Rocket Bomber - article - comics - rankings - For any endeavor - knowing the scope of the project is damn handy -- if not necessary

Hey, remember the rankings?

I sure do.

It’s not like I’ve abandoned that little project. Actually, I like it a lot; but then I’m hard-wired weird like that — I strongly identify with one of the basic geek prototypes, “good with numbers” — and in fact I like numbers better than about half of the people I know (I’m not sayin’ which half) and y’all should know: even a two-month lapse in regular reports and a full week gap in posts of any sort shouldn’t be taken as my last statement on the subject .

[yeah, yeah: my apologies for no posts last week. as stated: busy, busy, busy]

Graphic novel rankings are a big damn chunk — As of 19 July: 8,214 titles.

I know the total number of titles rather specifically and I can assure you there are no duplicates or other errors, as this is exactly what I’ve spent the past six weeks researching. 100 line entries or so of the old database were obvious typos and duplicates — and another 200 or so were less obvious, but still errors — but I’ve gone through the whole database, line by line, to figure out what I have and to nail down a publisher and (at least one) date for every last one of them.

On the one hand: 8,214 is quite a lot. 8K of anything is a bit much.

On the other: 8K is a start, but even with what I have listed I know that I can go back, fill in middle and missing volumes of some series and we’ll be up over 10,000 before you know it.

That is to say: the two years I’ve put into this odd hobby to date are just a start.

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Titles as listed conform to my own idiosyncratic nomenclature; typically —

• Series/Property/Character, then


• Iteration/Volume/Mini-Series, then


• Special Qualifiers (i.e. novel, manga), then


• actual volume number.

Ideally, it ends up being just Series Title plus Volume Number.

The output of most publishers, however, is far from ideal. [Marvel, in particular, may be responsible for a new, unseemly facial tic I exhibit whenever anyone starts talking about X-Men.]

Now that I have a solid base to launch from, though, I should be able to play catch up on the Graphic Novel Rankings — in fact, I have 1.2GB of archived web pages saved to my hard drive specifically for the GN rankings.

All I need to do now is, *sigh*, even more data entry so I finally get up to date.

Here’s the latest:
Full List by Title
Full List by Publisher/Imprint

Corrections are invited; just not here — I’ll try to get a web form up in a separate post so folks can submit title corrections before the end of the week.