The Way of the Editor:
Scribbled Notes For a Rainy Friday
It’s been about six months since we moved to our new location and set up shop, promptly proceeded to launch the most ambitious product line of any previous year, and then dragged ourselves from San Diego to Chicago back to back for the craziness of the summer convention season. Busy seems like an understatement. (And we still have a ton to do.) Meanwhile, user-submitted corrections have kept us plastered to our computer screens while Barry John Shepherd and Mark Waid duked it out for sovereignty over the Top Contributors billboard. I’m grateful just to be able to to catch up with a personal, mountainous pile of neglected work that’s been brewing since early April.
But all the hard work has been worth it. Not only did we send out a Human Computing record-breaking line of 4 new products this year (ComicBase Express, Pro, Archive, and Blu-ray), we’re also close to cracking the 300,000 comics indexed benchmark. More than 51% of the picture library is in large, high-resolution format. (If that seems like a negligible number to you, try over 80,000 cover scans.) And the enthusiastic responses to corrections has been amazing. We’re now filling in data on obscure comic books published in remote regions of the U.K.—or Australia. It’s also a little humbling to face how So Much Bigger Than We Are the database has become.
We’ve also been trying to up the interactiveness on the website, what with the Eskimo Grandmother Campaign of Terror as well as the more family-friendly Trick or Treat Halloween game this past week, all of which were a hoot for the whole on-site staff to produce. Voice talents were done in-house, and if there’s anything more scary/silly than a room full of grown-ups trying to sound like children (and in my opinion, succeeding), let me know. (Suggestions for other fun product tie-ins we could add to the site would be appreciated as well. Hey, if you want a particular ComicBase package sale, you might as well try asking for it, right?)
And finally, if anyone knows of any intrepid local high schooler looking to brave the thrills and dangers of working in a small, high-velocity comic book database software production environment, I’d like to direct you all to the current Human Computing job posting for a Production Assistant Intern.
11/05/2006 UPDATE: We’ve cracked the 300K mark. Way to go, Barry!