#2571: Marvel Selects Spider-man #3 (2000)

So this is a weird one.

Marvel Selects was a pair of strange series published in 2000, one title dedicated to Spider-man and one to the Fantastic Four. The comics featured reprints of stories from the 1970s, which was not exactly the peak material in the runs of these characters. Both series ran only six issues, so it doesn’t seem like the idea was a success.

What is weird, though, is that this comic features ads that are not ads.

Our coding protocol addresses three types of ads: external ads that are sold to some company that is not the publisher (a film studio, a video game company, a food company); in-house ads that advertise other products from the publisher itself (subscriptions, other forthcoming titles, trade paperbacks), and public service announcements. What it doesn’t count are what this book has: reproductions of ads that ran in the original comic book that are marked at the bottom as no longer valid. That is to say, they are ads for companies that no longer exist.

So, what are they?

Not an ad.

We have a category for editorial content, and the little notices on the bottom seem like that could make them qualify, but it’s not really what we mean by that term. We have a category for activities like puzzles, but that also doesn’t seem to fit. We have one for title pages, but that’s a no.

There are two categories that seem close. The first is pin-ups, which are images meant to stand alone outside of a narrative, which these do. The other is behind-the-scenes material. If we would want to make a case that the comic is being meta-reflexive about its own publishing history (which, to be fair, it actually is!) then this category might bend enough to accommodate these pieces.

Frankly, I’m not sure where I fall on this question yet, though I lean towards pin-up. If you have an opinion, we’re all ears.

There is, of course, always the dreaded “other”, but we’d prefer not to have to do that….

#3462: Suicide Squad #19 (2013)

With the return of the school year, we've started back on the process of coding our corpus. Right now we are doing a second run through all of our comics, focussing on paratexts (ads, letter pages, recap pages, credit pages) with a secondary focus on story length - which will set us up nicely for our third pass, which will focus on stories themselves. Combining these two elements, of course, also gives us comic book length as well. We've started with the most recent comic books and are moving backward in time. This means that the majority of our count so far has been 32 and 36-page comic books, with occasional forays into 52 pages and a very few 28-page books (plus one 200-page Jughead Digest!). 

The way that we're doing this now is crunching all of this by hand on index cards that are then inserted into the bag along with the comic book. We will add all of the information from the cards into the database as a second set, but we've already found that it is much faster to count and then record than it is to try to do it all at once (mostly because of tabbing backwards and forwards through the computer program). Also, the index cards give us a fallback if something catastrophic happens to our database.

For the most part, at least with contemporary comic books, the process of counting ads and story pages is very fast. I can do a regular comic book in about ninety seconds as a series of shorthand notations (c for cover, in for internal or house ad, ex for external ad, LC for letters page, and so on). Most elements in contemporary comics are full-page (I think I have only encountered one comic book with half-page ads so far). The somewhat less rare double-page elements get recorded as "in+in" or "ex+ex" to show them as one element across two pages. Again, this is all very quick.

Once the notes are on the pages, I do a quick double-check by adding the number of story pages with the number of paratext pages. This gives me a number divisible by four, and I know that I'm set. If it does not, I have to go through the comic book again to figure out where I made my error.

So imagine my frustration with #3462 (Suicide Squad #19), our first 38-page comic book. 

How 38, you ask? Good question.

As you can see above, Suicide Squad #19 has a gatefold cover, with the right hand portion tucked under the front cover. The reverse of these two pages is a house ad with a double-page spread. At first I counted this as a cover and an internal ad, but that seemed wrong. I thought that it was all just one cover, no matter how large, and so shouldn't be counted twice. But that made no sense, because in reality we're counting four pages on each piece of paper, but they are, of course, only one piece of paper. Then I circled the "c" to come back to it, but that made no sense either. So then I changed it to "c+c" and "in+in" to reflect the double-page spreads and allowed the final page count to stand at a non-standard count. 

So, the first exception to our rule of four.