema is a model for how the database is laid out, usually in the form of one or more tables.\u00a0 For example, a phone book schema typically consists of one large table that lists the name of a household or business followed by its address and phone number.\u00a0 A relational database is a sophisticated software application that relates data in multiple input tables to produce new output tables that answer specific questions.<\/p>\n
For the rest of this post, I will focus on developing a good schema for comic collecting.\u00a0 I\u2019ll do this by considering a classic story that demonstrates most of the nuances encountered in organizing a collection, and show how a fairly simple schema can tame the complexity.\u00a0 In the next post, I\u2019ll talk about applying this schema in a relational database, adding some finishing touches, and show the results.<\/p>\n
The story is \u201cBeyond the Purple Veil!\u201d<\/a> featuring Doctor Strange.\u00a0 Published in April of 1964, \u201cBeyond the Purple Veil!\u201d was an 8-page backup feature in Strange Tales 119, which was headlined by the Human Torch.<\/p>\n The next time this story appears is in Giant-Size Defenders #2 (1974) as one of three reprint stories backing up a 30-page new Defenders feature.<\/p>\n Beyond the Purple Veil appears next in a compilation entitled \u2018Doctor Strange, Master of the Mystic Arts\u2019 published in 1978 by Pocket Books.\u00a0 The book, which measures about 7 by 4 inches, contains reprints of the Doctor Strange backup stories from Strange Tales 110-11, 114-129, and 146, with only issue 110 identified.<\/p>\n It also appears in Essential Dr. Strange, a black-and-white compilation (2001), and three separate versions of Marvel Masterworks (1987, 2003, and 2010), the first and the third being hardcover and the second a trade paperback.<\/p>\n While it is possible to catalog each appearance of the story in a single list as separate entries as shown in the figure below, consider what happens if you notice that the title is missing the exclamation point at the end.\u00a0 You now have 7 entries that have to be edited, each one time-consuming and prone to error, even with a search and replace.<\/p>\n In addition, how should the other stories, contained in each of these publications, be tracked?<\/p>\n The simplest way to accomplish all of these goals is to have three separate lists.\u00a0 In the first list are all of the stories in the collection.\u00a0 In the second list are all the publications in the collection.\u00a0 The two key features of the comic collection are that multiple stories can appear in a given publication and that a given story can appear in multiple publications. \u00a0This many-to-many relationship is tracked in the third list where each entry is a single relationship that indicates which story is in which publication. Taken together, the three lists constitute the schema.<\/p>\n The figure below shows a partial realization of the schema for the seven publications discussed above, and for the two Doctor Strange stories \u201cBeyond the Purple Veil!\u201d and the one that followed it, \u201cThe House of Shadows!\u201d, published in Strange Tales #120. The first table catalogs the publications giving each a unique Publication Id, which is called a primary key in the language of relational databases.\u00a0 The second does the equivalent job for the stories.\u00a0 In both tables, the order of entry is not important and any shuffling of either list is workable.\u00a0\u00a0 The third table, the relationship table, is the crucial ingredient.\u00a0 Each entry represents a relationship between the publications and the stories and is denoted by a unique Relationship Id.\u00a0 Note that the relationship table clearly reflects seven appearances of the story \u201cBeyond the Purple Veil!\u201d in the seven publications discussed above.\u00a0 Entries 3 and 8, show that the publication Doctor Strange: The Master of the Mystic Arts contains both the stories \u201cBeyond the Purple Veil!\u201d and \u201cThe House of Shadows!\u201d.<\/p>\n That is all there is to constructing a basic schema for organizing a comics collection.\u00a0 Next week I’ll go into how to handle a story that gets split into more than one publication, or one that is only partially reprinted. I\u2019ll also present how you can put some more columns in each table to track additional items, and how to mine the data to make very nice lists showing different aspects of your collection.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"![\"Strange_Tales_119\"](\"http:\/\/aboutcomics.blogwyrm.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/12\/Strange_Tales_119.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Dr_Strange_Pocket_Books\"](\"http:\/\/aboutcomics.blogwyrm.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/12\/Dr_Strange_Pocket_Books-176x300.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Purple_Veil_Listing_#1\"](\"http:\/\/aboutcomics.blogwyrm.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/12\/Purple_Veil_Listing_1.jpg\")
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