ComicBase / Atomic Avenue Forums

The latest addition to the ComicBase community is now live! We’re happy to announce the debut of the official ComicBase and Atomic Avenue forums (at forums.comicbase.com and forums.atomicavenue.com).

Connect with fellow users, share comics news, and get your tech questions and feature requests addressed directly by the Human Computing crew!

A Day in the Office

By Production Assistant Extraordinaire, Ms. Candice Lucado

Human Computing is a special place. A place where comic books are lovingly documented and one’s geekiness (a fanatical devotion to typography, an over-abundance of action figures, or even a love for all things Alviso) is richly rewarded—though often with nothing more than a good guffaw.

Mornings we—and by “we” I mean “Mark,” who usually shows up a little earlier than some of us—collect all the orders that have come in overnight and get them ready to ship. You also may have noticed the random, haphazard stamps that have become our trademark. With a philatelist—that’s stamp collector in English—as a boss, we’ve learned to love searching for, say, a six-cent stamp to get an exact total for that shipment to Canada. We hand-select only the most bizarre and confusing themes for each package. Nothing goes with “American Dance” like “Douglas MacArthur” or “Hemisfair ’68.”

Corrections usually come next. Oh, corrections. We’ve created a monster, and it’s beautiful. I dare not detail all the scientific processes we go through to confirm each and every submission *cough/google-search/cursing-under-breath/more-caffeine-now/cough,* but do know that each correction does pass through the rigorous trials set forth by Pete, Shiaw-Ling, or moi.

Sometimes Pete needs an ad done on short notice, or a review written, or a printer set up, or some coffee made exactly to his specifications, or an Eskimo Grandma drawn, or a flash file made. And some days I try to do all those things at once! Yeah. Those are…fun days. Fun! In between all that, I graciously take tech calls, pleasantly place orders, and gleefully fire b.b. guns at the holiday decorations.

If it’s Wednesday, we drop everything (even the b.b.guns) the instant comics arrive. From that moment, we’re racing to get info into the database before folks on the East Coast (Hi, Carl! Hi, John!) start gloating and teasing us. We scan and index like creatures possessed in order to meet our Friday deadline, and we haven’t missed one yet!

But it’s not all target practice and data-entry here at Human Computing World Headquarters. Sometimes lunch descends into a slap-tastic round of Lunch Money, or we ‘research’ that Charlie Brown special Pete wants us to use as inspiration for our Halloween ad. And at the end of each week we get to experience “Feel the Love Friday,” an event so rife with loving snarkiness that we can’t help but tear ourselves away from the office for the weekend.

About the Writer: Candice’s favorite comic book is Through the Habitrails by Jeff Nicholson. She lives in the South Bay with her husband, a hamster, and few thousand comic books.

ComicBase Corrections Submissions Explained

It’s one of the most popular (and competitive) features of the ComicBase 11 program: User Submitted Corrections. We opened a whole new can of worms when we introduced weekly content updates last year in ComicBase 10—not the least of which was the new flow of tech support e-mails about the misspellings of the titles and issues in ComicBase, the demand to add inkers and cover artists, and other nitpicky notes that motivated users were sending in. Uh oh. Better fix that.

And so the Submit New or Corrected Data feature was introduced, fully unveiled for version 11, which allows users to add changes to new or existing issues within the program with just a few clicks of the mouse. Legitimate corrections are reviewed by a Human Computing staff member before being posted to the database as part of the weekly online content update for all users. On any given morning, we may find anywhere between 175 to 300 database corrections submitted overnight, with as many as 2000 items In the Corrections inbox come Monday morning! While others might say “obsessed,” we like to think “meticulous,” and “detail oriented.” ComicBase customers are truly a different breed.

Users can add credits and storylines as well as barcodes and special notes to current listings, or add in new issues and titles by creating a new entry within their copy of ComicBase and then right-clicking over the title name in the main window to send it as a correction. Determined indexers have already taken to submitting creator credits which ComicBase does not officially track—inkers and cover artists, etc.—with meticulous parenthesis behind the name: (inks) and (cover) artist, for example. But be careful about adding new titles, and double-check that you have the name spelled correctly as listed in the indicia. Oftentimes, a title will already have been listed in a copy of ComicBase already.

And in fact, that is o ne of the common problems that arises from so many users submitting their own databases to the system: everyone tracks their comics in a different way, and there’s often no consistency in the submission formats.

So, to help clarify things, we’ve put together this introductory guide to using the ComicBase Corrections Submissions function covering everything from sending your entry to reviewing, and how the system works behind-the-scenes.

How do I send a correction?

Submitting corrections to the database is easy: just highlight the issue or range of issues you’d like to send us information about, right-click, and choose the Submit New or Corrected Data command. Whatever you have highlighted in the program will be sent to the Human Computing staff. If any of the information is different than what is in the database, then it will be presented to our inbox for review. You can also send in cover scans to the ComicBase Picture library as well if your image is significantly larger than what we have. The program will automatically check your file size when you submit your correction and only prompt you if your picture is larger.

Once submitted, a Human Computing reviewer looks over the information before accepting it into the Master database. (This is true whether for an indexing submission or a cover image). On any given morning, we may find anywhere between 175 to 300 database corrections submitted overnight, and up to 2000 items in the Corrections inbox on Monday morning! A correction is accepted depending how practical including it would be—e.g. whether to accept “Superman appearance” as a valid note in Actions Comics, or double-check the spelling of an inker name as well as the reliability of the source. (Yes, we do keep track of who’s been naughty or nice and who has a track record of submitting fact-checked corrections or not to the database). If the correction passes all of the requirements, then it is accepted into the Master ComicBase database.

What kind of corrections can I send?

Users can send in corrections for anything from cover date and cover price to missing UPC barcode numbers, writer and artist credits, storylines, notes, or cover scans.

Adding Artist/Writer Credits—Cover artists, inkers, etc. are tracked with parenthesis () after their name, e.g. “Bill Sienkiewicz (inks), Greg Horn (cover)”. If an artist did both the cover and the interior art for a comic, they are simply the artist of the issue. If an artist worked on inks as well as interiors, then again it is The Artist, and there is no special parenthetical note after their name. Parenthetical additions are only used to indicate when an artist did not participate in all aspects of the production.

Adding New Titles to ComicBase—The rule of thumb for naming new titles in ComicBase is to go by the indicia name of a comic, which can often be found on the inside cover or back of an issue. Sometimes, however, publishers will duplicate titles or multiple publishers publish two different comics using the same exact title name. Any title you add in ComicBase must have a unique name, but finding the right name can be surprisingly difficult. If you run do across a tricky title name or a series we don’t have in the database, try The Black Art of Title Naming (.pdf) for ComicBase conventions on how to deal with them.

Formatting Notes—Here is a list of some commonly used formats for the ComicBase Notes field: Death of <character>, Origin of <character>, 1st appearance of <character>, 2nd appearance of <character>, versus <character>, <character> appearance, B&W, flipbook, ca. <year>, includes Certificate of Authenticity.

Not all users format their databases to fit within our conventions, however, and the ComicBase indexing system is organized in order to to maximize for Find searches within the program. One of the key differences users often miss is that Writers and Artists are divided by commas (,) between the names, so that if you have a name like “John Romita Jr.” the comma before the “Jr.” is not included, but for Storylines and issue Notes, semicolons (;) are used to differentiate between entries.

Pictures—ComicBase has a built-in filtering system for sorting out picture submissions. If you do not have a pictures for a particular issue or if your picture is of a smaller size than our scan, then the program won’t ask you to send us cover images. We also scan in all the new books as they come out every Wednesday as part of the indexing process for weekly updates. If the program is not asking you to upload your cover scan for the newest issue of 52, it’s probably because we already have an actual-size 100 dpi cover scan of the new comic.

For more on how to setup for scanning high resolution cover images, see the ComicBase Comics Scanning Guide online.

Publisher Names—As a general rule, ComicBase does not include parts of publisher names like “Comics,” “Publications,” or “Studios” unless there there are two or more publishers with similar names that need to be differentiated. For example, “Image Comics” is simply “Image,” and “Digital Manga Publishing ” is just called “Digital Manga”.

Storylines—Multiple part storylines should be tracked with the unifying storyline name first, followed by a comma, the part of the story, and if applicable, a semicolon followed by the individual storyline name. A properly indexed multiple part storyline will look like this: “A Death in the Family, Part 1”. The comma indicates to the program that the issue contains a multiple-part storyline which you can then use to search for all issues containing that storyline. (Try a Find search for a cross-title storyline like “Knightfall” to see what we mean.)

You can also add in the storyline name of a specific issue by including it in the storyline notes after a semicolon—e.g. “Rising Storm, Part 5; Tag”.

Common Correction Submission Mistakes

Variants—Many of the issues our users send corrections in for are actually indexed in the database as an A variant (25/A) or as a DF variant (25/DF). The notes on each issue will usually provide a description of what makes that issue unique. Try checking these notes before sending your corrections in, because otherwise, chances are the notes/pictures you're trying to add in won't make it into the database. We try to never change issue variant designations unless it’s a pretty egregious error (e.g. the publisher calls a book 1/A but we called it 1/B) because that causes problems with the other users’ inventories. In short, we don’t reassign issue variants.

In the past three years, we’ve also moved towards tracking variants by alphabetical names like 1/A, 1/B, 1/C, and so on, although the other designations (DF, GO, etc.) still exist in the database. With the exception of very few, however, we don’t take those as correction submissions.

Confusing Titles and Issues—A common indexing mistake we see is when a user conflates several titles together, or doesn’t research the database thoroughly and assumes a title doesn’t exist before sending in submission. This is currently the #1 cause of redundancies in the program. If you’re having trouble finding a particular book, don’t immediately assume that it’s not in the database. Check the indicia first to make sure that you have the title of the book typed correctly. You can also try using the barcode Jump feature to locate it if it has a barcode. And finally, try use a Find search with the most distinctive words from the title to see if it doesn’t exist in the database under a different name. If you still can’t find a title or issue after all of that, then enter the title in manually and submit a correction.

The Top Ten Billboard: All for the Glory

Submitting corrections is a lot of work, but the response has been amazing. And if it’s starting to sound cliché because we keep repeating this, it’s only because we’ve never stopped being surprised by the work people have put in.

What started as a quick way for the frequent contributors to ComicBase to send their database correction notes directly to the staff has now picked up momentum as one of the most frequently-used (and competitive) features of the program. As a way of recognizing all the time and effort users have put into making the database better for everyone, we even created a little scoreboard to help people keep track.

But with the flood of new corrections every week, it's just gone nuts. We started with a top ten contributor's list and have now moved on to a top 100 just to be able to give everyone the proper recognition!

So, a big Thank You! from all of us here at Human Computing, and keep those corrections coming!