The problem with comic book data

Or: I rant a bit and then tell you how I'm solving this problem for Just Read Comics

With 8+ years of comic book podcasting, and around 7 years of writing comic book reviews, I’ve discovered that comic books are a nefarious lot when it comes to organization. Sorting and organizing a vast physical collection can undoubtedly lead someone to the brink of insanity.

But lo, the digital era emerged. Surely in this world of computing power, the sorting and filtering and crunching of data this forever problem of organization could be figured out.

One day, someone cracked the code¹. comiXology normalized things in a way that could be managed² for folks who wanted to keep their collection of single issues organized.

Sort of.

The thing about publishing data that I’ve come to realize over many years of trying to crunch whatever publicly available data that’s out there is: this stuff is just not available in an accessible, understandable way. When it comes to new comics, it’s especially tough--at least in a way that public, non-paying consumers could easily comprehend.

Check out Diamond’s catalog. Check out Penguin Randomhouse. How about Lunar? This is a little misleading. This is mostly for retailers, but it’s the definitive list of new comics (and backlog comics) if you want to get straight to the source for new and upcoming comics. Sites like Amazon, Hoopla, or League of Comic Geeks aggregate a lot of that (and both do a lot of manual massaging of things to pretty things up) to make it digestible for people.

And sure, there’s companies out there who can offer ways for you to get access to this data and more (sort of³), usually for a fee. But that’s all about management and organizing your comics, which is a whole other thing that’s great for what it does, but isn’t exactly what I’m going for with Just Read Comics.

ComicBookDb.com: a strangely refreshing, yet haunting sight

Back in the day, ComicBookDB (now defunct) was a godsend. All of the data about comics you could ever imagine, linked together in nigh-infinite ways. Just a treasure trove of information. It had everything you could ever want to know about a particular comic book, including all of the creators--each of which had their own pages that linked every damn comic they’d ever worked on. Truly, a magical place that was shut down in 2019 and sold off to ComicVine⁴. The Grand Comics Database exists, but it’s not easy to use and, honestly, pretty one-note. But maybe that’s not a bad thing. It’s an index of comics and data presented plainly, and that’s all it needs to be.

All of this is to say: it’s not impossible to get information about comics. But it can be tedious as hell. And for many, this may be enough. I know plenty of comic readers--some of whom may be reading this right now--and they have their own set of rituals for finding information and figuring out how/where/what they’re going to read next and, most importantly, where to find it.

So where does Just Read Comics come in?

The main goal of Just Read Comics is simple: You want to read a comic? We help you find where you can do it digitally (and legally). But where does our data come from, especially when we aim to provide information that lives a step above the single issue or collection level?