Discussions on Comics

There's a type in a private domain that does this to some extent: Comic Book Collection. We have a lot of comics TPBs in Freebase now, mostly from OpenLibrary. Connecting these back to the comic books (series, stories, issues) would be mighty useful.

Looks like there was some discussion of moving that type to the comics domain, but no action was ever taken. It might be worth revisiting.

That's an interesting modelling case because most superheroes are themselves. If we were to break up, for instance, Batman, into the Mantle of Batman and Bruce Wayne, then how would that topic exist elsewhere as a TV Character, Film Character etc?

 Would it be reasonable for the primary identity to be the same topic as the regular non-superhero character, and then have something like "Alternate Mantles" that could be portrayed by different characters? I might argue that when a mantle is taken over by another character, that is usually distinct to that universe... is that a reasonable generalization?

I know this has been talked about before (here and here). Not sure that there has been any more movement on the subject.

Some characters (like Superman and Invincible) don't really suffer from this problem, but for characters like casperone's examples (and others like Blue Beetle and The Flash), there is no one person in a continuity that can be identified as the "true" identity. I do think that a Mantle type should be made, perhaps with a "Primary Bearer" property to identify the person that is most identified with it, like Bruce Wayne for Batman. This wouldn't have to be for all costumed characters, just the ones with this unique problem.

As for cross-media character, they usually correspond to a certain "bearer" (Bruce Wayne for Batman, John Henry Irons for Steel), and should probably be tied to that topic. 

I'm not sure I have any answers, but I have lots of questions. (O Joy.)

If CBC doesn't include GN, how would the continues/continued by properties work for series where there are both collections and original graphic novels? (I think both Gaiman's Sandman and Carla Speed McNeil's Finder fit this description.)   On the other hand, I'm not crazy about using a boolean for something like that -- I prefer to use the type system if at all possible.

Other thoughts on the GN type:

Does the property "stories collected" really belong? If it's an original graphic novel, doesn't that imply all new material? Otherwise, isn't it just a collection?

>If CBC doesn't include GN, how would the continues/continued by properties work for series where there are both collections and original graphic novels?

That's a good question and an argument for reusing the GN type. Is it possible to have a property that has more than one expected type?

>Does the property "stories collected" really belong?

I think so. Comic Book Story (CBS) type has no publishing implications. Just like a comic book issue consists of one or more comic book stories (some of which might not be original), an OGN also consists of one (in which case CBS can be left blank) or more CBSs. Some examples of latter are Fables: 1001 Nights of Snowfall -- of an OGN with multiple original stories by one writer but different artists, and anthologies like Flight with multiple original stories by various authors.

If a book has both previously published comic book issues and new original stories, I would classify it as a comic book [issue] collection. Some Hellboy volumes exemplify this.

Concerning the story continuation across different media (i.e. comic book series continued in a graphic novel), what about bigger media jumps, i.e. Firefly TV show -> Serenity: Those Left Behind comic book mini series -> Serenity movie -> Serenity: Better Days comic book mini series?

As it's unlikely something like this can be precisely modeled, I think the best we can do is to have an encompassing type that would facilitate finding story incarnations across different media.

For this I created a Media Franchise/Media Property type. Spider-man would be an example that spans all media: movies, MTV animated series, the upcoming Broadway musical, movie novelizations, comic books (obviously), OGNs, computer games, and movie soundtracks.

I think this is an interesting type, and it has some potential. I'm concerned about its overlap with the types book, book edition, and written work, though. I think it would be good to take out the properties that are duplicated from those types, and get them via including the other types. Before we could do this, though, we'd have to figure out whether comic book collections are books or book editions.  The difference is that the topic with the types Book and Written work is for the abstract notion of the work, and contains information that is always true about the work, no matter how it's published -- author, copyright date, genre, etc. Book edition is used for specific publications of the book, and has properties for publisher, publication date, etc.

Comic book collection has properties that correspond to both the abstract and specific notions, so we'd need to figure out where they went.

I want to reconcile the two schemata because we're ultimately going to be getting a lot of book data from various sources, and comic collections/TPBs/graphic novels will almost certainly be included with some of that data, and I'd like to avoid duplication. 

But I do like the specificity of contents and contributions that this provides, which is more specific than the contents model in the publishing domain. We could do issues and stories collected using that model, but the roles would have to be less specific (author, editor, interior illustrator, cover artist).

Comic Book Collection does resemble a book edition, but it's not really an instance of abstract written work. And it's definitely not an abstract book/written work.

After all, a comic book issue is a written work in some sense, but we don't have an abstract comic book issue and then an actual published comic book issue.

I think there's too many properties not directly applicable to comic books. But I see your point about importing book data, so maybe inherit the book edition and live with the differences?

I think including the Book Edition type is probably the best solution. And I really think only a few properties don't apply to comic book collections. TPBs and graphic novels are, after all, published like books, and have ISBNs and Dewey classifications and all that stuff. Audio reader is obviously not applicable, and the cover artist and illustrator properties are less precise than we would want for comics; contributing author is about as wrong for comics as it is for everything else -- it's there only for when we don't know more specific data.

(You did, however, just give me a very scary thought. It would not be wrong to model comic book issues using an abstraction/instance model, although it would probably only apply to the cover art in most instances, since variant covers tend to come in and out of fashion. And every once in a while, single issues are reissued, like for Free Comics Day. Not that I really want to do this -- it just occured to me that it would be possible.)

I ended up including the Book type in the Comic Book Collection (CBC) type. Both TPBs and hard cover volumes can be modeled through its Editions property. This would also work better for data import: i.e. Amazon has Punisher War Journal Vol. 1: Civil War as hardcover and links to the TPB edition.

Do you agree that Comic Book Writer, Comic Book Cover Artist, and Comic Book Publisher should not be removed from the CBC type even hough they map to more general Writer, Illustrator, and Publisher properties? The users can add comic book specific data after data imports that prepopulate general properties.

In terms of editor, I'd say that if the level of precision is valuable, then we should keep the CBC properties. But if we only care about the primary editor, or don't mind lumping all editors together, we could use the property from Written Work.

For writers, I guess the advantage to the denormalization is that "comic book collections written" is more specific than the "works written" property on Author. Chances are, CBCs will end up with values in both properties, which would not be wrong, and is not necessarily bad.

>typelibrarian

Thanks for the input. I agree about the CBC writer. As for the editor properties, I could go either way, but it never hurts it include more properties as someone might use them.