I just want to read comic books
Let me explain what it is we're all doing here, okay?
If you weren’t aware, I work at Squarespace. It’s a pretty solid job and I’m real pleased with it. But that’s not what today’s post is about.
An incredible perk of my job is the twice-a-year Hack Week’s that the company allows for. Folks get to spend approximately one working week building anything of their choosing — alone or as a group. You pick the scope, the language, the whatever. Some people use it to build things for the company or for their team or internal organization. Some build games. Some build AI-generated videos documenting the history of Squarespace (someone really did that this year and it was pretty impressive).
I cut my Hack Week short because of my birthday (🥳), but knowing I would have ~2.5 days to do something, I put together a list of ideas:
Build an automated Google Apps Script to generate payment docs for IRCB1
Fix up ComicPulls.com and add some realtime monitoring and analytics
Create a clone of ComicBookDB.com (RIP) so people have somewhere to track comic creators across series, variants, full series information, etc.
JustWatch.com but for comics
You’ll notice a commonality: I wanted to do something with comics.
I mean, if you know me at all, I always want to do something with comics. I always find myself wiggling conversations about most things back to comics. I can quickly come up with recommendations for just about anyone about pretty much any topic/genre. It’s a whole personality trait (for better or for worse) and I can’t help but always find ways to come back to comics2.
So I sat and toiled for, oh, maybe 2 minutes.
Just Read Comics
JustWatch.com but for comics.
My thought process was (after hours and hours of talking about comics with people all across the board): Folks want to read comics digitally and they don’t necessarily know all of their options to read them (legally). Why not make a site where you can find dang near any comic you’re interested in. The site would have links for:
Where you could read for free (ie. Hoopla, Libby, etc.3)
Where you could read using a service (DC Infinite Universe, Shonen Jump, Marvel Unlimited, comiXology Unlimited, K-Manga, etc.)
Where you could read by paying (itch.io, Amazon Kindle, Google Books, Vault Comics, Dark Horse, Silver Sprocket, etc.)
Plus, we’d add a nice series cover on the page, some credits, and a description of the series.
The big thing being: This is about listing comic book series, not individual issues4. There’s a dozen caveats here and a few extra bits I plan to build in, but that’s the main idea.
The day before I started on this project in earnest, I threw it out to some folks on the IRCB Discord and there was a lot of discussion about what this could be in the end. All I’ll say for now is that a lot of that feedback is on my to-do list, but I pared that down to the bare essentials and dove in.
Getting The Development Started
The idea for this kind of site is a simple one that I already knew had some pretty deep scope-implications. But I was going for fast and lean. In that spirit, I threw together a quick idea for two pages knowing I was going to build things using React, Typescript, and, for the sake of speed and simplicity, Bootstrap.
My initial idea was to just have a few pages, so I sketched out some rough ideas of what a public page for a Series would look like and a starting point for an admin. The goal was simplicity5. Not only because this was a Hack Week project, but because this whole site is meant to be a middle step to get someone to the comic they want to read.
So I started there and started fleshing out the data I would need to power these pages.
Naturally, this grew a bit as I started to work, but this was what I started with. It was a nice foundation to get the front-end built and power it by a few straightforward APIs in NodeJS. Not to mention, it gave me enough to get things running quickly to allow for more time spent digging in on the more *ahem* complicated parts of this project beyond just building the site.
What’s nice is that even after a few weeks of working on things and getting some real data into the system, my database hasn’t changed too much. I’ve made some tweaks to sort out some of the funkier bits around how data goes from “out there” to “in here.”
And maybe it’s about now that you’re asking: But what about the data?
My well of knowledge about how absolutely fucking irritating and stupid challenging gathering data about comic books into a single source was a hurdle I knew I was going to have to get over one way or another. It’s pretty unreasonable to think I’d be adding every comic I could think of to this thing manually—even if that meant a cleaner dataset. Folks who listen to IRCB or hang out in our Discord have probably heard / read me rant about the inconsistent, nigh incomprehensible bundles of of comic book data out there that anyone can access. It’s a goddamn mess and it’s a miracle companies and sites like Manage Comics, Omnibus, or League of Comic Geeks manage to exist because, folks, it’s bad out there in the world of serialized comic/manga data.
Despite all of that, I came up with something of a solution. It’s semi-automated and massively chaotic. You might be able to glean a bit from the pictures above what it is, but that’s whole post in itself…
For now, that’s what we’re building here: A site to find where you can read the comics you want to read.
Wrapping up
Given how little I’ve told you, I’m curious to know what you folks think. Based on what you’ve read, would you use this? Is there something missing that you would need in order to use this? Let me know. Post a comment or shoot me an email: mikerapin@substack.com
To really wrap this up: I’m hesitant to do this, but you’re all pals. So here’s the site:
JustReadComics.com - Read The Comics You Want On The Services You Love
It’s locked down to just a landing page and NOT usable6, but it exists out there and I’m excited7.
Next time
React and Bootstrap.
I try to pay the folks who work on the show a few bucks every quarter because I believe it’s the right thing to do for their hard work. It’s, admittedly, not much, but as our Patreon / sponsorship grows, that value will increase over time. It’d be super cool if you subscribed here.
Can you blame me though? Comics fucking rule.
Maybe one day you could plug in your local library
OGNs are their own thing, but it still applies here. One OGN = One Series. Plus, indexing individual issues feels like a slippery slope to a middle-man service for simply buying comics and I don’t know if I want to go down that path. But hey, make this my full time job and you got it, bub!
Before you ask: Yes, there will be a search
Recall my last post about MongoDB connections… but also, it’s extremely primitive right now, even locally.
Please ignore the fact that I haven’t replaced the stock React favicon and loading function 🤣