0262: Skyman #4 (1948)

This week I'll be posting about some of our more recent acquisitions before they head to the shelving unit, so we'll be looking mostly at comics from the 1930s and 1940s. This is one of the least written about periods of the American comic book (at least among scholars), and is also an area that is most prone to generalization and assumption. There's a lot to see here.

I will admit that the first thing that caught my attention about this, the final issue of Skyman, was the boy with the Jughead hat. Having written Twelve-Cent Archie, I did some looking into that hat and its design origins in the early-1940s, so finding one here in the late-1940s was enough for me to set the comic book aside. But there is a lot going on here aside from that. "Clean Comics For Everyone" is a heck of a slogan if you know the history of comics reception during this period (Columbia also used that phrase on their flagship title, Big Shot Comics). More than that, however, I was struck by the Ogden Whitney signature right below the title.

One of the elements that we are coding for is cover credits. In the 2000s, these are spectacularly common (except among comics targeting young readers), and they are fairly common in the 1990s and even, a bit, in the 1980s. A lot of scholarship presumes them to be absent from the earliest comics, but our corpus isn't really showing that at all. Lev Gleason's comics, for example, mostly have them, and so do a pretty remarkable number of comic books from the 1930s - particularly those with comic strip reprints in them.

The Whitney credit here is a little bit more out of place. Whitney, who was inducted into the Eisner Hall of Fame a few years ago, co-created Skyman (a superhero with no powers other than wealth and a weird plane) with Gardner Fox, and his adventures ran in Big Shot Comics beginning in 1940. There were four Skyman special issues in 1941, 1942, 1947 and 1948 (this one). Whitney signed all four covers, and the third issue even has a "By Ogden Whitney" under the title, while this issue lost the "By" but otherwise looks the same. 

Similarly, all of the interior stories are signed by Whitney with a "By". The GCD doesn't credit him as the writer (they leave it an open question), but Columbia lets him imply he did the whole thing. Maybe he did? In terms of our project, it's not that relevant who wrote the stories, but the fact that an author is assigned to the work is important to us overall.

Columbia were a weird publisher that was in business from 1940 to 1949. We have a few issues of Big Shot Comics in the corpus, and a couple of other Columbia strip reprint titles. The publisher was never a big player, as their short life indicates. This book is somewhat anomalous for its dearth of ads - it contains only three, an in-house ad for Big Shot Comics on the inside front cover, a Charles Atlas ad on the inside back cover, and an ad for a combination cigarette lighter/flashlight/keychain on the back cover.

#2219: American Splendor Windfall #2 (1995)

At the end of 2017, I donated all of my "comic books", by which I mean standard-sized American comic book pamphlets, to Special Collections in the University of Calgary Library to create the beginnings of a comics collection there. Well, almost all of them. The day before the library staff came to pick them up, I rummaged through them and grabbed every comic book that I owned that also appeared in the What Were Comics? corpus. Disappointingly, it actually wasn't that many. It should have been two per cent, but I think it was probably slightly less. In some ways I felt a bit bad about breaking up runs of some series, but, on the other hand, all of the comics in our corpus will someday also be housed in Special Collections - we're just not finished using them yet. 

American Splendor Windfall was one of a series of American Splendor limited series at Dark Horse and Vertigo in the 1990s and 2000s. They are the only American Splendor comics in our sampling frame because the Overstreet Guide, one of our three datasets, does not index the earlier, more valuable and collectible self-published comics. This is the only American Splendor comic to make it into the corpus, and it is one of a fairly small number of "alternative comics" included. It will stand out in other ways, of course, not the least of which being that there are only a few black-and-white comics in the corpus.

This comic book is a weird one for me because it has four artists (Scott A. Gilbert, Josh Neufeld, Joe Sacco, and Frank Stack) and I believe that I've had dinner with three of them (I have never met Stack, and, actually, I never met Harvey Pekar either). My guess is that a lot of people might assume that it will be anomalous in the mid-1990s for being an anthology comic, but having gone through the corpus I'm beginning to think that multi-story titles persist in the comics world a lot longer than generally assumed.

2903: Fantastic Four Special #1 (2006)

So, I guess Fantastic Four are back. I don't pay close enough attention to current superhero comics to really claim to understand why they were gone or what they've been doing. I'm told they were gone for three years, but now they're back. Marvel has rebooted their series and their numbering so much over the years that sorting through all the Fantastic Four comics in the corpus was slightly annoying (I actually purchased a mid-1960s FF by mistake when I should have bought a volume three or four one - I was able to trade it for another book that we needed though, so it all worked out). This comics, #2903 in the corpus, is one of twenty-seven Fantastic Four comics that we own.

We have so many of these type of comics: comics where it is difficult to remember why there was a need for a "Special" rather than just a stand-alone issue of Fantastic Four, and comics that don't seem to be much recalled (we got this for less than a dollar, though it originally cost three dollars). 

The comic begins with a retro style on its first two pages that made me perk up but it then settles into what may well emerge as a generic Marvel house style of the 2000s when all the count is done. An awful lot of overlapping panels in this one, which is one of the more distinctive visual traits of this period. The single book-length story is about Reed Richards having dinner with Dr. Doom. 

0526: Little Ike #3 (1953)

"Little" is probably the most interesting word in our corpus. Forty-six of our comics have the word "Little" in them, beginning in 1948 with Little Audrey #4 and ending in 2013 with My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic #9. Without checking, it may be the single word that occurs most frequently in our titles. But the most interesting thing is the rate of occurrence. Almost all of our "Little" titles come in the first quarter of the corpus. In the 1940s and 1950s, the comics world was replete with them (Little Dot, Playful Little Audrey, Wendy, the Good Little Witch, Little Sad Sack, Little Archie, Hot Stuff, the Little Devil, and, of course, Marge's Little Lulu), but after Harvey ceased publishing this little comics craze was on its last legs. Few things speak as plainly about the audience expectations of the comics world as the transition of this one key term. In short: young readers were the absolute drivers of the comics industry for, well, that's part of what we're looking to determine. Forty years? Fifty?

Little Ike was not a successful player in this genre, this is his third of four issues. The comic itself is probably exactly what you'd imagine it to be - a series of short gag stories featuring a mostly child cast. 

Probably predictably, the next comic in the corpus is Little Iodine #21. 

1305: Lone Ranger #18 (1974)

The ads in this one are basically the ads of my youth: 100 Piece Toy Soldier Set ("packed in this footlocker!"), Roach Studios iron-in transfers, 204 Revolutionary War Soldiers ("only $2.25"), and, of course, the back page ad for Daisy air rifles. The basic Gold Key line-up for a long, long time in the 1970s.

One of the most interesting things about this comic is that it contains two stories and both of them are reprints from the 1950s - specifically from Dell's Lone Rangercomic of that period. So much of the material that was published under the Gold Key banner is reprints that aren't actually marked as such within the comic book itself. Presumably, the feeling was that, over the course of twenty years, the readership of the Lone Ranger had completely changed generationally, and so who would even know the difference? In contradistinction to companies like Marvel and DC that were rabidly marking their reprints as "Collector's Item Classics!!!", Gold Key (and others) just quietly asked their customers to look the other way.

Interestingly, both of the stories in this issues have a certain 1950s feel, which is exactly the phenomenon that we hope to be able to categorize. Gold Key felt old-fashioned in the 1970s because they were old-fashioned, which certainly couldn't have much helped the longevity of the brand. They would stop distributing seven years after this comic book was published.

While the topic of comics reprints and consecration has been a big topic for a while (see several of the chapters in the newly released anthology Comics Memory, for example), reprints that aren't announced as reprints are one of the massively understudied hallmarks of the 1960s and 1970s.

0009: Knock Knock (1936)

File this one under "you learn something new every day". 

Bob Dunn is reasonably well known in the world of comic strips as the cartoonist who took over Jummy Hatlo's They'll Do It Every Time after Hatlo's death in 1963. Dunn won several awards from the National Cartoonists Society at the end of the 1960s. Long before that, however, he produced this book for Western Publishing in 1936. It is a collection of more than fifty single-page gag strips - each one a knock knock joke. They are all in black-and-white, and most are five or six panels since, well, knock knock jokes have five parts (the sixth panel is generally one in which the jokester gets a punch in the nose for telling such a poor joke). The work in here is pretty accurately reflected by the card stock cover - they are minimal, sketchy drawings. Not a lot of detail, not a lot of craft, not a lot of wit. Lots and lots of racist imagery, which (sadly) almost goes without saying for the period.

When I looked up Dunn, I found that Maurice Horn's The World Encyclopedia of Cartoons credits him as the inventor of the knock knock joke. That surprised me. Partly because you never really anticipate that anything as simple as a knock knock joke has an "inventor" (though, of course, it would have to), and partly because I would've thought that the knock knock joke would have been around longer than eighty-two years.

Looking up the knock knock joke, seems to give some credence to the claim. Wikipedia traces the form back to Macbeth, but, well, please. They cite a couple of examples from before 1936 that are akin to knock knock jokes, but which lack the precise five-part form. Then, all of a sudden, they have a surprisingly large number of examples from... 1936. The most interesting of these, to me, is the fact that Fred Allen complained about the "negative craze" in his 1936 year-in-review broadcast. So it evidently was a new idea.

More interestingly, the knock knock joke seems to have faded away and then been revived by Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, suggesting that the form faded away, and then was revived by a terribly smart tv show with an ironic and retro tone, and that it then stuck in our culture. As the father of a still-young son, I can assure you that knock knock jokes still have currency and still haven't improved very much.

Horn called Knock Knock "a million selling book". I have no idea if that's true. It wasn't terribly hard to locate nor was it expensive for a comic book from the 1930s, so it may well have been ubiquitous.

0198: Aviation Adventures and Model Building #17 (1947)

The Overstreet Guide refers to this one as "Half comics and half pictures", but that isn't strictly accurate. It's less than half comics, and the rest is mostly a mixture of advertising and model-building instructions. The instructions are really detailed. I'm pretty sure that I could use these to build a really interesting balsa wood airplane if I took this down to my local craft store.

Aviation Adventures and Model Building feels a lot more like a magazine with comics than it does a "traditional" comic book. Perhaps it is because the first page isn't a splash page or a story, but an ad. Not just any ad, an ad for Xacto knives. It seems weird to me that there was once a time when Xacto was a company that advertised, but there you have it.

The issue is filled with a series of very short comics stories, the most interesting of which is an ongoing series (this issue has the sixth chapter) that literally teaches how to fly: how to use the controls, and so on. I'm not sure who the audience for that would be, and it terrifies me to think that at one time you could learn to fly from what is essentially a children's comic. Unfortunately, you never would've learned to land, since the magazine was cancelled with this issue.

The most interesting ad is surely this one, for Pepsi Cola. If you know anything about American soft drink wars, you may know the name Walter Mack, the president of Pepsi who targeted black Americans directly in the 1940s. This ad, featuring Pepsi the Pepsi-Cola Cop, is not an example of that trend, but it may be an example of Pepsi's increasing reliance on niche-marketing during this decade. Definitely something to look into.

0070: Four Color #12 (1942)

In our study, Dell's long-running series Four Color has created more than a few problems. On the conceptual level alone, there is some debate as to whether Four Color is actually a series of 1331 issues or is better understood as a series of one-shots. That is not a minor issue for us, because if we do characterize it as a series of one-shots, that completely changes our picture of the creation and cancellation of titles in the early part of the industry. In practice, I have found that some dealers keep all their Four Colors together and others break them up, so that this issue might be filed under B while the previous issue (featuring Smitty) would be under S. We have tended to treat Four Color as a single series to date, but we are open to arguments that we shouldn't be.

This particular issue of Four Color, the earliest one in the corpus, raises a whole host of other problems - good problems, the types of problems that this project is precisely designed to capture. 

Lets' just talk about the most obvious one: Four Color #12 is a "graphic novel". 

Four Color #12 was released in 1942 to coincide with the release of Walt Disney's fifth animated feature, Bambi. The comic is entirely based on the film, from the modelling of the characters to the plot. It is sixty-eight pages in total (including covers) and sixty-four of those pages consist of a single story. While there is no consensus on the minimum page count of graphic novels (Art Spiegelman's In the Shadow of No Towers is probably the shortest book that is regularly termed a "graphic novel"), it is clear that many "graphic novels" were forty-eight pages, as, for example, Marvel's self-declared Graphic Novels in the early-1980s. By any reasonable standard, then, Four Color #12 is a graphic novel. Of course, there are no reasonable standards for that particular term.

A few other items of note: No creator credits, of course. There is no advertising in the comic at all, neither external nor internal, and very little information other than the indicia. The vast majority of the pages are standard six-panel grids, but there are some interesting exceptions later in the book, particularly during the forest fire. It is a strikingly legible book, very easy to follow, which is a function of the intended audience to be sure. 

One final interesting note is that the copy that we have differs from both versions that are reported in the The Grand Comic Book Database. Their indexed copy gives the title "Four Color Comic" and the number (12) under the Ten Cent price, but ours does not. The GCD has another cover that is like ours, but which costs 15¢ where ours cost a dime. 

Mid Term Report

It’s been five months since we shared an update with you. One of the reasons for that is that we have been extremely busy here at What Were Comics? headquarters as we have begun coding in earnest and generally moving the process forward. What have we been doing?

Acquiring comic books. In our last update I noted that had more than two-thirds of our corpus in hand from working with three different stores. As you can imagine, a lot of that involved picking the low-hanging fruit – comics that are pretty easily locatable in some of the larger stores or at conventions. Since that time we have continued to buy comics from literally dozens of dealers across North America, including a very successful purchasing trip to WonderCon in Anaheim in March. After six months of concerted efforts searching for 3,563 randomly selected comic books we were missing only 207 of them.

Those 207 comics fell into two broad categories: those that we can’t afford and those that we can’t find.

On the first category, we bought our books in stages. We have always been looking for reading copies and whenever we found multiple copies of the same book we would buy the least expensive (so long as it was complete). I joked to dealers that I was looking for Golden Age comic books that the dog had thrown up on. Initially we would not pay more than $25 for any book in the corpus. Over the months we raised that to $50, and then to $100. Nonetheless, I defy you find a copy of Superman #21 for $100. So, we have placed the purchase of some of our remaining comics on hold for the time being (mostly comics from 1934-1941) and we plan to come back to them a little further down the road when we are more clear about our budget. We also had some small troubles getting reimbursed for some of our purchases, but that has all been resolved (thankfully!).

On the second category, we have found that there are some comic books that we simply cannot find. Some of these would not be valuable at all (early-1990s black-and-whites from series that are barely recalled), but after six months of consistent searching online and in person, we’ve called it a day on those. Thus, we have re-randomized the Sampling Frame to account for some of the missing books. Having done that, we were able to find 170 of these comics, meaning that we are missing only 37 books from our corpus, or just slightly over one per cent. Many of the missing 37 we can buy online now, but generally in the range of several hundred dollars. We’re thinking about it.

The great Tom Gauld, in New Scientist. If this ratio of data collection and graphics making holds true, we are in serious trouble!

Coding comic books. With so many books in hand, we finally got down to work this summer. Specifically, we are using a custom-designed tool to enter data about our corpus (thank you Anissa!). This data is collected in several broad areas: at the level of the comic book (Title, Issue Number, Publisher, Price, Page Count, and so on), at the level of the story, at the level of the page, at the level of the panel, and also including all non-comics elements (ads, letters pages). Working with our tools as they have been designed, it is optimal to do each of these levels at once.

So, we began with the comic books themselves. We now have preliminary data on 99% of the books in our corpus, or about twenty per cent of our total data collection is now complete and we can begin making some very preliminary calculations.

A (very) small portion of the data for the early-1940s as it looks in Excel.

In the fall term, we will be moving on to coding of the paratexts. Why jump to the final element? Mostly because our first wave of data collection has given us solid leads for a number of articles and chapters that have almost nothing to do with the actual content of the comics themselves, and the information about the rise and fall of advertising and letters pages will be a necessary element to those analyses of economic shifts in the comics industry over time. We hope to have the paratextual elements coded by the end of 2018. We will then move on to the story coding in the first half of 2019, with the page and panel work being done in late 2019 and 2020.

So, to sum up, just past the midpoint of the first stage of our project we have:

- Finalized the Sampling Frame

- Generated the Randomized Corpus

- Acquired 99% of the corpus physically

- Constructed our coding tool

- Finished the first (of five) coding levels

We are extremely excited with what we’ve accomplished to date.

In May, I gave the keynote address at the Canadian Society for the Study of Comics annual conference in Toronto (and, once again, thanks to that fine organization for the invitation!). We were just about to start coding at that time, and now, three months later, I realize just how much more information I could have shared if we were then where we are today. We are learning things at an exponential rate now.

I should also note that the first publications from this project will be out soon, and we will share them when we can.

Ugly industrial shelving, wonderful spinner rack, so many comic books.

Finally, we bought a spinner rack! All of the 3, 563 comics almost fit onto two industrial shelving units that are so common on the University of Calgary campus, but we were going to need one additional shelf. So we bought a spinner rack, which will eventually be used to hold the “to be coded” part of the collection on a rotating (get it?) basis.

You can get your own spinner rack here (we think it’s great).

Getting Physical

The primary task of the What Were Comics? team over the past two months has been acquisitions. There are 3, 563 comic books in our corpus, ranging from Bringing Up Father (1934) to Young Avengers #14 (2014), representing a randomly sampled two per cent of the comic books published in the United States from 1934 to 2014 inclusive. To date, we have worked with three comics shops (The Beguiling in Toronto, Lone Star Comics in Arlington, and Mile High Comics in Denver) to acquire physical copies of our corpus. Just over two-thirds of the collection is now in our greedy little hands.

Even though we have a fairly substantial budget line item for comic book acquisitions, one thing that has become clear to us quickly is that we will not be able to acquire all 3, 563 comic books that we are studying with our current funding envelope. One reason for this is that many of the comics in the corpus are bank-busters. Even with the remit of buying the lowest grade copies we can find, a comic book like Action Comics #17 is prohibitively expensive. Lone Star, for example, has an incomplete copy of this item (coverless, and missing parts of its pages) on sale for $444. That’s just too rich for us, even if it were complete. The second reason, of course, is that some of our sampled comics we simply cannot locate for sale at any price. We are on the lookout for four different issues of Gulf Funny Weekly, and we haven’t found any issues for sale.

Too rich for us, alas...

Needless to say, the combination of expense and scarcity has hit us particularly hard in the earliest part of our study. Currently, we own physical copies of three comic books from 1940 and none at all from the 1930s. As we move closer to the present our success rate improves dramatically. Without actually running the numbers, we probably have greater than 98% of the comics we want from the 2010s, and greater than 95% from the 2000s. Basically, we have picked almost all of the low-hanging fruit and what remains to be bought is material from the first forty years of our study. Particularly notable gaps in our collection fall in the areas of early romance comic books and horror comics, while the most surprising gaps may be children’s comics from the past two decades (think Nickelodeon).

So, what to do about these gaps?

Well, in the first instance, we will do provisional work on comic books that we can find digitally. While we may only own physical copies of about fifteen per cent of our comic books from the 1940s, we own electronic scans of probably eighty per cent or more of them.

Initially, I was quite content to work from scans that are available on ComicBookPlus or the Digital Comics Museum. Not only would we save funds, but they are easy to handle and easy to share with our research assistants. Over the course of the past two months, however, I’ve really changed my mind. I now see the scans as a back-up and a tool of last resort. Let me explain why.

As our comic books have rolled in, we have been cataloguing them and tagging them with a unique identifying number. This week they were all arranged chronologically and deposited on industrial shelves in the WWC office. It only takes a glance to see the importance of dealing with physical objects rather than electronic copies. For instance, simply looking at the books on the shelves highlights the way that squarebound comic books were much common in the 1960s than may be generally assumed. Moreover, look at the spine for Lone Ranger #47, with its factoids about jaguars. In the words of Nick Sousanis, “it’s almost a random encyclopedic entry and nonsense poetry all at once”. We don’t have an electronic copy of this book, but if the spine weren’t scanned I think we would be missing something important.

More generally, the physical arrangement of the comic books on the shelves tells its own story: you can actually watch the books shrink in physical size, for example. Moreover, we wind up with somewhat wacky looking shelves like this one:

Magazine-sized comic books stand out like a sore thumb in the 1970s

Here we see a series of magazine-sized comic books all arriving in a short time span: Mads, Crackeds, Crazys, Spirits, Eeeries, and even Planet of the Apes. While we have earlier magazine-sized comics (including a Humbug on the top shelf) we have nothing else like this many of them and by the mid-1990s they almost completely disappear except for a couple of late-era Mads.

Similarly, we can see at a glance the rising move towards graphic novels and collected editions that begin to show up in volume only on our final three shelves, where we find several books of several hundred pages that are hell-bent on skewing our page count averages.

Our comics get thicker as the years go by...

We’re still on the hunt for more books from our corpus, of course. Sometime soon we should have a better sense of which comics might be impossible to find in any form – physical or digital – and we will then need to address that issue through a selective re-sampling. This is the main reason that we have not yet published the corpus list to our site – we know that this is likely to be only the semi-final version. Nonetheless, we’re excited to be sharing the corpus document here in the near future and we will write about it in greater detail at that time.

Acquisitions Mode

We've been horribly negligent in terms of updating this blog, and I'm hoping to write something a little more substantial in the next few days. We (Ben Woo and Bart Beaty) provided an update to the comics scholars community earlier this month at ICAF in Seattle that is certainly worth expanding on here for the record. This isn't that post.

In a nutshell: This past summer we concluded the work of assembling the What Were Comics? sampling frame. This meant cross-checking our three data sources (the Grand Comics Database, the Overstreet Price Guide, and the database at MyComicShop.com) for works that are in all three. The resulting Excel spreadsheet was then organized by year, and we randomly sampled to generate a corpus that amounts to two per cent of the comics in our sampling frame, by year and rounded up. This is the What Were Comics? corpus and it amounts to 3,563 comic books.

Hand-checked copy of Overstreet required seven highlighters...

So. We are now in the process of acquiring those comic books. Ideally, we would like to have physical and digital copies of each of them. Realistically, this may not be possible. For instance, our corpus includes four different issues of Gulf Funny Weekly from 1934 to 1940, and we have yet to find any copies for sale. It also includes things like Action Comics #17. MyComicShop currently has two of those for sale, both of which are incomplete and which cost in the hundreds of dollars. Budget realities will work against us.

Off to the library with this lot, space cleared for the What Were Comics? corpus

That said, we are making progress. This month, I donated my collection of American comic books to Special Collections at the University of Calgary, but before I did I rifled through it for comics that appear in our corpus. At the same time, we have begun purchasing what we can - including buying more than 1,500 of the comics today in one fell swoop.

This has been an interesting exercise in comics buying. Notably, the vast majority of what we have bought so far has cost us less than $2 per book. It turns out that random Black Lightning comics from the 1970s are not that valuable. We are currently focussed on the lowest hanging fruit, acquiring as much as possible at prices below $20 per book. Once the dust settles, we will see about getting the older works that we need.

I think that the most interesting things that I have noticed so far is that two categories of books are trickiest to find: the first is reasonably contemporary children's comics (like Nickelodeon books), which are probably not in high demand and which don't have a big secondary market. The second are almost any kind of romance comics, which are causing huge gaps in the Excel spreadsheet. War comics from the 1950s? Easy. Western comics from the 1950s? Here you go! Romance comics from the 1950s? No way. There is certainly something substantial to be written here about gender and collecting...

Speaking of collecting, the one thing I was telling people at ICAF was that it was striking how the random sample turned up so few "important" comics. No Fantastic Four #1, no Detective Comics #27, and so on. This is mostly good news for the budget conscious researcher. However, yesterday I went to buy Marvel Super Heroes (2nd series) #8 from 1992, fully expecting it to cost about $1.70. Imagine my surprise, therefore, to learn that it is a "historically significant" comic book:

Squirrel Girl is REALLY popular!

So, the first appearance of current fan favourite Squirrel Girl is highly collectible. We've passed on this comic at those prices - just can't mentally justify it. We'll have to hope her stock goes down before the end of our project.

So. Sampling frame = Done. Corpus = Complete. Acquisitions = Ongoing. Coding Protocols = Drafted. Data Entry = About to begin beta-testing.

Back soon to talk about a couple of the larger issues. If you'd like to donate a copy of Marvel Super Heroes #8 to comics research, hit us up!

Where Are We Now? (II)

We’ve been quiet on this blog for far too long, and I thought it was time that we let you in on what the What Were Comics? team is up to as we approach the end of 2016.

In a nutshell, the main activity these days is constructing our data-set. As you may recall, our goal is to code two per cent of comic books published in the United States between 1934 and 2014. To do this we need to complete two distinct tasks: first, we need to compile a list of all the comic books published during this period, and then we need to select that two per cent.

To compile the sampling frame of all the comic books published between 1934 and 2014 has been an incredibly onerous task – far more time-consuming than we originally envisioned, and this has been the main reason for our silence all year. Essentially our updates would have read “processing”.

Rather than settle on a potentially biased definition of what a “comic book” is a priori, we decided at the beginning to outsource that definition. We had originally thought that we would define a “comic book” as any publication appearing in two of three existing data-sets: The Grand Comic Book Database, the Overstreet Price Guide, and on mycomicshop.com. We recently revised that, however, so that a publication needs to appear in all three of these databases, which we think makes it more consistent and fair. I may write something on the topic of comic books that got demoted from our data set based on this rule (spoiler: a lot of regional publications and give-aways so far).

To produce our master list, we exported the data from the Grand Comic Book Database – over 600,000 individual entries. These were sorted in an Excel spreadsheet by year and then we unleashed our research assistants on that data. We needed them to clean up two things: entries that were undated (which was several hundred thousand items) and obvious duplicates. Undated entries plagued us, as we needed to hand-date them from our other two databases and then enter them into the appropriate year in the Excel sheet. Duplicates are far easier to note. We don’t count newsstand edition and direct market editions of the same Marvel comic book from the 1980s as different items, for example, so it is just a matter of hitting delete thousands of times. By the time we get to variant covers in the 1990s that is a whole lot of duplication.

So, we are extremely grateful to our group of research assistants who undertook that first step this year. It wound up taking most of the year to accomplish.

Currently we are, well, I am going through each year chronologically and doing a final cull. Beginning with the dataset provided by GCD I am first confirming that the comics appear in MyComicShop. When I find one that does not, it is deleted. When I find an odd-sounding one, I mark that and then look it up by hand in this year’s Overstreet (my copy is very well-thumbed already). If it’s not in Overstreet then it is also deleted.

There are two main reasons that I’ve chosen to do this fairly boring task myself (each year of data takes a couple of hours to run through – I’m listening to a lot of podcasts). The first is that it’s not that boring. Simply reading a list of comic books published year by year is quite enlightening. You can literally see changes to the industry as they appear over time and it serves as an immediate historical corrective to certain longstanding assumptions. Read a list of comic books published during the Second World War and you will quickly come to realize that comics studies has dramatically overemphasized the role of the superhero during that period, for instance.

The second reason is that there are still a lot of decisions to be made, and I’d prefer a team lead do this work as opposed to a research assistant. Take this as but one example. This morning I opened the spread sheet to 1953 and entry number 166 is Animal Adventures #1 and number 167 is Animal Adventures #1. An obvious duplicate, right? Well, not so fast. The first of these is listed as Timor and the second is Premier Magazines. Did two different publishers release a comic book with the same name in the same year? It’s certainly possible.

Turning to MyComicShop.com I note that there are two titles called Animal Adventures. The first, beginning in 1953, is from Timor (#166 in our dataset) and the second, from Accepted Publications, is dated 1955. Now we have an issue. Are Premier Magazines and Accepted Publications the same company? And even if they are, did their version of Animal Adventures come out in 1953 (as GCD claims) or 1955 (as mycomicshop claims)? Clicking through on mycomicshop gives us these two covers:

So, the Accepted version is a reprint of Timor edition. Going back to the GCD, it turns out that the Accepted version is actually a reprint of the first three issues (actually, the only three issues) of the Timor series. This makes it a different comic, and it must be included in our dataset. But here’s the problem: GCD says that the Accepted version is undated. So what year? Well, mycomicshop says 1955. Turning to Overstreet, their listing shows the three Timor issues from 1953 and 1954, plus an undated reprint of all three in a single issue from Accepted and, again, no date. So in the end we have two votes for no date, and one vote for 1955.

Turning to ComicBookPlus, they have copies of the first and third issues of this series from Timor, and the first issue is clearly dated December 1953 in the indicia. They don’t have the reprint, so no more clarity is added. So, now the judgement call: the Accepted version has to be in our dataset as it in all three sources, but where does it go? We don’t have an undated area (though perhaps we should?) and so, given one data point, I’ve moved it to 1955 where mycomicshop believes it belongs. All that work to remove one entry from the year and add one entry to another year. And there is only a two per cent chance that the comic even winds up in our sample (though, at this point, having invested the labour, I’m rooting for it).

When that process is completed (a couple of hours per year) I re-sort the spreadsheet and run the sample.

To do the sampling we are relying on the random integer generator at random.org. I enter the number of comic books for the year (for 1952: 2,895) and then ask it to generate a list of, in this case, 58 entries (two per cent, rounded up). That gets me a random list of numbers that correspond to rows in the spreadsheet and I swap one for the other. Thus, 2878 becomes Young Romance #42. As a final step, I take a look at ComicBook+ and the Digital Comics Museum to see if scans of those comics are available. Generally about forty to sixty per cent are, but that is about to end as we reach the end of the fair use exemption for those sites.

At this point we’ve completed about one quarter of our sampling, and we hope to be finished by the end of January. At that point we will begin the process of acquiring the rest of the comics that we don’t have and then we will move into beta-testing our app. We expect to take a couple of months in 2017 to iron out issues with the app and with the coding protocols, and, with luck, by spring 2017 we will begin entering data in earnest. Then the fun will really begin.

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I hope to post a couple of other updates over the next couple of weeks, including a report on some preliminary findings that were shared at the Superhero Identities conference in Melbourne at the beginning of the month. In the meantime, I’ve been amusing myself while I slog through the data by posting oddities from the database on Twitter. Follow us at @whatwerecomics if you’re interested in seeing bizarre public service comics about tree farms show up in your feed!

What Were Comics goes to Atlanta

What Were Comics? team members Bart Beaty and Benjamin Woo will be at the annual conference of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies this week in Atlanta, Georgia. They will both be participating in a workshop organized by Blair Davis of the SCMS Comics Studies interest group,   "Comics and Methodology (or, Which Method Would Win in a Fight—Superman and Semiotics or the Hulk and Historiography?)." The workshop will also feature Henry Jenkins and Scott Bukatman. That's during session N2 on Saturday at 9 AM.

Where Are We Now?

Tippy Teen, as drawn by the great Harry Lucey, finds a problem in the coding protocols...

We've gone two months without updating this blog, but I would hate to let you think that we haven't been working all summer. Here's where we are at right now:

1. Data curation. Having exported the GCD database we are trying to determine the scope of comic book publishing between 1934 and 2014 so that we can develop our random sample. This requires eliminating a lot of items that are included in GCD that we don't want included. One example (that doesn't actually impact us because it falls one month outside our timeframe): Star Wars #1 shipped in January this year with, I believe, seventy different variant covers. We don't count variants as different comics, so this would need to show up in our database once, not seventy times. In part that's as simple as selecting and deleting sixty-nine instances of the book from an Excel spreadsheet. The problem is that the comics industry loves variants (or has loved them in the past) and there are literally tens of thousands of them and we have to confirm each one by hand. Slow-going. We now have four students working on this issue, and we hope to be done in the next few weeks.

2. Finalizing the Sampling Frame. Related to this, for our purposes a comic book is only a comic book if it appears in two of three databases (GCD, mycomicshop.com, or the Overstreet Guide). We have been cross-referencing GCD and mycomicshop all summer, but in late August we will have to cross-reference against Overstreet. Fortunately, I am expecting two copies of the new Overstreet Guide to arrive this week, so we can finally move on to this task.

3. Data entry tool. As this is a big data project, we need a consistent way for our coders to input data that will be usable in the long term. To this end, we have hired a computer programmer to build us a unique tool that will allow each of our coders in the next step to connect to the database and input findings. We are in the final stages of this project, which has been slowed somewhat by the research team's constant "what if we added this function?" requests. We are the type of people who drive our programmers crazy.

4. Coding protocols. This has been the big one. Last week, Ben Woo came to Calgary for four days of meetings. This was the first time that the entire team had been able to sit down in person to discuss the project. Over the course of a couple of days we drafted a fifteen page coding guide and a supplemental booklet of illustrations and examples that ran to another hundred pages. We then shared this with several students and asked them to read it and code one comic book: Tippy Teen #21 (which you can read online here). We then met at the Visualization Studio at the University of Calgary to compare notes on the data. Discussing the coding with the students made it very clear which parts of our protocols need to be more precise, and we are now revising those instructions. We will run a second round of tests likely in August. Ideally we would like the instructions to be clear enough that any student could step in and read a comic book and code it the same as any other student. The reality is that people are people and this will never be the case, but we're trying to eliminate as much of the guess work as possible.

In our initial test we encountered two significant areas of confusion. First, we are trying to define "shot lengths" (to borrow a term from film studies). That is, at what distance are the characters from the reader? Close-up, medium length, extremely long? These terms are simple to define, but in comics they are not so easy to code. In film, at least in the pre-CGI era, coding shot lengths is relatively easy because you identify what is in sharpest focus - it Cary Grant is in the centre of the screen with people at a party behind him that are not in focus, you code for Cary Grant. In comics, though, everything can be "in focus" because there is no technological limitation on the drawing. This is something that we need to define. Ideas like "the element that is the focal point of the panel" have proved far too vague.

Second, the overall design of the page has proved to be a total bear. We probably argued for three hours about this one day, came to a resolution, and then argued about it for three hours again the next day. Notions of the grid, and, more importantly, types of grids have already become our bête noir. We are planning a longer post on this topic - and possibly a journal article - coming soon. Suffice to say: the entire concept of the "tier" in comics studies is ridiculously fraught because of the myriad innovative ways that cartoonists find to layout their pages for maximum visual interest. 

So that is where we are at as of the end of July 2015. We are optimistic that we will have our coding book, data collection tool, and random sample ready to go for September, which is when the real work will begin.

Woo on Comics Labor and Leisure

What Were Comics co-investigator Benjamin Woo has posted his most recent article, “Erasing the Lines Between Leisure and Labor: Creative Work int he Comics World”. The article is published in Spectator (35:2). Here Ben draws on his survey of comics creators to look at how an identification by comics creators of labor as leisure presents a risk of self-exploitation. Key takeaway: “Within this nexus, the distinction between labor and leisure fades away like the Fantastic Four’s Invisible Woman”.

Jar of Fools

Two-thirds of Team What Were Comics met up in Toronto this past weekend for the annual conference of the Canadian Society for the Study of Comics, which is held in conjunction with the Toronto Comic Arts Festival. Some very productive discussions took place, and these will impact how we proceed over the summer and into the fall. It was one unofficial discussion that I wanted to note here today, though.

On the Saturday night at TCAF I found myself talking with Jason Lutes and R. Sikoryak in a bar, and our conversation touched a little on this project. Specifically, I mentioned the odd "perpetually falling horse" panel from Jungle Comics that I previously posted about. Jason immediately spoke up to say that he had included one such panel in his graphic novel Jar of Fools (above). I hadn't recalled that page so was curious to look it up again when I got back to Calgary. Jason noted that his intention is to have the tall panel read twice. Thus, the ideal pathway, for him, is panels 5 -> 6 -> 7 -> 8 -> 6 -> 9. That way you get the despairing Esther twice. Fascinating.

Anyway, it's interesting to see this unusual panel lay-out turn up again - deliberately and knowingly - half a century later. Lutes is one of the smartest cartoonists working today, so I'm not surprised that he thought his way through this particular conundrum. If you haven't read Jar of Fools you really should try to track down a copy (I'm not sure if it is currently in print from Drawn and Quarterly). It's one of the great comics of the 1990s.

First Data

When I typed the title “First Data” above, initially it came out as “First Date”. I almost kept that in, because in some ways diving into our data set for the first time is exactly like getting to know someone - there is some excitement, some trepidation, some sense of not wanting to move too fast, or to screw anything up.

Yesterday, thanks to some help from the great Rodrigo Baeza, we were able to look at our master list for the first time. If you’re just joining us, in our attempt to sample two per cent of all “American comic books” published between 1934 and 2014, we have worked out a preliminary definitional system that something is an “American comic book” if it was published in the United States and if it appears in at least two of these three sources: the Grand Comics Database; the Overstreet Price Guide; and mycomicshop.com. For the underground period, we are also using Jay Kennedy’s price guide, since Overstreet intentionally omits underground comix. 

So far, so good.

Our first step has been to use the MySQL data dump from the GCD and to sort it in Excel. This is primitive, to be sure, but all we are interested in at this point in time is making a series of eighty-one annual lists that can be cross-checked against the other reference sources and then randomized. 

At first glance, our data dump includes 293,381 items. Some of these were cut immediately: things published before 1934, and things published in 2015 (if we do add 2015, it will be after the year has concluded). Simple. 

Sorting by year and moving comics to individual pages was also a cut and dried process for the most part. Interestingly, just moving all those issues electronically provides a good historical overview of the rises and falls in publishing volume over time. We’ll have more to share on this point when we get precise data.

The first big stumbling block came when I looked at all of the comics that have no dates attached to them in the GCD. That number was much higher than I anticipated: 69,630 - or more than twenty-three per cent of all the titles indexed lack this basic piece of information. 

What to do? Well, the obvious answer is that we need to generate that by hand ourselves. Simply beginning at the first entry I began typing titles into the mycomicshop.com database to see what is there. Fortunately, quite a lot is there, including good dating information. An added bonus is that this has already demonstrated that mycomicshop.com is not simply taking data from GCD and duplicating it, which was a back of the mind worry. They are independent of each other, so can be used to corroborate each other. Items with dates in mycomicshop.com are being added to our master list, and items that are absent are being flagged as absent so that they can be checked against Overstreet for inclusion or exclusion. The bad news? It’s a time-consuming and dull process. I checked about 300 records in an hour. At that pace, it will take a research assistant six and a half weeks of full time work just to put dates on entries that are missing them, and even then we will need to check the validity of the 230,000 comics that already had dates. It will be a long summer.

One other issue has already raised its head: GCD indexes some material that seems very instinctively to be not comics, like Toyfare Magazine and Amazing Heroes, and mycomicshop.com also lists them for sale. We may need to modify our search parameters based on the stated GCD rule that: “The individual issues of this series are each less than 50% comics. Only comics sequences are indexed and cover scans are accepted only if the issue has 10% indexed comics content.” This would mean restricting our searches to items that are “cover scan eligible” from GCD. Thoughts?

Defining "Comic Books"

Previously I outlined our first four goals with this project this way:

1. Define what we mean by a “comic book"
2. Find out how many “comic books” were published in each year
3. Randomly select two per cent of those to form a data set
4. Track down electronic or physical copies that are in the data set

Yesterday the three investigators on this project sat down to talk about this for the first time since we received our grant funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. It was an epic four-hour Skype call, much of which addressed that first point.

Here’s the sticking point - this is an interdisciplinary team. Bart Beaty is trained in Communication Studies but works in an English department. Ben Woo is trained in Communications and works in Communications. Nick Sousanis is trained in Art Education and is hoping to continue in that area. Nick is a practicing artist, Ben was an aspiring artist, Bart can’t draw a lick. So we all come to this project with slightly different backgrounds and interests. We all want to use the data set that we will produce to do slightly different things. This is, we believe, one of the strengths of the team-based approach. But it also means that we have to initially get on the same page before we can even take the first steps.

So: what are we actually studying? “American comic books”. Great. But what are those exactly? Are we referring to a publishing format? If so, we need to start from the fact that the “American comic book” has been 64 pages, 52 pages, 36 pages, even occasionally 80 or 100 pages, and that its dimensions are not constant. If we focus on format we lose magazine-sized comics from Warren and Fantagraphics and we lose digest-sized comics from Archie, even though all of those things seem, intuitively, to be comics. Moreover, we predetermine a good deal of our results. Format, distribution channel, publisher - all of these were considered and rejected as inadequate starting points. 

In the end we returned to something that I wrote in my book Comics Versus Art:

By conceptualizing comics as the products of a particular social world, rather than as a set of formal strategies, it is possible to highlight the various conventions that are frequently used by comics artists. While most theorists of comics have come to identify certain traits (sequential images, word/text relations, continuing characters, reproducibility, word balloons, and so on) as essential to the comics form, given the difficulties presented by border cases, of which children's illustrated picture books and artist’s book are but two, it seems much more productive to say that these traits are merely conventions of the comics form, rather than defining elements of it.

The key for us moving forward is to study the “social world” of “American comic books”. In a tautological way, you might say that we want to study the “American comic books” that are recognized as “American comic books” by people who create, sell, and read “American comic books”.

So how to do that? 

In our preliminary work so far we have been working with the data in the Grand Comic Book Database. This has been an incredibly useful launching point, but it is not without problems for us because they seem to be more expansive in their definitions than we might be. One solution would simply be to defer to them and use everything that they index, including Ballyhoo and other collections of gag cartoons, and the Spirit Supplements. This seemed to us to be ceding too much authority to a group that has a slightly different mandate than we do.

The solution that we arrived at was to use a three-pronged approach. We will include in our master list any “American comic book” that is included in at least two of these three reference sites: The Grand Comic Book Database; the Overstreet Price Guide; and, MyComicShop.com.

The rationale for these selections is as follows:

The GCD is the most comprehensive public database attempting to catalogue comics production around the world.

The Overstreet Price Guide has been the standard reference work for comic book collectors for more than forty years. While it is admittedly more selective than the GCD, it has had an indelible influence on the self-image of the “comics world” for decades.

MyComicShop.com was selected because it is an extensive site that lists both items for sale even when they are not in stock. It also has a very friendly interface.

We are very interested in hearing suggestions about other sites or indices that seek to be roughly comprehensive descriptors of comic book culture. We did consider The Standard Catalog of Comic Books, but as it has not been updated since 2005 we ruled it out.

So, essentially, we will be making a master list of everything that appears in at least two of these three sources. Relative to our previous posts, this would exclude Ballyhoo (only found in GCD) but would include the Spirit Supplements (found in all three). So that argument is concluded for now.

A few other notes on our initial assumptions:

On reprints. We will be including reprints as separate items. This was contentious, and the question became: Are we studying what was created in the industry at various moments in time, or what was made available to readers? Take Watchmen, for example. We could count Watchmen #1 as a 1986 release and then exclude all of its many reprintings. That would allow us to focus on what was created and when. Yet it seems very important that Watchmen #1 has been reprinted as a trade paperback, a hardcover, an Absolute Edition, as a DC Comics Essentials, particularly as that helps us track the shape of “the comics world” in terms of reprint strategies. Watchmen will just keep turning up. That said, we are only using new editions rather than immediate reprintings to satisfy demand on under-ordered titles.

On translations. We will be including these, where they appear in two of three sources. To exclude them seemed as if it would misrepresent the shape of the field (particularly with the rise of manga). Coding them as a distinct category will allow us to do some interesting things.

On “American”. One of the oddities, given where our funding comes from, is the fact that we are excluding Cerebus and comics published by Drawn and Quarterly. We are not going to include work from Canadian publishers so as to make the our data set coherent. One thing that we all agreed: we hope that we will be able to recruit a graduate student who will use our tools to run a comparative study focusing on Canadian comics. It would be fascinating to see the results.

So, we are beginning with a working definition of our first question, above. We are defining a “comic book” as something that is included in at least two of the three most commonly used databases that define “comic books”.

We are particularly interested in thoughts on this because if we have this step fundamentally wrong it would be better for us to know that before we move on to step two rather than after.

Our next stop to actually compile a master list, from which we will derive our randomized two per cent sample set. That will be a lot of manual labor on the part of our research assistants!

Coloring the Avengers

A very interesting piece has just gone live over at The Wall Street Journal. Essentially, they have reduced the colour palette on five decades worth of Avengers covers to sixty-four colours (eliminating black and white) and then arranged them chromatically in comparative images like the one above. You can mouse over individual strips to see the original covers. It's all quite nicely displayed, and I think it begins to scratch the surface of some of the things that can be done with a large data set to display changes in comic book production over time. Definitely one to check out for yourself!

Beaty in The Walrus

Bart Beaty's book, Twelve-Cent Archie, has been excerpted in the May issue of The Walrus, and that excerpt is now available online to non-subscribers. Check it out!