Comic strip data

[neversurrender8]

OK, just to get the ball rolling, this is what *I* look for in terms
of comic strip data, and the order in which I search. I should point
out that my primary interests is genre (usually science fiction) and
creators; followed by storylines and reprint info. Your mileage may
vary :)

1) Genre -- of course this is noone else's first pass, but this is
sadly mine. I want to filter out the pure humor. That said,
occasionally, a strip like THE BUNGLE FAMILY has a time travel story;
RIP KIRBY goes to Atlantis; or even DICK TRACY goes SF for a couple of
years; and strips like CONNIE, BRICK BRADFORD and ALLEY OOP start out
as one thing and end of as SF. Which begs the question -- can we
search (or even want to search) genre at the story level?

2) Strip title - normal folk, of course, probably want to start here.
Some strips change names (SECRET AGENT X-9 to SECRET AGENT CORRIGAN)
and others go by different names depending upon the newspaper where
its carried (STRANGE AS IT SEEMS, a non-fiction strip, had at least
two different simulataneous titles)

3) Syndicate - many strips jumped from syndicate to syndicate; BRICK
BRADFORD being one famous example. Does this create a new listing? Is
BRICK BRADFORD (Central Press Association) different from Brick
Bradford (King Features)?? And some strips go from one medium to
another - HENRY started out in magazines, and there was a discontinued
caveman strip that jumped to Boys' Life.

4) Published date - As noted before, some strips (BUCK ROGERS, CONNIE,
etc) were originally numbered and designed to run on any date a
newspaper wished to start; some Sunday strips ran on Saturdays in
newspapers that only published 6-days a week; at least one Canadian
newspaper collected STAR HAWKS in a separate comic book section
comprised of 7 strips; weekly newspapers collected 6 dailies at once,
etc. And how to create a daily record for something that ran decades
is problematic from both storage and a search standpoint.

5) Creators - OK, a strip may say "by Dan Barry", but we all know that
at various times Harry Harrison or Bob Kanigher wrote it, and Mike
Sekowsky, Rick Estrada, or Sy Barry drew it. This creates varying
levels of creators and uncertainty.

6) Editors -- I'm not certain how useful this is, or how to include.
The Times and Dille Syndicate had heavy handed editing and it was
important; I'm interested in how long people like Sylvan Byck were
involved with Flash Gordon but ...

7) Format - Sunday strips have notorious varying formats that affect
much more than appearence, dropping panels and much more. Even daily
strips have different presentations (2 panels across in a two row
format, single panel, etc etc)

8) Story titles - very important to me. In the olden days, every
Sunday strip -- and lots of daily strips -- had an individual title,
sometimes presented the previous day / strip. In my own story
listings, I've used titles from an authors script (Harry Harrison,
Leslie Charteris) where available; a published announced title from a
previous strip; or even from a foreign reprint collection. Nice to be
able to differentiate where these came from. And as noted before,
starting and ending dates for a story are often overlapping.

9) When is a syndicated strip a syndicated strip? The Times had their
own comic section and a number of their strips appeared nowhere else
(I think BEYOND MARS had this distinction); others (like, I believe
ROD RIAN) appeared in supermarket circulars before hitting Flash
Comics; the MENOMONEE GAZETTE is responsible for solely distributing
the second coming of DRIFT MARLO and the import of a few UK strips (as
is the LA TIMES re UK stuff). And some King Features strips only get
US distribution via the web (I believe TARZAN fit this category)Lots
of grey areas.

10) examples - short of creating a database of all published strips,
what will be used for a cover image? (and I'm waxing wise either; some
examples should be included)

I'm sure I missed something.

Next (tomorrow?), I'll try to list the sources I've used.

Art Lortie

[Merlin Haas]

>
>1) Genre -- of course this is noone else's first pass, but this is
>sadly mine. I want to filter out the pure humor. That said,
>occasionally, a strip like THE BUNGLE FAMILY has a time travel story;
>RIP KIRBY goes to Atlantis; or even DICK TRACY goes SF for a couple of
>years; and strips like CONNIE, BRICK BRADFORD and ALLEY OOP start out
>as one thing and end of as SF. Which begs the question -- can we
>search (or even want to search) genre at the story level?

Searching genre at story level makes more sense than searching at
strip title level, but I wonder if keywords might be a better way to
go. The GCD has had endless discussions on how to define genre
without coming up with entirely satisfactory solutions.

>
>2) Strip title - normal folk, of course, probably want to start here.
>Some strips change names (SECRET AGENT X-9 to SECRET AGENT CORRIGAN)
>and others go by different names depending upon the newspaper where
>its carried (STRANGE AS IT SEEMS, a non-fiction strip, had at least
>two different simulataneous titles)

Stripper's Guide uses "title" and "alternate title" Newspapers
print strips under all sorts of variants of the official names.

>
>3) Syndicate - many strips jumped from syndicate to syndicate; BRICK
>BRADFORD being one famous example. Does this create a new listing? Is
>BRICK BRADFORD (Central Press Association) different from Brick
>Bradford (King Features)?? And some strips go from one medium to
>another - HENRY started out in magazines, and there was a discontinued
>caveman strip that jumped to Boys' Life.

I think title works better than syndicate. (We'll still have
instances like Big Chief Wahoo > Steve Roper > Steve Roper and Mike
Nomad to work tracking on.) Keep one title, and just note when
distribution changes from syndicate to syndicate.

>
>4) Published date - As noted before, some strips (BUCK ROGERS, CONNIE,
>etc) were originally numbered and designed to run on any date a
>newspaper wished to start; some Sunday strips ran on Saturdays in
>newspapers that only published 6-days a week; at least one Canadian
>newspaper collected STAR HAWKS in a separate comic book section
>comprised of 7 strips; weekly newspapers collected 6 dailies at once,
>etc. And how to create a daily record for something that ran decades
>is problematic from both storage and a search standpoint.

Some papers like Chicago American printed Regional editions on
Saturday that included all six daily strips, in addition to the usual
local one-a-day editions. Most strips were intended to be printed on
a specific day. Even the Canadian papers which printed Sundays on
Saturday left the Sunday date on them. Not sure what the best way
to handle the numbered strips is.

>
>5) Creators - OK, a strip may say "by Dan Barry", but we all know that
>at various times Harry Harrison or Bob Kanigher wrote it, and Mike
>Sekowsky, Rick Estrada, or Sy Barry drew it. This creates varying
>levels of creators and uncertainty.

We almost need fields for "ghosts" and "assistants", since hardly any
creators did everything on their strips, especially in the old days
when things paid well. Even today, strips like Beetle Bailey and
Garfield are collaborative affairs.

>
>6) Editors -- I'm not certain how useful this is, or how to include.
>The Times and Dille Syndicate had heavy handed editing and it was
>important; I'm interested in how long people like Sylvan Byck were
>involved with Flash Gordon but ...

Not much interest in this.

>
>7) Format - Sunday strips have notorious varying formats that affect
>much more than appearence, dropping panels and much more. Even daily
>strips have different presentations (2 panels across in a two row
>format, single panel, etc etc)

Formats were more standard in the old days. Looking at a Sunday
today, I'm not sure how to describe the formats that are jammed
together to fill up the page.

>
>8) Story titles - very important to me. In the olden days, every
>Sunday strip -- and lots of daily strips -- had an individual title,
>sometimes presented the previous day / strip. In my own story
>listings, I've used titles from an authors script (Harry Harrison,
>Leslie Charteris) where available; a published announced title from a
>previous strip; or even from a foreign reprint collection. Nice to be
>able to differentiate where these came from. And as noted before,
>starting and ending dates for a story are often overlapping.

Should be a field for this, though it will be very hard to find
titles for some individual dailies.

>
>9) When is a syndicated strip a syndicated strip? The Times had their
>own comic section and a number of their strips appeared nowhere else
>(I think BEYOND MARS had this distinction); others (like, I believe
>ROD RIAN) appeared in supermarket circulars before hitting Flash
>Comics; the MENOMONEE GAZETTE is responsible for solely distributing
>the second coming of DRIFT MARLO and the import of a few UK strips (as
>is the LA TIMES re UK stuff). And some King Features strips only get
>US distribution via the web (I believe TARZAN fit this category)Lots
>of grey areas.

Syndication would be the appearance in more than one publication. If
a strip appears in just one paper it isn't syndicated.

>
>10) examples - short of creating a database of all published strips,
>what will be used for a cover image? (and I'm waxing wise either; some
>examples should be included)

Yellow Kid comes immediately to mind, though perhaps overused. It is
a public domain image, which would solve some problems.

Just as an aside, we need to come up with a better name than
"Stripper's Guide". (That's the only fault I can find with Allan's
project.)

best -- Merlin Haas

[Lionel English]

On Sun, Sep 5, 2010 at 1:30 PM, neversurrender8 <alor...@aol.com> wrote:

1) Genre -- of course this is noone else's first pass, but this is
sadly mine. I want to filter out the pure humor. That said,
occasionally, a strip like THE BUNGLE FAMILY has a time travel story;
RIP KIRBY goes to Atlantis; or even DICK TRACY goes SF for a couple of
years; and strips like CONNIE, BRICK BRADFORD and ALLEY OOP start out
as one thing and end of as SF. Which begs the question -- can we
search (or even want to search) genre at the story level?

We're going to build this from the ground up.  So if we say we need to be able to search for genre at the story level, we can make that a requirement to be met.  However, when you say story, are you referring to individual strip titles (as in (8) below) or to extended stories/continuities?

I'm thinking it might be more useful, as Merlin indicated, to apply a genre to the strip as a whole, and then to have keywords that can be applied to individual episodes or groups.

And grouping is, I think, another important feature to look at:  We certainly need the ability to add data in bulk (create Sunday strips from 1/2/34 to 4/5/68; create a daily+Sunday strip from 2/3/45 to 5/6/78 ), and to select subsets of the data for bulk editing (select Strip X from Date A to Date B, add/replace art credits with Joe Blow).

 

2) Strip title - normal folk, of course, probably want to start here.
Some strips change names (SECRET AGENT X-9 to SECRET AGENT CORRIGAN)
and others go by different names depending upon the newspaper where
its carried (STRANGE AS IT SEEMS, a non-fiction strip, had at least
two different simulataneous titles)

Out of curiosity, how do you determine which is the official name?  Is it just the most common one, or is there an authoritative source you can refer to?  Names and alternate names are, of course, very important.

 3) Syndicate - many strips jumped from syndicate to syndicate; BRICK

BRADFORD being one famous example. Does this create a new listing? Is
BRICK BRADFORD (Central Press Association) different from Brick
Bradford (King Features)?? And some strips go from one medium to
another - HENRY started out in magazines, and there was a discontinued
caveman strip that jumped to Boys' Life.

No reason we can't have our cake and eat it too, if the tech guys are clever enough.  We want to be able to look at strips by syndicate, and we want to be able to look at the full run of a strip no matter how many syndicates the run is spread over.

 

4) Published date - As noted before, some strips (BUCK ROGERS, CONNIE,
etc) were originally numbered and designed to run on any date a
newspaper wished to start; some Sunday strips ran on Saturdays in
newspapers that only published 6-days a week; at least one Canadian
newspaper collected STAR HAWKS in a separate comic book section
comprised of 7 strips; weekly newspapers collected 6 dailies at once,
etc. And how to create a daily record for something that ran decades
is problematic from both storage and a search standpoint.

I think we'd like to track which papers carried which installments of which strips.  This is the kind of thing a database should be good at.  I *think* that will cover most of the scenarios above, as well as things like papers that ran Doonesbury reprints on dates when the current strip was too controversial, or some strips (I'm blanking, but I think maybe Modesty Blaise?) which had "introductory" strips for use by new papers so they wouldn't have to jump into the middle of an ongoing story.

 

5) Creators - OK, a strip may say "by Dan Barry", but we all know that
at various times Harry Harrison or Bob Kanigher wrote it, and Mike
Sekowsky, Rick Estrada, or Sy Barry drew it. This creates varying
levels of creators and uncertainty.

6) Editors -- I'm not certain how useful this is, or how to include.
The Times and Dille Syndicate had heavy handed editing and it was
important; I'm interested in how long people like Sylvan Byck were
involved with Flash Gordon but ...

7) Format - Sunday strips have notorious varying formats that affect
much more than appearence, dropping panels and much more. Even daily
strips have different presentations (2 panels across in a two row
format, single panel, etc etc)

So, are there subset of Daily and Sunday?  Other formats?  Panel?  Full page?  Multi-page?  What's covered by Format?

 

8) Story titles - very important to me. In the olden days, every
Sunday strip -- and lots of daily strips -- had an individual title,
sometimes presented the previous day / strip. In my own story
listings, I've used titles from an authors script (Harry Harrison,
Leslie Charteris) where available; a published announced title from a
previous strip; or even from a foreign reprint collection. Nice to be
able to differentiate where these came from. And as noted before,
starting and ending dates for a story are often overlapping.

 

If we allow arbitrary grouping of installments into story lines, then there's no reason we can't overlap them if needed, or leave some out if there are brief gaps between long stories.  Any given installment should be allowed to be part of zero, one, or more story groupings.  So a given installment can have it's own unique title, but could also belong to larger continuity.  Or two.

9) When is a syndicated strip a syndicated strip? The Times had their
own comic section and a number of their strips appeared nowhere else
(I think BEYOND MARS had this distinction); others (like, I believe
ROD RIAN) appeared in supermarket circulars before hitting Flash
Comics; the MENOMONEE GAZETTE is responsible for solely distributing
the second coming of DRIFT MARLO and the import of a few UK strips (as
is the LA TIMES re UK stuff). And some King Features strips only get
US distribution via the web (I believe TARZAN fit this category)Lots
of grey areas.

10) examples - short of creating a database of all published strips,
what will be used for a cover image? (and I'm waxing wise either; some
examples should be included)

 

This will be a much bigger challenge than it is on the comic book side.  A scan of a comic book cover falls well within fair use guidelines.  But a scan of an entire strip installment does not.  At the top most "about this strip" level, we might get away with a few panels in isolation, or maybe one example strip.

A few other things we probably want to track:

Strip premise:  Brief description of what the strip is about.

Story synopsis: at the story level, a brief description of the story.

Characters:  At the top level, major characters who belong to the strip.  I.e. the regular cast.  And then, maybe at the story level, another listing, that would include the regulars appearing in that storyline, and any storyline specific characters.  Tracking characters at the individual installment level seems like over-kill to me, but I'd be willing to listen to counter-arguments.

--
Lionel English

San Diego, CA
lio...@beanmar.net

[Donald Dale Milne]

Some thoughts on what to include:

1) Genre - We've had a lot of problems with that in the GCD, though
there are some widely accepted genres. I would suggest a limited number
of genres that would encompass everything we've seen, along with the use
of Keywords to allow folks to drill down further. Perhaps to apply a
genre to the strip as a whole, and the Keywords to episodes.
2) Strip title - Much like the series name in the GCD, a strip name can
change over time. Will will need to record the various names as they
appear on the strips, and maybe even some commonly used names. Setting
one name per strip as an 'official name' for our purposes and linking
all others to it would be useful for search and data entry.
3) Syndicate - Much like the publisher in the GCD, a strip's syndicate
can change over time. I don't believe we should create a new strip each
time one changes syndicates, as I think that model is confusing for users.
4) Published date - no opinion
5) Creators - It appears we will need to record the role that a creator
played, such as ghost or uncredited assistant.
6) Editors - no opinion
7) Format - The format can be different for the same strip on the same
day in different papers: do we wish to go into paper-by-paper data?
Perhaps the best information for format is the number of panels? Also,
whether printed in color or black-and-white could be useful.
8) Story titles - no opinion, as I have seldom seen a title used on a strip
9) When is a syndicated strip a syndicated strip? - no opinion
10) examples - The earliest known strip we can get a scan of? Of
course, to avoid copyright problems it should be offered only as less
than full size.

Story synopsis - I like to know what's going on in a strip by episode,
for identification of a reprint.
Characters - This has been of great interest to me, so I would like the
ability to record and search for characters in a strip, by episode. It
can be useful, or at least interesting, to see how infrequently some
continuing characters are used.

- Don Milne

> lio...@beanmar.net <mailto:lio...@beanmar.net>
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[Lionel English]

I'm trying to stay away from implementation discussions, 'cause our programmers asked so nicely :-), but I can't help thinking of things in data groupings, and so I'm going to reorganize my thoughts along those lines to see what new ideas shake out.

== Data ==

Strip meta data  -- general information about the strip.  Name of the strip. Alternate names.  Dates begun and concluded.  Creator(s).  Premise.  Genre.  Links to preceding and/or succeeding strips, if any.  Frequency.  Format(s).  Newspaper or magazine.

Strip owners -- syndicate or other entities who control distribution.  Names.  Address(es).  Dates.  Key personnel (and tenures and positions).  Links to previous and/or next incarnations.

Ownership -- links between strips and strip owners indicating duration of relationship.  Strip.  Owner.  Begin and end dates.

Subscribers -- papers or magazines in which a strip appears.  Publication name.  Publisher.  Location/distribution area.  Links to previous and/or next incarnations.

Issues -- issues of above.  Date and/or vol/issue number.

Installments or episodes -- individual strips.  Date and/or serial number.  Installment title.  Credits.  Characters.  Synopsis or identifying caption or dialog.  Keywords.

Publication -- occurrences of installments in issues.

Story/Continuity -- aggregates of installments that tell extended stories.  Story name.  Synopsis.  Keywords.  Characters.

Characters -- people who appear in a strip.  Name(s).  First appearance.  Brief description.  Strip(s) and story(ies) associated with.

Creators -- people who produce strips.  Name(s).  Birth, death dates.  Brief bio.  Links to work.

== Functionality == 

Must be able to enter/edit/search for all of the above.

Must be able to work on data in bulk--create installments in bulk by specifying beginning and ending dates and frequency.  Select installments by data range to add/edit credits in bulk.  Etc.

[tony]

We're all just spitballing now, right? We'll distall these into a
more coherent list for actual discussion?

A hypothetical record for a comic strip should contain:

Strip name
with alternate names
Format (daily or sunday or both)
Creators
including ghosts and assistants when known
Syndicate
Dates of run
A description of the strip

There should also be some links to the follow data:
a list of all the dates the strip appeared which will further link to
a list of the characters for that date
and the newspapers in which that day's strip ran
and the particular creators for that day's strip

I realize that last buncha stuff is mostly about implementation but I
think it's pretty important and worth mentioning now.





tony

[Lionel English]

Yeah, we can spitball, organize, refine, and repeat until we think we have a clear description of what we want the tech team to build.  And then we'll beta test it and find out what we forgot to tell them and have them fix it.

 

And no, saying you want to see something that links to some other stuff is not implementation.  Implementation would be behind the scenes stuff -- tables, fields, joins (telling them how they should link tables).  Saying what you want to see and how you want to interact with things is perfectly appropriate to bring up here.

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[Lionel English]

OK, just as a reminder, our initial goal here is to come up with a requirements doc that can be passed on to our tech team, so they can begin analyzing, modeling, and prototyping an actual database.  So far I think we're making pretty good progress.

 

We've identified a large but fairly well-defined scope:  newspaper comics, national and local, for all locales, including small press alternative papers and college/university newspapers.

 

We have a decent collection of data elements we want to index, below.  Please let me know if we discussed anything else, data wise, that's not included below.

 

What we've most recently been discussing is functionality--how do you want to interact with the database?  How do you want to be able to index things?  What do you want to be able to search for?  How do you want large search results presented?  Are there other things we should look at?  Many of those questions might have multiple answers.

 

I'm hoping to wrap up this initial discussion phase by the end of next week--if discussion gets hot and heavy I'll keep it going longer, but if not I'll wrap it up next weekend and post the requirements document to the gcd-tech list where the programmers live.  When that happens, I'll post a link back to this list of the relevant thread on that list (which has public archives--you don't need to subscribe (but can if you want) to follow what's going on).  After that, I'll leave this list open, and you can discuss whatever you want while we're waiting, and I'll be sure to update everyone -- via this list -- when the tech team has questions for us to consider, or when they're ready for some beta-testing.  When we reach the beta-testing phase, this list will shift focus to beta-testing discussions--what's working, what isn't, what could be done better.

[Merlin Haas]

>OK, just as a reminder, our initial goal here is to come up with a
>requirements doc that can be passed on to our tech team, so they can
>begin analyzing, modeling, and prototyping an actual database. So
>far I think we're making pretty good progress.
>
>We've identified a large but fairly well-defined scope: newspaper
>comics, national and local, for all locales, including small press
>alternative papers and college/university newspapers.
>
>We have a decent collection of data elements we want to index,
>below. Please let me know if we discussed anything else, data wise,
>that's not included below.

I don't know if we discussed it, but we need a "Notes" field
somewhere. Or maybe there should be a "comments" field for each data
group you listed for sources, etc.
Am I correct in assuming that the general structure is planned to be
the same as the GCD as far as editing and submitting for approval?

best -- Merlin Haas

><mailto:lio...@beanmar.net>lio...@beanmar.net

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>San Diego, CA

><mailto:lio...@beanmar.net>lio...@beanmar.net

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[Donald Dale Milne]

Sounds pretty comprehensive to me, though I didn't see the idea of
linking reprints. I suspect any other data not mentioned would come up
during implementation planning, usually as new fields or tables required
to record items you did mention. I will also note that each level of
data needs a Notes field for information that is useful but does not fit
into the predefined fields.

- Don Milne

> lio...@beanmar.net <mailto:lio...@beanmar.net>

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> lio...@beanmar.net <mailto:lio...@beanmar.net>

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