What belongs in a strip database?

[Lionel English]

On Sun, Sep 5, 2010 at 8:00 PM, Lionel English <shoeb...@gmail.com> wrote:

One:  What are the limits on the kinds of things we want in the database?  Obviously we'd include all the "classic" kind of newspaper strips:  Calvin and Hobbes, Modesty Blaise, Pogo, Peanuts, etc.  But what are the boundary cases?  Can the experienced strippers tell me if there are "normal" boundaries that specify what is and isn't a strip?  Do people view single panel strips like Dennis the Menace or The Far Side as strips?  What about single panel cartoons in, say, The New Yorker?  Editorial cartoons?  What about comics in magazines, like Goofus and Galant in Highlights, or Little Annie Fannie in Playboy?

So.  How broadly or narrowly do we wish to define "strip"?  The answer determines what is and isn't allowed in the database, and potentially determines a few data points we might wish to add to determine differences between various strips (for example, magazine vs newspaper).  Think about boundary conditions.  This could easily devolve into an abstract discussion; try to use concrete examples and practical reasons for including or excluding things.

--
Lionel English
lio...@beanmar.net

[Jan Roar Hansen]

On Sun, Sep 5, 2010 at 8:00 PM, Lionel English <shoeb...@gmail.com> wrote:

One:  What are the limits on the kinds of things we want in the database?  Obviously we'd include all the "classic" kind of newspaper strips:  Calvin and Hobbes, Modesty Blaise, Pogo, Peanuts, etc.  But what are the boundary cases?  Can the experienced strippers tell me if there are "normal" boundaries that specify what is and isn't a strip?  Do people view single panel strips like Dennis the Menace or The Far Side as strips?  What about single panel cartoons in, say, The New Yorker?  Editorial cartoons?  What about comics in magazines, like Goofus and Galant in Highlights, or Little Annie Fannie in Playboy?

 

Lionel English wrote:

>So.  How broadly or narrowly do we wish to define "strip"?  The answer determines what is and isn't allowed in the database, and potentially determines a few data points we might wish to add to >determine differences between various strips (for example, magazine vs newspaper).  Think about boundary conditions.  This could easily devolve into an abstract discussion; try to use concrete examples >and practical reasons for including or excluding things.

We have also discussed a way to allow publications with less than 50% comics, to be indexed.

(This summer a 28 page Carl Barks story was reprinted in a 150 page Norwegian magazine)

Will the Highlights / Playboy examples be covered by this.

 

Jan

[Merlin Haas]

I'm not sure that the magazines fit with a comic strip index.
Lumping 365-a-year strips with those appearing every few months in a
magazine seems to be too much. And the data we want for newspaper
strips would be different than that of magazines.

Probably a separate database for "magazines and books containing
comics," based somewhat on the existing GCD scheme would be easier to
implement.

best -- Merlin Haas

[Lionel English]

With comic books, we're interested in both the comics and the book--we index the whole publication.

With comics that appear in publications that aren't comic books, we have a couple of choices:  One would be to treat all such comics as strips, which would mean indexing the comics (only) and then making note of the publication(s) they appeared in.  Another would be to make a third category for such comics.  In which case we'd need to settle on the boundary between strips and this third category--do strips have to appear at least weekly in order to be strips?  Do they have to appear in newspapers?  What's the dividing line?

Note the difference:  The comic-book database is publication oriented.  The comics are subordinate to the publication.  In the strips database, the publication(s) will be subordinate to the comics.

--
Lionel English

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

[Donald Dale Milne]

I think this is an important distinction for us. We're going to
focus on the strips themselves. Strips can appear in many different
types of publications: magazines, books, newspapers, comic books, on
maps, event programs, greeting cards, bubble gum wrappers, etc. How
comprehensive should we try to be?

I'm going to mention right up front that I have little expertise in
the strips. I've indexed reprint books for the GCD, I enjoy reading old
strips, and I sometimes search out information on them. As a data user
(which is where most of my arguments will come from), I would find it
useful and enjoyable to discover strip information on all types of
publications in one place. Questions like which Peanuts strips have
been reprinted as greeting cards, what are all the different strips that
have run in Playboy over the years, how long did Bazooka print strips on
its wrappers and did the characters change over the years, which
syndicates published a given strip, would be interesting.

- Don Milne

On 9/6/2010 11:17 AM, Lionel English wrote:
> With comics that appear in publications that aren't comic books, we
> have a couple of choices: One would be to treat all such comics as
> strips, which would mean indexing the comics (only) and then making
> note of the publication(s) they appeared in. Another would be to make
> a third category for such comics. In which case we'd need to settle
> on the boundary between strips and this third category--do strips have
> to appear at least weekly in order to be strips? Do they have to
> appear in newspapers? What's the dividing line?
>
> Note the difference: The comic-book database is publication oriented.
> The comics are subordinate to the publication. In the strips
> database, the publication(s) will be subordinate to the comics.
>
> --
> Lionel English
> San Diego, CA

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

[D.D.Degg]

Donald Dale Milne wrote:
>       I think this is an important distinction for us.  We're going to
> focus on the strips themselves.  Strips can appear in many different
> types of publications: magazines, books, newspapers, comic books, on
> maps, event programs, greeting cards, bubble gum wrappers, etc.  How
> comprehensive should we try to be?
>

> Lionel English wrote:
> > Note the difference:  The comic-book database is publication oriented.
> >  The comics are subordinate to the publication.  In the strips
> > database, the publication(s) will be subordinate to the comics.

Chris Browne's "Cruiser" in Playboy
Shary Flenniken's "Trots and Bonnie" in National Lampoon
John Severin's "Sagebrush" in Cracked
Jim Engel's "Dick Duck, Duck Dick" in The Comics Reader
Caniff and Sickles' "Mr. Coffee Nerves" advertising strip
Ted Richards' "The Forty-Year-Old Hippie" in alternative papers
those Chris Giarrusso comic strips in Marvel comics
Chuck Stiles' "Ed and Emma" in the Wisconsin farm publication Hoard's
Dairyman

Would all of the above and those of the same stripe be eligible?
As mentioned there are many comic strips other than those that
appeared in daily newspapers.

And does the strip need a title or continuing characters to be
acceptable?
Does it have to appear regularly or only once?

To chime in on one subject - I think following the syndicate trail (as
closely as possible) would be mandatory.
The Post Syndicate became the Post-Hall Syndicate became the Hall
Syndicate which joined the Publishers Syndicate becoming Publishers-
Hall Syndicate. Publishers Hall Syndicate had already absorbed such
entities as the New York Herald-Tribune Syndicate and the Chicago
Daily News Syndicate into what became the Publishers Newspaper
Syndicate. Various syndicates, including Publishers became Field
Enterprises which was bought in 1984 and became News America
Syndicate. That in turn became North America Syndicate, a wholly owned
subsidiary of King Features Syndicate.
This is why the Mark Trail comic strip, which began with the Post
Syndicate, and the Mary Worth comic strip, which began with the
Publishers Syndicate, are now part of King Features stable.

As you can see, some syndicate trails will take a bit of space.

D.D.Degg

[Merlin Haas]

>Donald Dale Milne wrote:
>> I think this is an important distinction for us. We're going to
>> focus on the strips themselves. Strips can appear in many different
>> types of publications: magazines, books, newspapers, comic books, on
>> maps, event programs, greeting cards, bubble gum wrappers, etc. How
>> comprehensive should we try to be?
>>
>> Lionel English wrote:
>> > Note the difference: The comic-book database is publication oriented.
>> > The comics are subordinate to the publication. In the strips
>> > database, the publication(s) will be subordinate to the comics.
>
>Chris Browne's "Cruiser" in Playboy
>Shary Flenniken's "Trots and Bonnie" in National Lampoon
>John Severin's "Sagebrush" in Cracked
>Jim Engel's "Dick Duck, Duck Dick" in The Comics Reader
>Caniff and Sickles' "Mr. Coffee Nerves" advertising strip
>Ted Richards' "The Forty-Year-Old Hippie" in alternative papers
>those Chris Giarrusso comic strips in Marvel comics
>Chuck Stiles' "Ed and Emma" in the Wisconsin farm publication Hoard's
>Dairyman

You forgot "Slim and Spud" from The Prairie Farmer.. :-)

>
>Would all of the above and those of the same stripe be eligible?
>As mentioned there are many comic strips other than those that
>appeared in daily newspapers.

Mr. Coffee Nerves is obvious. But is there a difference between
including Cruiser and Little Annie Fanny? Both comics, one in short
format, other in longer.
Alternative papers would be the same as paid newspapers or shoppers,
by my thinking.

>
>And does the strip need a title or continuing characters to be
>acceptable?
>Does it have to appear regularly or only once?

This gets right to the heart of the matter. What defines a strip?
Appearing more than once would seem to be a place to start. (That
would eliminate most editorial cartoons (exceptions: Tom Tomorrow and
Tom the Dancing Bug, etc.) and magazine cartoons (exceptions: Hazel,
Brother Sebastian, Henry, Little Lulu, etc.)
Going to be hard to index something without some sort of a title.
Doesn't necessarily need to be official, but there has to be someway
to identify it.
Format is also going to be defined. Are panels with blocks of text
underneath them comics?

Details, details...

best -- Merlin Haas

[Donald Dale Milne]

I also think appearing more than once is a good starting place.
And, it would take either a title or a continuing character to have
appeared more than once. I think unconnected comics by one creator
would not make a strip, which, as you said, would eliminate a lot of
editorial cartoons and magazine cartoons.

Sometimes the dialog is in text under the panel (Dennis The Menace,
Family Circus), instead of in word balloons. So, I think we would have
to allow that format.

- Don Milne

[Lionel English]

My personal opinion is that it needs an identifiable strip name of some sort in order to be a strip rather than a cartoon.  So to me, panels like Dennis and Family Circus qualify, but editorial cartoons, or New Yorker cartoons don't make the cut.  I'd be willing to include magazine strips in addition to newspaper strips, so that would include things like Little Annie Fanny and Goofus and Gallant, which would eliminate the GCD's need to then invent a new category for these types of comics.

I don't have any particular thoughts about placement of dialog and/or captions within or outside of the panels--Prince Valiant, for one, did not use word balloons or the like, and yet still used a combination of art and text to tell a story.

This tells me that a couple of data points we'd want to record would be magazine vs newspaper strip, and perhaps frequency.

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[Jan Roar Hansen]

I would support indexing magazines in addition to newspapers.

In Norway (and other European countries) many US newspaper strips have been reprinted in magazines.

Mostly Sundays and since the magazines often are weeklies, there is long runs of some strips.

 

The Norwegian magazines also include some classic Norwegian comic strips which would be nice to have an index of.

 

Jan

[D.D.Degg]

Lionel English wrote:
>  I'd be willing to include magazine strips in addition

> to newspaper strips, so that would include things like Little Annie Fanny...

But Little Annie Fanny is NOT a comic strip. I call those kind of
things a comic feature, you can call what you want but they are not
comic strips. Then those Tales of the Watcher and the other backup
features become strips.
Boltinoff's Casey the Cop and such are comic strips, the various four
and five page backups in comic books are not comic strips.
Dave Berg's The Lighter Side is a collection of comic strips which
stretched over two pages.

A comic strip is limited to not more than one page.


D.D.Degg

[tony]

While I suspect that I will be in the minority on this, I would prefer
that we limit ourselves to comic strips appearing in newspapers. The
comic strip is a decidedly different beast from the (essentially)
comic BOOK Little Annie Fannie or the-I'm-not-sure-what-to-call-it
Goofus and Gallant.

I do feel that we should include single-panel newspaper strips but not
editorial cartoons. I'm not completely sure how to parse out the
editorial cartoons, yet.





tony

On Sep 5, 10:11 pm, Lionel English <shoebut...@gmail.com> wrote:

[tony]

A separate database for comics from magazines and books would be my
preference, as well.





tony

[tony]

On Sep 6, 11:36 pm, Lionel English <lio...@beanmar.net> wrote:
> My personal opinion is that it needs an identifiable strip name of some sort
> in order to be a strip rather than a cartoon.  So to me, panels like Dennis
> and Family Circus qualify, but editorial cartoons, or New Yorker cartoons
> don't make the cut.  

But Otto Soglow's "Little King," while untitled in the New Yorker,
began there before it moved to King Features in 1934. If we include
magazine strips, I would want to find all of "Little King"'s
appearances noted together.

And "The Addams Family" is untitled in the New Yorker but is certainly
one body of work.

Gosh, I'm sounding a lot more argumentative than I intend. I'm just
belaboring the principle of unintended consequences.





tony

I'd be willing to include magazine strips in addition
> to newspaper strips, so that would include things like Little Annie Fanny
> and Goofus and Gallant, which would eliminate the GCD's need to then invent
> a new category for these types of comics.
>
> I don't have any particular thoughts about placement of dialog and/or
> captions within or outside of the panels--Prince Valiant, for one, did not
> use word balloons or the like, and yet still used a combination of art and
> text to tell a story.
>
> This tells me that a couple of data points we'd want to record would be
> magazine vs newspaper strip, and perhaps frequency.
>

> > gcd-strips+...@googlegroups.com<gcd-strips%2Bunsu...@googlegroups.com>

[tony]

I wouldn't want to index anything in the strip database that appeared
in comicbook database.





tony

[Lionel English]

On Tue, Sep 7, 2010 at 4:41 AM, D.D.Degg <ddd...@comcast.net> wrote:

A comic strip is limited to not more than one page.

 

This is what I get for relying on Wikipedia.  Before I included the Little Annie Fanny example I was trying to figure out if there was a page limit for strips.  I couldn't think of any traditional strips that exceeded the single, full page boundary, but the Wikipedia entry on strips didn't address the issue, and the Wikipedia entry on Little Annie Fanny called it a comic strip.  I allowed myself to be persuaded.

 

We can, of course, set up our own definition of strip that includes multi-page magazine strips, but I think we're better off avoiding a definition that strays too far from the normal boundaries of what's considered a strip.  So if there are no multi-page strips, perhaps we should confine ourselves to newspaper strips and save magazine comics for another project.  That might simplify things a bit for purposes of the present discussion.

 

What do others think?

--
Lionel English

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

[MJ]

I also believe that only strips published in newspapers should be
the focus. As for single-panels, yes these should be included as
there are quite a few that are extremely relevant.
As for editorial cartoons / magazine cartoons that should be in
a seperate category that should be included only after the main focus.
To include comic strips that have been published in newspapers!

> > lio...@beanmar.net- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -

[Lionel English]

On Tue, Sep 7, 2010 at 12:13 PM, tony <tonyr...@comcast.net> wrote:

On Sep 6, 11:36 pm, Lionel English <lio...@beanmar.net> wrote:
> My personal opinion is that it needs an identifiable strip name of some sort
> in order to be a strip rather than a cartoon.  So to me, panels like Dennis
> and Family Circus qualify, but editorial cartoons, or New Yorker cartoons
> don't make the cut.  

But Otto Soglow's "Little King," while untitled in the New Yorker,
began there before it moved to King Features in 1934.  If we include
magazine strips, I would want to find all of "Little King"'s
appearances noted together.

And "The Addams Family" is untitled in the New Yorker but is certainly
one body of work.

Gosh, I'm sounding a lot more argumentative than I intend.  I'm just
belaboring the principle of unintended consequences.

 

Didn't you just argue that you wanted to limit it to newspaper strips? :-)

 

If we eventually create a panel cartoon database and a magazine comics database, then we'd have to decide which one "The Addams Family" and brethern belong in.  If we confine ourselves to newspaper strips at present, we can sidestep that question at present.  But, on the board list, we do need to decide on what the possible categories are, so we'll know whether a given example needs to be shoehorned into an existing database or will have an eventual home in an as-yet-unbuilt database.

--
Lionel English

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

[MJ]

I think Tony has a great grasp of this.

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



On Sep 7, 2:29 pm, Lionel English <lio...@beanmar.net> wrote:

[Lionel English]

Can you clarify that?  Because many, many comic books reprint strips.  And many books collect strips.  So there are and will continue to be many strips in the comic book database.  But they're reprints.

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[Tony Rose]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Lionel English" <lio...@beanmar.net>
To: gcd-s...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Tuesday, September 7, 2010 2:29:10 PM
Subject: Re: [gcd-strips] Re: What belongs in a strip database?

On Tue, Sep 7, 2010 at 12:13 PM, tony <tonyr...@comcast.net> wrote:

On Sep 6, 11:36 pm, Lionel English <lio...@beanmar.net> wrote:
> My personal opinion is that it needs an identifiable strip name of some sort
> in order to be a strip rather than a cartoon.  So to me, panels like Dennis
> and Family Circus qualify, but editorial cartoons, or New Yorker cartoons
> don't make the cut.  

But Otto Soglow's "Little King," while untitled in the New Yorker,
began there before it moved to King Features in 1934.  If we include
magazine strips, I would want to find all of "Little King"'s
appearances noted together.

And "The Addams Family" is untitled in the New Yorker but is certainly
one body of work.

Gosh, I'm sounding a lot more argumentative than I intend.  I'm just
belaboring the principle of unintended consequences.

 

Didn't you just argue that you wanted to limit it to newspaper strips? :-)<<<

Yes, I did, but I expected to lose that one!   :)

 

>>>If we eventually create a panel cartoon database and a magazine comics database, then we'd have to decide which one "The Addams Family" and brethern belong in.  If we confine ourselves to newspaper strips at present, we can sidestep that question at present.  But, on the board list, we do need to decide on what the possible categories are, so we'll know whether a given example needs to be shoehorned into an existing database or will have an eventual home in an as-yet-unbuilt database.<<<<

Agreed.




tony

[Tony Rose]

This also reminds me of a VERY important thing that I left out of my hypothetical record earlier:  the daily strip should link back (to the regular GCD) to whatever book or comic it may have been reprinted in.

To clarify the below, I just meant that I would want Henry Boltinoff's stuff (and the other like fillers) indexed in the comic book database, not in the strip database.  Strips that are indexed in the strip database will/should link back to their reprints in the regular GCD.

Better?



tony

----- Original Message -----
From: "Lionel English" <lio...@beanmar.net>
To: gcd-s...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Tuesday, September 7, 2010 2:23:22 PM
Subject: Re: [gcd-strips] Re: What belongs in a strip database?

[MJ]

If you were asking me to clarify on the single panels that should be
included. I was only implying that reference to strips like Family
Circus,
Ziggy, In The Bleachers, Speed Bump, Cornered, Marmaduke, etc. Strips
that appear on the funny pages in newspapers.

Editorial cartoons, Magazine cartoons should be in a seperate category
to
be included later. This is a huge undertaking as it is.

On Sep 7, 2:29 pm, Lionel English <lio...@beanmar.net> wrote:

[Donald Dale Milne]

I'll agree with that. I think we need to define our strips and
publications such that we do not duplicate efforts.

- Don Milne

[Donald Dale Milne]

Leaving out magazines eliminates quite a few less-than-one page
strips. For example, MAD currently runs a feature "The Strip Club"
which contains several recurring short strips. While MAD is a comic and
would be indexed in the GCD, I imagine there are other non-comics
magazines that may have similar features.

- Don Milne

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

[Lionel English]

True.  But if we're going to eventually have to create a new category with which to index things like Little Annie Fanny, then I think it's easier to define that category as "magazine comics" than "magazine comics of greater than one page in length".  Including selected magazine comics makes the split less simple, meaning it will be more confusing what is and isn't allowed.

[D.D.Degg]

Donald Dale Milne wrote:
>       Leaving out magazines eliminates quite a few less-than-one page
> strips.

And if it is decided on just newspaper comic strips then it's already
being done by Allan Holtz' incomparable Stripper's Guide.
http://strippersguide.blogspot.com/

I would like to see it go for comic strips that appeared/appears in
magazines, fanzines, specialty publications and any other odd
publication AND newspapers.
But still be restricted to one-page-or-less comic strips.

D.D.Degg

[Merlin Haas]

And what do we do with magazine strips that vary from one page to
more than one page depending on the issue, which I seem to remember
National Lampoon strips doing?

Stripper's Guide is great, but it's not online and doesn't include
many of the features we're considering for our database, such as
story episodes, strip characters, a searchable method to find ghosts
and assistants (I think the latter are just in notes in Stripper's
Guide.); and maybe which newspapers a strip appeared in.

I'd like to split the GCD into three sections: comic books; magazines
that feature comics and strips; and newspaper strips, with links
connecting relevant fields that cover more than one area.

Would someone outside the US comment about the effectiveness of
splitting between newspapers and magazines? I've got the impression
that more strips are parts of magazines than appear in newspapers,
but may be wrong. (Wouldn't be the first time.)

best -- Merlin Haas

[alor...@aol.com]

Merlin Haas sez:

> I'd like to split the GCD into three sections:

> comic books;

> magazines that feature comics and strips;

> and newspaper strips, with links connecting relevant fields that cover more than one area. 

And there ya go! Even though its a US-centric approach. But if the techies plan it right, someday in a galaxy far, far away, there'll be a way to tie the three together.

 

Internationally, you'll find the dividing line between the 3 types isn't as clear. But someday it won't matter, hopefully.

 

Like I pointed out earlier, there's no difference between King Features' packaging of their Puck sections (strips) and the UK weeklies (comics, maybe even magazines) except the distribution. In some countries, our syndicated strips are repackaged in lots of strange and mysterious ways that define any rational separation. And you really can't come up with separate rules for each country, now can you?

 

I looked at Ray's idea of indexing individual newspapers as a possibility a long time ago when I was rummaging through the microfilms of the Boston Globe for information on early basketball leagues. It just doesn't work as the top tier in the database, as it shifts priority to the newspaper, not the syndicate (and without thinking too deeply about it, having the syndicate at the top might make more sense because they define the packaging and distribution).

 

Consider: in the 1950's we had 10 daily newspapers in Boston alone, half of whom had both morning and evening editions. The evening editions of Wednesday's Herald I believe carried strips from Thursday, and the Globe had a slightly different lineup in the evening edition. In the 60's, the Herald and American merged becoming the Herald-American, then merged with the Traveler, becoming the Herald-Traveler, then gobbled up another paper and became the Boston Herald. Who the heck wants to track this stuff?

 

But where its reprinted is useful info in this digital age of online archives, so we do care where they're printed. We just don't care about the paper's lineage.

 

As to what is a strip -- its a cartoon that appears with some regularity. I think something like Frankie Galasso's weekly one-panel sports cartoons that ran in the rovidence Journal, Boston Globe and LA Times qualify as much as any other non-fiction strip (see http://mylittletown.com/frankgalasso.htm ) It can appear in only newspaper (all that means is that its a marketing failure). The issues of Editor & Publisher can come in handy here.

 

I'm dying to take a crack at some of the magazine strips, as I already have indexes of about 30 strips that ran in pulps as well as an index to about 50 years of Boys' Life strips.

 

Art Lortie

[Lionel English]

On Tue, Sep 7, 2010 at 6:49 PM, D.D.Degg <ddd...@comcast.net> wrote:

And if it is decided on just newspaper comic strips then it's already

being done by Allan Holtz' incomparable Stripper's Guide.
http://strippersguide.blogspot.com/

I mean no disrespect whatsoever to Mr. Holtz, who has obviously been doing what he does for a very long time and very well at that.  But, as Art pointed out, even if we do decide to only do newspaper strips (with this project), Allan's project has some limitations, and we can design a project that complements his and does things his doesn't.  And the internet allows us to create a collaborative, community project that is international in scope.

 

I would like to see it go for comic strips that appeared/appears in
magazines, fanzines, specialty publications and any other odd
publication AND newspapers.
But still be restricted to one-page-or-less comic strips.

My eventual hope is the GCD will consist of a number of sister projects, with various amounts of interconnectedness (reprints, creators, characters).  So, from a big picture perspective, I'm trying to keep in mind that whatever we exclude here has to find an eventual home in another sister project of some kind, and I'd prefer that the divisions be fairly simple to articulate.  Thus, my preference for either doing newspaper strips only, *or* ALL newspaper and magazine strips (other than those that originate in a comic book, as those are already covered in our existing project).  A definition that includes some magazine strips but not others seems...messy.  IMHO.  I'd like divisions that overlap as little as possible, but as a whole are as inclusive as possible so that any given comics object will have a home somewhere, in one of the eventual projects.  It may take a long time to get all those different projects up and running and self-sustaining, but eventually that's what I hope to see happen.

My immediate goal, however, is to come up with recommendations for the tech team to implement.  I'm not above pushing my own opinions, obviously, but neither am I unwilling to listen to others.  So this is where the power of the community comes in. There are now over 20 of us on this list, and I think we've heard from only a third of you.  

Should newspaper strips and magazine strips be segregated, or integrated?  Should multi-page "strips" be segregated from others, or should that merely be a format description (panel, daily strip, Sunday strip, full page, multi-page)?  Is this discussion too US-centric, and can we segregate things as easily as this, or are there more options?

[carch...@aol.com]

Me too. Grand Comic Book Database for comic books and graphic novels of all stripes. Grand Comic Strip Database for newspaper comics and editorial cartoons of all stripes. Grand Cartoon Database for magazine cartoons of all stripes. The GCD, the Grand Comics Database!

 

my best

-Ray

> wrote:
> >One:  What are the limits on the kinds of things we want in the
> >database?  Obviously we'd include all the "classic" kind of
> >newspaper strips:  Calvin and Hobbes, Modesty Blaise, Pogo, Peanuts,
> >etc.  But what are the boundary cases?  Can the experienced
> >strippers tell me if there are "normal" boundaries that specify what
> >is and isn't a strip?  Do people view single panel strips like
> >Dennis the Menace or The Far Side as strips?  What about single
> >panel cartoons in, say, The New Yorker?  Editorial cartoons?  What
> >about comics in magazines, like Goofus and Galant in Highlights, or
> >Little Annie Fannie in Playboy?
>
> >Lionel English wrote:
> >  >So.  How broadly or narrowly do we wish to define "strip"?  The
> >answer determines what is and isn't allowed in the database, and
> >potentially determines a few data points we might wish to add
> >to >determine differences between various strips (for example,
> >magazine vs newspaper).  Think about boundary conditions.  This
> >could easily devolve into an abstract discussion; try to use
> >concrete examples >and practical reasons for including or excluding
> >things.
>
> >We have also discussed a way to allow publications with less than
> >50% comics, to be indexed.
> >(This summer a 28 page Carl Barks story was reprinted in a 150 page
> >Norwegian magazine)
> >Will the Highlights / Playboy examples be covered by this.
>
> >Jan
>
> I'm not sure that the magazines fit with a comic strip index.
> Lumping 365-a-year strips with those appearing every few months in a
> magazine seems to be too much.  And the data we want for newspaper
> strips would be different than that of magazines.
>
> Probably a separate database for "magazines and books containing
> comics," based somewhat on the existing GCD scheme would be easier to
> implement.
>
> best -- Merlin Haas

-- 
Group discussions are archived at 

[Lionel English]

On Tue, Sep 7, 2010 at 10:11 PM, Lionel English <lio...@beanmar.net> wrote:

Should newspaper strips and magazine strips be segregated, or integrated?  Should multi-page "strips" be segregated from others, or should that merely be a format description (panel, daily strip, Sunday strip, full page, multi-page)?  Is this discussion too US-centric, and can we segregate things as easily as this, or are there more options?

 

Anyone?  Jan?  Edgar?  Lou?  Ramon?  Rodrigo?  Leonardo?

 

--
Lionel English

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

[Mike]

Lionel asked for people to chime in. So far, nobody's convinced me of
anything and that's why I've been staying silent.

On Sep 7, 7:41 am, "D.D.Degg" <ddd...@comcast.net> wrote:
> Lionel English wrote:
> >   I'd be willing to include magazine strips in addition
> > to newspaper strips, so that would include things like Little Annie Fanny...

>

> A comic strip is limited to not more than one page.

I tend to agree w/ Lionel on a point like the above. D.D. suggested
it's a comic feature, but there's probably no need to invent a term
that the rest of the world won't use.

I'm also leaning toward Allan Holtz's rule that it has to appear in a
newspaper - just to have some place to start. However I would include
alternative papers, which he does not, and he and I have gone back and
forth debating.

Ray brought up editorial cartoons. I think that's a separate database
- which can perhaps be built at the same time w/ the same
underpinning. The syndicates will eventually be the same.

Gag cartoons haven't been mentioned except as strips that grew out of
them (Little Lulu, Little King etc), but need perhaps the most
indexing (as Ray can testify). AFAIK, there is no database of any
beyond the New Yorker, but for 50+ years they were a major form of
cartooning.

Magazines could probably fit into a comic strip database for recurring
items, but I'm thinking right now that perhaps there should be one
comic strip database and then one (wait for it D.D.) "comic features"
in other periodicals. An index of the cartoonists in an issue of the
Sat Evening Post nestled alongside 'Little Annie Fanny' along with
covers of Popular Science by Alex Raymond.

If anyone decides to run w/ this idea, there's also the 'humorous
illustration' field of which the New Yorker is the current best
example, but not the only. The 9/6/10 issue has a cover by Arnold Roth
(Playboy, Fantagraphic Books), spot illos by French cartoonist Petit-
Roulet and a comic strip page by Tomine. I'm still tracking the NON-
gag cartoonists, ala this obsolete version - http://comics.lib.msu.edu/rhode/nyorker.htm

And I sort of hate to do this, but it came up a long long time ago w/
the GCD even - what about webcomics?

Mike Rhode

[Mike]

That's essentially Allan Holtz's format.

[Mike]

Oh, and I forgot to mention college newspaper strips. I would include
those. It may take years until someone fills in data, but so many
cartoonists start their careers there.

Mike

[Lou Mazzella]

Just joined the list and am now caught up. Personally I'm leaning towards them being integrated. We'd have a database for comic books which we already have and one for comics appearing in other periodicals. And I feel that we should have some way of tracking cartoonists' work regardless of whether it is a recurring strip. For example I'd like to be able to search a database for the work of Charles Addams and get a list of his Addams family cartoons and his other cartoons as well, even if it's just a statement of "2 single panel cartoons, New Yorker, April 1960". -Lou --- On Wed, 9/8/10, Lionel English <lio...@beanmar.net> wrote:

[MJ]

Mr. Rhode knows comics. I'm inclined to agree with his knowledge!
Along with any
of his suggestions.

[Donald Dale Milne]

Two things no one has convinced me of yet:
1. A strip is not more than one page long: why?
2. Newspaper and magazine strips are somehow different from each other
and therefore should be in different databases: why?

Also, I suspect both of these are very US centric and once we hear
from more folks from other countries we may find the lines blurring over
whatever reasons someone may give.

As for Lou's thought, I think there is a difference between a strip
with a unifying name and/or recurring characters, and unconnected
cartoons. While I agree it would be good to be able to do a search
through both in one database, I'm still leaning toward strips being our
only focus.

- Don Milne

On 9/8/2010 9:35 PM, Lou Mazzella wrote:
> Just joined the list and am now caught up. Personally I'm leaning
> towards them being integrated. We'd have a database for comic books
> which we already have and one for comics appearing in other
> periodicals. And I feel that we should have some way of tracking
> cartoonists' work regardless of whether it is a recurring strip. For
> example I'd like to be able to search a database for the work of
> Charles Addams and get a list of his Addams family cartoons and his
> other cartoons as well, even if it's just a statement of "2 single
> panel cartoons, New Yorker, April 1960".
> -Lou
>

> --- On *Wed, 9/8/10, Lionel English /<lio...@beanmar.net>/* wrote:
>
>
> From: Lionel English <lio...@beanmar.net>
> Subject: Re: [gcd-strips] Re: What belongs in a strip database?
> To: gcd-s...@googlegroups.com
> Date: Wednesday, September 8, 2010, 4:54 PM
>
> On Tue, Sep 7, 2010 at 10:11 PM, Lionel English
> <lio...@beanmar.net </mc/compose?to=lio...@beanmar.net>> wrote:
>
> Should newspaper strips and magazine strips be segregated, or
> integrated? Should multi-page "strips" be segregated from
> others, or should that merely be a format description (panel,
> daily strip, Sunday strip, full page, multi-page)? Is this
> discussion too US-centric, and can we segregate things as
> easily as this, or are there more options?
>
> Anyone? Jan? Edgar? Lou? Ramon? Rodrigo? Leonardo?
> --
> Lionel English
> San Diego, CA

> lio...@beanmar.net </mc/compose?to=lio...@beanmar.net>

[Jan Roar Hansen]

As I earlier wrote, many newspaper strips are reprinted in Norwegian magazines. I want them to be in one database.

And if we index magazines, all of its comic contents should be indexed.

 

Jan

 

 

 

[Mike]

On Sep 8, 11:16 pm, Donald Dale Milne <dondmi...@att.net> wrote:
>       Two things no one has convinced me of yet:
> 1.  A strip is not more than one page long: why?
> 2.  Newspaper and magazine strips are somehow different from each other
> and therefore should be in different databases: why?

I concur w/ 1.

For 2, I think it's 2 different business models - syndications,
continuing characters and frequency of publication. Let me try an
example.

For "Cul de Sac" there should be 2 entries - Richard Thompson's Sunday
only version in the Wash Post and then the current syndicated version.
For Bob Mankoff in the New Yorker, there will be ~2000 entries - even
though he's done less cartooning than Thompson.

That's just a gut feeling about the difference.

[Mike]

On Listing publications - to differentiate this from Holtz's work, and
also to make it more useful, I think we should list publications (ie
the newspapers) that a strip appeared in, when possible. This will of
course have to be relational to be useful.

Mike

[Tony Rose]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Donald Dale Milne" <dond...@att.net>
To: gcd-s...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Wednesday, September 8, 2010 10:16:25 PM
Subject: Re: [gcd-strips] Re: What belongs in a strip database?

      Two things no one has convinced me of yet:
1.  A strip is not more than one page long: why?

I can't convince you this because I don't agree with it.

2.  Newspaper and magazine strips are somehow different from each other
and therefore should be in different databases: why?

There is a difference between newspaper strips and others in that there are rigid format issues that impact layout.  This is mitigated somewhat in Sunday strips but with dailies, you just can't do some of things you can do with a full page.

But, I think the real difference is that if we can confine ourselves to one kind of publication, we can avoid the "does this belong?" arguments and simply put the oddball stuff in a hypothetical "everything else" database.




tony

[Jan Roar Hansen]

 

Tony Rose wrote:

>But, I think the real difference is that if we can confine ourselves to one kind of publication, we can avoid the "does this belong?" arguments and simply put the oddball stuff in a >hypothetical "everything else" database.

So there will be:

GCD for comic books

A newspaper database

A magazine database

An “everything else” database

 

Will the strip index be included in the newspaper database or will it stand alone ?

Will the “everything else” database include items with less than 50% comics ?

 

In an advanced search, you will be able to either choose one or all of these ?

 

Jan

[Tony Rose]

Hmm.  I had thought magazines would be included in the everything else but I can see that is pretty US-centric.

I'm for defining "comic strip" as comics running in a newspaper, excluding editorial cartoons, and indexing those.

If we added the comic strip database (as defined above) and the regular GCD, would all that was left be publications that were less than 50% comics?




tony

----- Original Message -----
From: "Jan Roar Hansen" <jan-...@online.no>
To: gcd-s...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Thursday, September 9, 2010 1:11:50 PM
Subject: Re: [gcd-strips] Re: What belongs in a strip database?

 

Tony Rose wrote:

[Marco Graziosi]

On Sep 8, 11:16 pm, Donald Dale Milne <dondmi...@att.net> wrote:
>       Two things no one has convinced me of yet:
> 1.  A strip is not more than one page long: why?
> 2.  Newspaper and magazine strips are somehow different from each other
> and therefore should be in different databases: why?

1. W. Eisner's The Spirit was more than one page and originally appeared in newspapers, I think. True, it looks like a comic book, but the GCD does not index it.

2. More and more comics are being published in magazines, i.e. Spiegelman's In the Shadow of No Towers appeared in the London Review of Books in Britain. Given the rising status of graphic novels, I suppose the number of interesting comics published in magazines will increase.

In order to distinguish between newspapers and magazines a simple tag would be enough (daily strip, sunday page, magazine serial/one shot).

In Italy most strips have been published in magazines, either for the general public or specialized: the Peanuts, Doonesbury &c. have been published in Linus for several years in monthly instalments, much of The Spirit was published by another comics magazine: Eureka. There is no tradition of newspaper-published strips.

Marco

[Ramon Schenk]

> 1. W. Eisner's The Spirit was more than one page and originally
> appeared in newspapers, I think. True, it looks like a comic book, but
> the GCD does not index it.

Sure it does: http://www.comics.org/series/10295/

Best,
Ramon

[Marco Graziosi]

You're right, I searched for "the spirit" and it didn't turn up: anyway, it was distributed as the comic section of newspapers, that was the point.

Marco
____________________________________________________________

Marco Graziosi
http://www.nonsenselit.org/
____________________________________________________________

[Edgar Loftin]

why not editorial cartoons and sports cartoons in the newspaper as well?

[Tony Rose]

I'm shying away from the political and sports cartoons for now but only because it makes the already somewhat daunting task seem almost insurmountable.  Ultimately, I'd like for them to be included, somewhere, somehow.  But for a lot of early stuff -- in the oughts and teens -- it's not altogether clear what's a "regular" strip and what's an editorial cartoon.  TAD Dorgan's stuff is one of the creators I'm thinking of.

[Donald Dale Milne]

I haven't heard any convincing arguments as to why not editorial
cartoons and sports cartoons in the newspaper either. Also, I agree
with Mario that in order to distinguish between newspapers and magazines
a simple tag would be enough.

I'm seeing a structure something like this, with the primary unit
being the name of the strip. The secondary unit would be a single day's
strip. I think this would represent the most atomic unit of publication
and is needed because nearly every other piece of data may vary with the
date.
Strip name:
Alternate names list
Syndicates list
Notes for strip
Original date of publication (need a way to handle weeklies or monthlies
with no "day" date):
Title, number, or story arc that day's strip belongs to
Creators and their roles for that day's strip (including ghosts and
assistants when known)
Characters for that day's strip
Description (synopsis) of that day's strip
Reprint info (from / in) for that day's strip
Type of that day's strip:
daily
Sunday
other
Publications in which that day's strip ran (the format data may
change by publication):
Publication name
Publication issue number (if any)
Format of that day's strip:
number of panels
size
color or black-and-white
Notes for that day's strip

Other related tables would be needed for creators, publications,
syndicates, etc.

- Don Milne

[Lionel English]

I thought about asking about editorial and sports cartoons in the poll, and may eventually go back and do another poll for that.

 

As I see things currently, the major "levels" of a strip data would be the meta data (about the strip) and the installment data (episode of the strip that appeared on day X).  So the problem with fitting cartoons into this model is that they have no meta data--there's no strip name, the cartoons generally aren't connected (other than being by a given cartoonist).  They generally have no continuity of any kind.  So they'd need a different indexing model (IMO) to address the different challenges of indexing them.  If you think about how you'd go about indexing the cartoons in a week's worth of your local paper, you'll see, I think, that you'll need to collect different information in order to really identify individual cartoons.

 

The exception to the rule (again, IMO) is panel cartoons that appear under a recurring strip name--things like Dennis the Menace, Marmaduke, Family Circus (those also use multi-panel Sundays so they're odd anyway).

 

More borderline cases would be things like The Far Side (recurring name, but no recurring characters or continuity) or (with magazines) The Addams Family, which has recurring elements but not an actual strip name.  With these kinds of borderline cartoons, we could make explicit exceptions to include or exclude.

 

So I generally see cartoons -- newspaper or magazine -- as a distinct category that will probably get it's own project.

[Lionel English]

On Thu, Sep 9, 2010 at 11:48 AM, Marco Graziosi <marco.g...@gmail.com> wrote:

1. W. Eisner's The Spirit was more than one page and originally appeared in newspapers, I think. True, it looks like a comic book, but the GCD does not index it.

 

 

Ramon addressed the not indexed part.  It's an odd beast to be sure that straddles the borders.  It's probably in the GCD because we *weren't* indexing strips and we wanted to include it.  It could easily fall into either or both categories.

 

 

2. More and more comics are being published in magazines, i.e. Spiegelman's In the Shadow of No Towers appeared in the London Review of Books in Britain. Given the rising status of graphic novels, I suppose the number of interesting comics published in magazines will increase.

In Italy most strips have been published in magazines, either for the general public or specialized: the Peanuts, Doonesbury &c. have been published in Linus for several years in monthly instalments, much of The Spirit was published by another comics magazine: Eureka. There is no tradition of newspaper-published strips.

 

Magazines that are predominantly comics (at least 50%) would qualify for inclusion in the comic book database.  But yes, there a lot of comics in magazines that contain less than 50% comics overall that don't have a home right now in the comic book database.  If we don't include them in the strips database, we'd have to create another project to cover them.  Which we can do, but if they are structurally similar enough to the strips database it seems like it would be pointless to make two separate projects that work essentially the same, when a simple flag would tell the difference.

 

 

In order to distinguish between newspapers and magazines a simple tag would be enough (daily strip, sunday page, magazine serial/one shot).

I think there are only three differences I can think of off hand between magazine and newspaper strips.

 

1) Frequency.  Newspaper strips are generally daily or weekly.  Magazine strips are generally less often than weekly (with the exact frequency depending on the magazine, and having the possibility of varying over the course of the magazine's run).  This is not a big difference structurally, because we want to capture frequency anyway (newspaper strips can be daily or weekly, so we already need a frequency field).

 

2) Length.  I can't think of any examples of newspaper strips that are longer than a full page, except those in the Spirit supplement, which can be argued to be a comic book.  There are multi-page magazine strips.  Again, however, we'll already want a field to indicate whether a strip is a panel, daily strip, or Sunday, and there are various Sunday sizes, so multi-page could simply be another value in a list we'd already want to create.

 

3) Distribution.  Newspaper strips are typically distributed to a multitude of papers.  Magazine strips are more often confined to a single publication.  However, a system set up to track appearances in hundreds of papers could easily handle the much simpler case of strips that only have a single appearance.  It's simply a minimalist case of the newspaper model, not a completely separate model.

 

So, with that in mind, I'm currently leaning towards including magazine strips with newspaper strips, because we want to index them anyway, and the model seems similar enough to newspaper strips as not to require a separate, dedicated project.

[Donald Dale Milne]

Regarding frequency, I'm currently reading a local newspaper that
is a monthly. I would guess there are others. And, it contains some
strips that are longer than a page. And, while some of it's strips are
local only and not distributed elsewhere, it also prints (reprints) many
strips that originally appeared in other newspapers. Granted, it's over
50% comics, so I'm currently indexing it for the GCD. But, if it were
not, I believe it would fall within our proposed database. Just thought
I would note the frequency, length and distribution because you cannot
rule out anything.

- Don Milne

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

[Mike]

A point of clarification, based on Don's snipped post below. Are
people viewing this as an index of EVERY DAY's strip (as Don seems to
be) with 1000s of entries or as an index of the LIFE of a strip, with
5-10 entries for most? I thought the second, myself.

Mike

[Lionel English]

It can be both.  As long as we have tools for updating runs of a strip in large batches.  I wouldn't expect anyone to want to index Peanuts one strip at a time, but we could tell the database to create daily and Sunday records for each date between 1950 and 2000.  And then go in and cherry pick individual strips to add interesting notes or keywords to (like tagging all the football kick strips, or the Spike strips, etc).

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[Tony Rose]

A couple of people (GCDers who aren't on this committee) have suggested that what they really, really want out of a strip database is the ability to see what individual strips are reprinted where. 

tony
----- Original Message -----

[carch...@aol.com]

And I sort of hate to do this, but it came up a long long time ago w/
the GCD even - what about webcomics?

Mike Rhode

The biggest problem I have with web comics is how the postings can disappear over time, for one reason or another. One thing I noticed when I was writing my master's essay was the way citing websites in a bibliography or endnotes had changed in less than a decade. Before you needed to cite the url. Now you need to cite the url and the date it was retrieved.

 

If we have a webcomics database, we have to cite similiarly, as over time the original webcomic will eventually disappear or move.

 

P.S. Sorry for the delay on getting my thoughts to you on my ideas on how to index comic strips. Been busy with work and finding out my parents are coming into town over the weekend and I am getting my apartment ready for them! lol

 

my best

-Ray

[carch...@aol.com]

It going to depend on how we end up indexing the items in question. Do we see them as a part of the item they are printed in (so comic strips and editorial cartoons are for newspapers and magazine strips and gag cartoons are for magazines) or do we see them by their format only (so comic strips and magazine strips are together and editorial cartoons and gag cartoons are together on their own as well)?

 

I like the former myself as I see the item itself the strip/cartoon is in as the first stage in indexing.

 

my best

-ray

-----Original Message-----
From: Donald Dale Milne <dond...@att.net>
To: gcd-s...@googlegroups.com

[carch...@aol.com]

This will come in handy when trying to identify where strips have been reprinted. Many paperback and trade reprint books, along with most earlier comic strip reprint comic books, did not list the date of the strip that was being reprinted.

 

One thing I had been considering making mandiatory for indexing a strip on any given day, is to index the first few lines of dialogue in a strip like we do with untitled comic book stories. Now some comic strips before the 1940s had story titles on each strip, but that wasnt always the case and it stopped by the 50s. So those can only be relied on only so far to identify reprints. And some strips like There Oughta Be A Law where the strip title is always the first line of dialogue (and the rule would have to be adjusted for those circumstances). And there is wordless strips like Henry or occasional Peanuts episodes that would have to have some rule of its own too.

 

But by making such a thing mandiatory on indexing comic strips, it will allow us to identify both where strips are reprinted and in what newspapers they appear in.

my best

-Ray

[carch...@aol.com]

Thing is that once you index a comic strip for a given day, or all given days, that is the only time it has to be indexed. Once its entered, you can use it to populate other newspapers in appears in (including any information of any changes made in the strip, like dropped panels).

 

Each daily paper will have 365 issues, so to speak. There are like maybe 4000 daily papers in history that did comic strips (at least for the U.S.). I know the number is huge when you add it up, but I think it is doable if information loaded in once is available in a drop down menu to be re-used over and over again as needed.

 

my best

-Ray

-----Original Message-----
From: Lionel English <lio...@beanmar.net>
To: gcd-s...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Thu, Sep 9, 2010 11:29 pm
Subject: Re: [gcd-strips] Re: What belongs in a strip database?

[Steve Cottle]

wow,   i would love to see an index of all 4000+ newspapers with the strips they carried over the years,  God that would make pulling strips from Newspaper archive so much easer.  

-Steve

Mr. ilovecomix

http://ilovecomixarchive.com

http://ilovecomix.tumblr.com

http://twitter.com/ilovecomixarch

http://www.facebook.com/pages/ilovecomixarchive/111412535577659

http://123.writeboard.com/b7bbb1dc9bf249fc6/ password is ilovecomix
http://www.rackspacecloud.com/327.html (the best file hosting site ever)

[Tony Rose]

I think that would be a pretty important aspect of this sort of database.

tony
----- Original Message -----

[carch...@aol.com]

That was my thinking too. Strip collectors can also determine which is the "most complete" version of a strip is located in what papers this way too.

 

my best

-Ray

-----Original Message-----
From: Tony Rose <tonyr...@comcast.net>
To: gcd-s...@googlegroups.com

[carch...@aol.com]

Another thing to keep in mind when indexing individual strips by their date. Not only can you record the different formats from paper to paper, but you can record when and what papers censored a strip. Especially with Doonesbury, which has its strip censor by more than one paper over the years. I believe their have been other examples in the U.S. over time and I am sure it has happened in comic strips in other countries as well.

 

my best

-Ray

[carch...@aol.com]

It would seem to me if someone decided to index the comic content of today's Washington Post, they might as well index the editorial and (if there are any) sports cartoons that appear their too. I think this is how most indexing will get done, so add the info as you are their with the item and as you go along.

 

Nice thing about editorial cartoonists, their are so few of them at any given time and they have a tendacy to stay with their paper for long periods of time so as far as a number of creators go, it might seem less of a height to climb than it seems at first. And there is the sad fact that they are a dying breed too, as many papers have been firing their editorial cartoonists or not replacing the ones taking buy-outs or retiring.

 

my best

-Ray

-----Original Message-----
From: Tony Rose <tonyr...@comcast.net>
To: gcd-s...@googlegroups.com

[carch...@aol.com]

With editorial cartoons, wouldn't the artist be the "feature"? I am thinking of all the editorial cartoonists and I see what they do as a feature in and of itself for their own work.

 

my best

-Ray

-----Original Message-----
From: Lionel English <lio...@beanmar.net>
To: gcd-s...@googlegroups.com

[Donald Dale Milne]

That's about what I was thinking. If we index the strip for a
day, everything else can be built off that.

- Don Milne

> <mailto:gcd-strips%2Bunsu...@googlegroups.com>

>
> For more options, visit this group at
> http://groups.google.com/group/gcd-strips?hl=en
>
>
>
>
> --
> Lionel English
> San Diego, CA

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

>
> --
> Group discussions are archived at
> http://groups.google.com/group/gcd-strips/topics
>
> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
> gcd-strips+...@googlegroups.com

> <mailto:gcd-strips+...@googlegroups.com>

[carch...@aol.com]

I am thinking of

 

Master Strip Name (like master Publisher, i.e. Mutt and Jeff) -

Day of Publication -

Actual Strip Name (if different, i.e. E. Mutt) -

Syndicate -

Strip Title (or if none, mandiatory use of first line of dialogue ["Say Jeff, want t'go huntin'?"]) -

Content (creators, characters, et al) -

Newspaper or Publisher (Washington Post, Curtis Publishing Company) -

Section Name (daily = "Life" section; Sunday Comics name="Washington Comic Cuts") or  Publication Name (Saturday Evening Post)  -

page # (3) /total page count (strip = 0.25 page) -

format type -

Notes

 

Let me explain it better later when I can. The order is subject to change. Alot of the things in the top tier can be made into drop down menus to speed up indexing over multiple newspapers.

 

my best

-Ray

-----Original Message-----
From: Mike <mrh...@gmail.com>

> wrote:
>    
>      I'm seeing a structure something like this, with the primary unit
> being the name of the strip.  The secondary unit would be a single day's
> strip.  I think this would represent the most atomic unit of publication
> and is needed because nearly every other piece of data may vary with the
> date.
> Strip name:
>      Alternate names list
>      Syndicates list
>      Notes for strip
> Original date of publication (need a way to handle weeklies or monthlies
> with no "day" date):
>      Title, number, or story arc that day's strip belongs to
>      Creators and their roles for that day's strip (including ghosts and
> assistants when known)
>      Characters for that day's strip
>      Description (synopsis) of that day's strip
>      Reprint info (from / in) for that day's strip
>      Type of that day's strip

-- 
Group discussions are archived at 

[Tony Rose]

Though I cannot think of any at the moment, some political cartoonists have given their "strips" names.

tony
----- Original Message -----

[MJ]

Besides doing strips all these years, I also gave a few of my
editorial cartoons names. For Instance
I did quite a few with the tagline Bushwhacked when George W. was in
office, and I also spun a
few off for Hillary Clinton with the tagline Hillarious.

On Sep 10, 4:04 pm, Tony Rose <tonyros...@comcast.net> wrote:
> Though I cannot think of any at the moment, some political cartoonists have given their "strips" names.
>
> tony
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: carchiv...@aol.com
> To: gcd-s...@googlegroups.com
> Sent: Friday, September 10, 2010 3:40:51 PM
> Subject: Re: [gcd-strips] Re: What belongs in a strip database?
>
> With editorial cartoons, wouldn't the artist be the "feature"? I am thinking of all the editorial cartoonists and I see what they do as a feature in and of itself for their own work.
>
> my best
> -Ray
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Lionel English <lio...@beanmar.net>
> To: gcd-s...@googlegroups.com
> Sent: Thu, Sep 9, 2010 7:06 pm
> Subject: Re: [gcd-strips] Re: What belongs in a strip database?
>
> I thought about asking about editorial and sports cartoons in the poll, and may eventually go back and do another poll for that.
>
> As I see things currently, the major "levels" of a strip data would be the meta data (about the strip) and the installment data (episode of the strip that appeared on day X). So the problem with fitting cartoons into this model is that they have no meta data--there's no strip name, the cartoons generally aren't connected (other than being by a given cartoonist). They generally have no continuity of any kind. So they'd need a different indexing model (IMO) to address the different challenges of indexing them. If you think about how you'd go about indexing the cartoons in a week's worth of your local paper, you'll see, I think, that you'll need to collect different information in order to really identify individual cartoons.
>
> The exception to the rule (again, IMO) is panel cartoons that appear under a recurring strip name--things like Dennis the Menace, Marmaduke, Family Circus (those also use multi-panel Sundays so they're odd anyway).
>
> More borderline cases would be things like The Far Side (recurring name, but no recurring characters or continuity) or (with magazines) The Addams Family, which has recurring elements but not an actual strip name. With these kinds of borderline cartoons, we could make explicit exceptions to include or exclude.
>
> So I generally see cartoons -- newspaper or magazine -- as a distinct category that will probably get it's own project.
>

> On Thu, Sep 9, 2010 at 1:43 PM, Tony Rose < tonyros...@comcast.net > wrote:
>
> I'm shying away from the political and sports cartoons for now but only because it makes the already somewhat daunting task seem almost insurmountable. Ultimately, I'd like for them to be included, somewhere, somehow. But for a lot of early stuff -- in the oughts and teens -- it's not altogether clear what's a "regular" strip and what's an editorial cartoon. TAD Dorgan's stuff is one of the creators I'm thinking of.
>
> tony
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Edgar Loftin" < edgarlof...@gmail.com >
> To: gcd-s...@googlegroups.com
>
> Sent: Thursday, September 9, 2010 2:27:56 PM
> Subject: Re: [gcd-strips] Re: What belongs in a strip database?
>
> why not editorial cartoons and sports cartoons in the newspaper as well?
>

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> --
> Lionel English
> San Diego, CA
> lio...@beanmar.net
>
> --

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[MJ]

You are correct though others also do this
Boiling Point - Mikhaela Reid
Slowpoke - Jen Sorenson

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> > - Show quoted text -- Hide quoted text -

[MJ]

I just thought I would chime back in. I was responding to Tony's
mention that some editorial cartoonists
do give their feature taglines. Some might not agree with me but I
feel editorial cartoons are not strips.
Cartoon strips should be those that appeared or still appear in
newsprint.

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