Status Update: The British Comic-Book Database

There’s no easy way to say this, but I think I rooted the Database. Everything was fine when I confined myself to comics, but that wasn’t nearly clear nor informative enough – there were massive gaps in what was presented and the information didn’t entirely make sense without context. This isn’t a problem confined to my efforts, as every comic database online suffers from the same problem. In an attempt to plug this data gap, albeit an unadvised one, I began adding in information required internally (rather than, as Wikipedia and others do, by providing reference links), which meant the size began increasing dramatically.

To look at where things stand right now you need to understand the way it was put together – firstly, everything was hand-coded. This wasn’t, in retrospect, the brightest idea, but it afforded me complete control of what appeared on each page. Where something needed clarification it was possible to add that material to the page. Mostly my interjections were of a linking nature, passing people forward to more comprehensive pages, but sometimes there were factual points which needed to be made.

Anyone who knows anything about British comics will understand the intrinsic ties to popular culture and sporting achievements, though those who are only familiar with US titles might be a tad bewildered at the complexity of something like this.

Take sports comics, for instance – there were interviews with sportspeople (each of whom needed a page to list their appearances in comics), there were league table “ladders” (which required that year’s positions to be noted, along with pages for each team), and a multitude of pin-ups, posters, and other miscellaneous items which had to be appropriately linked and indexed. By the time I hit the original Eagle, and had to do lists of the cutaways – with pages for each machine – and the reprints (ye gods, the reprint index…) the number of pages had become astronomical.

At last count the Database was circling the 45 million page count, and so tightly interconnected that MAMP crashes while navigating more than three or four pages deep. This isn’t (I think) a problem with MAMP as much as it has to do with the unecessary complexity of the Database itself. Everything has a .php extension, therefore I can’t read the contents without either using MAMP or opening them in a text editor, so progress is painfully slow in every way possible. I hate myself a little right now.

What is really needed is something to hold it all together on the back end, while preserving the ability to include additional information where needed.

Even a moderately useful iteration is going to require thousands of hours of tweaking to ensure stability and comprehensiveness, which I would rather not take on right now. See, the Database hemorrhages money. It sucks up finances like there is no tomorrow, and investing time and money is something like that is, at present, on the list of Very Bad Things to do. I can’t justify the headache and financial committment without at least a modicum of income from it, and keeping it free of advertising has always been a priority.

I did tell everyone to download it when they had the opportunity, so you can’t blame me for not having a copy to hand.

Now, as to its return…

There’s a plan in place to restore all that information, but with a far wider scope than anything you could possibly imagine. That’s why the page count has bloated, and why it has been so long offline. It won’t be specifically about comics, though everything that was originally present will be included (and more), although I’m going to be requiring some more people to take care of the other factors – simply adding in all the films which were covered in Look-In and Eagle were enough to give me a headache, so being comprehensive – and including things which are, at present, almost entirely absent from the historical record – is a concern.

I’m not anticipating the restoration to be in any way easy – which would, lets face it, be really boring – and there are things which I’m not entirely certain can be done at present without uncovering a trove of information that has been elusive to date. The missing information is really rather specialized, and is likely going to take some time to gather the people who have this to hand, but on the off-chance that anyone has documentation which can corroborate the information that is – at present – indexed with lots of question marks peppering the text:

• The first casualty of motorsport. The German count (or duke, or something), on whom I have absolutely nothing to go on, as whatever information is to be had seems to be offline. Idealy there would be a death certificate, though in lieu of that any documentation about the race – flyers, posters, a programme, anything – would be appreciated. Information on pre-F1 races in general would be wonderful to have, as almost every site I’ve looked at has a miserable time trying to deal with these. There are a couple of indexes which would be especially improved with this.
• The MPAA certification list. There’s some headway on this, though only the first three thousand or so films have proper referencing. Unfortunately I still don’t have anywhere near a complete run of either Radio Fun nor Film Fun, so the question remains as to which films were adapted, mentioned, advertised, or spoofed. There isn’t, as far as I can tell, any kind of list anywhere which has an index of every film to appear in comics, so I want to plug that gap.
• Likewise, a list of theatrical productions 1860-c.1920, and which were given space in proto-comics and magazines with comic strips. You can only imagine how difficult this one is…
• Music lists. Everything mentioned post-c.1961 isn’t too difficult to deal with, but there are some comics which have what I initially thought to simply be jokey refrains, which then turned out to be lines from music of the period. Ugh. I sorta regret that that I don’t have any shellac, but… then I would need something to play them on. And then I would want something to play cylinders on. And it would escalate. You can see how this is another aspect of the Very Bad Thing I mentioned, right? Well, old music is something of a nightmare to get right, especially as I have no idea where to begin with some of it. Sheet music, in particular, is a complete monstrosity to deal with. I’m pretty certain that I would get a lot more understanding of the text pieces in Ally Sloper if the theatrical and sheet music lists were done.
• Any television lists which have more information than is presently online. Specifically the earliest shows, broadcast live, which are so under-represented that it is difficult to see what is being talked about – were the condensed Shakespeare adaptations in the early years taken from specially-modified scripts, or were they the edited Victorian texts before the material was put back together again? And which plays – tantalizingly incomplete in most records, including IMDB – comprised series blocks?
• Military figures. This is a whole section that is pretty much empty. For people who are wondering… Back in the day there used to be Real Life Stories which ran in a number of publications, adapting the lives of notable individuals in strip format – the lists of these people were easy(ish) to put together, as the comics had just enough information to start with, but getting more details on their lives… Not so much. The big names – Churchill, Rommell, and the like – were a piece of cake, but some kid mentioned in dispatches from the Boer War? No birth or death certificate, no contemporary account of their life, no photographs… For a while I was under the impression that at least a handful of these were heavily fictionalized, but I’ve tracked down most of the mentions in the Times to corroborate at least some of the information.
• Sports in general. Cricket is a beautiful game to watch, but the rules seem to be written in Klingon. Or Kzinti, actually, as there are Klingon dictionaries which can make sense of the more obtuse terms. And football… I have no idea what is happening half the time, and amuse myself by imagining the ball to be one of those giant bombs in 1940s serials painted to look like a ball. So getting the facts on early football history is something of an impossibility when I’m not sure what is important and what isn’t. The indexes for Tiger and Roy of the Rovers is incomplete without an understanding of where the sport was at the time those strips were written, and it would make a lot of the text pices less difficult to follow.
• The list of books featured in various and sundry recommended reading pieces (notably from Eagle, Look-In, and early 2000 A.D.) weren’t bad, but some of the books – especially the cash-in stuff which had a worrying tendency to appear and disappear overnight in the eighties – are giving me trouble. I’ve never seen some of the books online (eBay, whilst great for some things, is a pain when searching for a specific edition), and there are at least a few dozen titles the descriptions of which I have left as a couple of lines of question marks in exasperation. Any of the _____ Joke Book releases (it seems to be a line, but don’t quote me on that) are still proving elusive, and even a handful of relatively high profile books – at the time – are impossible to sort through properly.
• Newspapers. Just… newspapers in general. Anyone? I thought that it would be a good idea (well, it seemed like it at the time) to sort through the paperback collections of strips and link them back to their initial appearances, but man, is that ever a pain in the ass. Adding to the problems, The Daily Sketch has strips which don’t appear to have been collected in any way, nor are some of the artists credited. When they are credited, they are usually given some acronym, alias, or merely their initials. Oh what fun and joy. A handful have been (tentatively) identified by style, mentions in biographies, or guesswork, but anything pre-1910 (or thereabouts) are beyond my reach. Anyone who appeared in Punch, Judy, or other publications, seem to be better represented in the historical record, but the others are a mystery.

There’s more, but of an increasingly niche nature.

Would you believe that this was meant to be an easy project?

I’m looking at this as a long-term prospect, rather than something which needs to be ready ASAP. Having a plan in place to get x amount done in a specific timeframe is difficult without knowing what information is lacking, and… Well, the dominos will fall where they fall.

As an addendum, because it has been mentioned in passing, there are two add-ons to the site which I started without much thought as to their complexity – a dangerous thing, indeed. I kicked off a list of novels based on comics and comic strips here on WordPress (with more than a little gnashing of teeth), but soon discovered a trove of international efforts which had gone unrecognized.

But that wasn’t enough. One must also consider the records, computer games, radio shows, television series, films…

An area which, in the past decade or so, has exploded. I’m getting through that list slowly, but there are things in those categories which a) have never been translated into English, b) have never officially been released outside their country of origin, c) are hellishly expensive to acquire, and d) are not guaranteed to work on the equipment I have to hand. Which is all, frankly, par for the course. I don’t expect things to be too simple, but damn, the universe loves kicking me in the balls and laughing.

The other, slightly related, project, is perhaps more commercially-minded and would likely be the starting point for a relaunch of the Database as a whole: a comprehensive index of British magazines.

Now, hold on a moment there – isn’t that more difficult than the list of comics? Well… Maybe. I’m not sure where I’m going with it, but it is easier to pick up bound collections of magazines by year (the 70s version of the Movie partwork, computer game magazines, even the likes of Photoplay) than it is comics. Not sure what to do with this, in all honesty, but it is on the list of current projects. And there are enough connections with comics, especially regards creators and characters, that it won’t be too difficult to marry the projects in future.

I’ve already made some headway finding actual release dates for a number of magazines (rather than what is written on their covers), and I anticipate this being a relatively straightfoward piece to put together compared with other subjects – the credits are already in place, for the most part, and the high print runs for most titles are going to make tracking down missing issues less troublesome.

However… There had to be a glitch it there somewhere, didn’t there? It is getting to be annoying looking for generic titles when there are other magazines (largely irrelevant to this task) which share the same name. Doubly so when the title shares its name with things that are way, way out of the scope of any of my lists, or are plain impossible to find. Now!, the replacement for Look-In, is one such title that is beginning to make me annoyed. It should be a title that is available in sufficient quantities, but there’s little to zilch about it online. And no, the music compilation albums aren’t connected in any way as far as I know.

I’m ignoring zines for the moment as there seems to be renewed interest in them, though it would be nice to see soemthing better sourced and referenced available.