Two of my faves:

Death by Uncannyknack (John Gallagher) via Deviantart

Witchblade #110 Cover by Mike Mayhew via Deviantart

This Blog's Purport... Conclusion

A strange thing started happening in the mid-1990s/early 2000s whilst I was away from comics. Older series from the Big Two began spawning progeny all over the place...

...and some of the longest running mags from Marvel began rebooting (and rebooting again) with new Number 1s each time.

The progeny posed no problem for completing my now grandiosely-titled Masterlist (nee Reading Order), but my efforts were "complicated" by Marvel's annoying re-numbering trend.

How should I distinguish 1996's Captain America #1 from 2002's Captain America #1 on my list? Should I identify them by Volume number?

Captain America (v.2) #1 

Or should I add the volume date in parentheses (like comiXology does for series on their site)?

Captain America (1996-1998) #1

The examples of how this dilemma has been handled online are plentiful but inconsistent and therefore not helpful.

My biggest problem arose, however, because I vacillated back and forth between strategies.

I started adding volume numbers to the half-completed list (and thus had to go back and change all the previous entries to align with this strategy).

Then I decided that adding the volume numbers was making the entries too bulky and ugly (yes, ugly). I wanted to streamline the entries, so I went back again and deleted all the volume numbers I had just added.

(This, unfortunately, is emblematic of the approach I have employed throughout this project.)

It did not occur to me during this lengthy revision process that I was creating a reading list based on CHRONOLOGICAL order and therefore there was ABSOLUTELY NO NEED to identify either the volume number or the volume date on my reading list.

(I swear to God, I used to be a smart person.)


Luckily, some good things came out of the two decades I had missed in comics.

DC and Marvel started new imprints (Vertigo in 1993 and ICON in 2004) for more mature subject matter that the industry's own Comics Code would not allow in their regular mags...










...and new publishers such as IMAGE entered the fray offering creators the chance to own the rights to the characters and stories they would create.

All of which has left me with plenty of comics I'd still like to collect...

So, though I may claim here that I have finally finished my Reading Order (and thus am ready to begin writing my blog), I know it will never truly be finished.

Now, how to begin...?

This Blog's Purport... Part 3

Like all professional nerds, I have a database listing all the comics (and related items) in my collection -- with columns for identifying details such as authors, artists (including pencilers, inkers, AND colorists), publication dates, and purchase info for each issue, etc.

My collection fills several pages of an Excel database, color-coded by publisher and electronic location. For example, a comic in the comiXology cloud = green fill with black font, a PDF on my computer = green fill with red font, a hard copy only = white fill with black font, Dark Horse Digital comics = blue fill with black font, yada, yada, yada.

(A total dork, I know. Perhaps you doubted my true-fan bona fides?)

However, no. I was not satisfied that I could navigate that database easily enough to readily locate which issue should follow the next in the Holy Chronology of Comic Book Publications.

No, I would need to generate a "reading order" showing the sequence of all the comics at once, perhaps week by week -- starting from, say, January 1960. Something that may look like this: 


Now, I am truly a glutton for the punishment my over-organizational tendencies cause me, but I had no idea what taking this path to an accurate and usable reading order would require of me.

First, I discovered that the "publication" date for a comic and its "cover" date are two different things to the Big Two. The actual publication date (or release date) is two to three months (depending on which decade the comic was published) EARLIER than the date on the cover of the comic.

(a consequence, I learned, of how long the books were 
intended to linger on the news stands back in the day). 

My reaction to this discovery:

WTF? My database has been wrong all these years!?

I also learned that, at some uncertain point in comic history and for an unclear period of time, comics were released on Tuesdays  (instead of Wednesdays, as is the current practice).

So, of course I HAD to go back and correct all the back issue dates for the Marvel and DC comics in my database.

But, how to do that? While some comics are released consistently from month to month, not every comic is published every month.

I started by going to comiXology.com to check all the publication dates against my database.

However, I quickly found that the comiXology dates for older issues are often inaccurate.

So, I found a listing of calendar dates online that goes all the way back to the '60s and before (which you can find here). 


Then I cross-checked the pub dates I had with those posted on my two main resource sites for data on comics: mycomicshop.com and Comic Vine.

Sheesh, THAT was FUN.

But, through this process, I also discovered that Vertigo is not an "independent" publisher, as I had originally thought, but an imprint of DC comics. 

R U F-ing Kidding ME? I have to correct all of those dates, too?!

Shoot me now.

To be continued...