Digital Comic Book Database

Home , Grand Comics Database, NOW Comics

Ashley Hamblin

12/15/2014

Project Narrative

For my project, I propose the creation of a crowd sourced digital comic book database

that uses Comic Book Markup Language (CBML). This will be an online resource that allows

users to search the database for comic books, learn about and create markup for each comic

book, as well as be a forum to discuss and expand on CBML.

The scholarly merits of comic books and graphic novels are beginning to be recognized

and there are some resources available to contribute to the scholarly community. There are

even online comic book databases, however there is minimal or no markup for these items. The

databases that do provide metadata don’t provide the metadata to do the scholarly or critical

analysis that my proposal would offer. There are also very limited resources on CBML.

The first goal of this project is to have comics be accessible and usable as a scholarly resource,

allowing users to be able to gather data and hopefully add to the discussion of the scholarly and

literary merits of comic books and graphic novels. The second goal is to create a resource that

would allow users to learn about CBML and to create a community that would allow them to

expand and build on CBML.

The final iteration of this project will provide an interaction for three types of users:

Those who are interested in doing meaningful and scholarly research on comic books and

graphic novels, users who want to upload images of a comic book or graphic novel and be able to easily add descriptive data, and those who want to learn about, discuss and use CBML.

Technical Requirements

The purpose of this project is to create and make available CBML encoded comic books

and graphic novels. This will allow them to be digitally published as well as allow for the ability 2

to analyze and study them. This means that initially several comic books will need to be

encoded with CBML and both the encoded file and the images for the comic book will need to

be made available online. The users will need to be able to create accounts, view comics with

the appropriate metadata, upload comics and add CBML to the appropriate comics, as well as

preform advance searches of the CBML encoded comics. There will also need to be a help

section, as well as a forum for users to interact with each other. This will require a frontend

interface using HTML/CSS and a programming language such as PHP or Ruby. There will need to

be a relational database to store user information. There will also need to be an XML-aware

text searching system like eXtensible Text Framework (XTF) to provide access to digital content.

XTF is an open source platform that consists of Java and XSLT.

Environmental Scan

Comic books and graphic novels have begun to become viewed as serious scholarly subjects. This means that there is an expanding list of resources related to comics. There are scholarly journals, comics studies at universities, multiple digital databases, and a few resources directly related to the digital markup of comics.

Comics Journals

ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies is a peer-reviewed, open access journal dedicated to the study of comics. It is published by the English Department at the University of

Florida. Image and Narrative is a peer-reviewed open access e-journal out of Belgium that focuses to the study of visual narrative. This includes comics. International Journal of Comic Art is the premier comics studies journal that has been publishing articles since 1999. Their aim is to publish scholarly and readable research on any aspect of comic art. This includes animation, 3

comic books, newspaper and magazine strips, caricature, political cartoons, and humorous art

and cartoon magazines. The journal does not maintain an online edition; however the table of

contents is available online. The Comics Journal is an American magazine that takes comics

seriously. The magazine has the view that comics are fine art and should be evaluated with a

higher critical standard. It is known for its long interviews with creators, regular columns, and

critical reviews. The Web site includes excerpts from recent issues and hosts an active message

board.

Comics Databases

There are several online comic databases in existence. Some provide covers only of the comic books, while others provide the complete comic book in a PDF, image or compressed file version. Most of these do provide some level of metadata with the comics, with varying levels of completeness. These are primarily used as a cataloging and search tool. There are even some with markup of the text. However, these are used more for the digital presentation and accessibility of the comic books; this would primarily be seen in retailers of digital comic books.

The Grand Comics Database (GCD), available at is an example of a large online database. The entire comic book is not included, but cover images are available. They are also extensively indexed with information on publications, credits, dates and more. This also an example of a crowd sourced database. Volunteers upload covers and index them. The Comic Book Database is another well-known database. Like the GCD this also a crowd sourced database with the goal of cataloging comics and graphic novels. This database also doesn’t provide access to the complete comic book. Examples of databases that provide access to public domain comics are

The Digital Comics Museum (DCM) and the collections at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. 4

The DCM is a collection of public domain comics from the Golden Age of Comics. The metadata in this collection is limited. The University of Nebraska-Lincoln has two collections that are part of their libraries image and multimedia collections. These are The Government Comics

Collection, and The Educational Comics Collection. Both of these collections include public domain comics that were created by corporations, non-profit organizations and government agencies. Both of these databases provide access to a digital version of the comic books as well as descriptive metadata. Comixology is an example of a digital comic retailer. Many of the larger labels, including DC Comics and Marvel Comics, sell their digital comics through

Comixology. Comixology provides metadata stored with each issue, allowing for a basic search function as well as connecting individual comics to larger story arcs.

Markup Language

There are limited resources on marking up comic books in particular. Comic Book

Markup Language (CBML) was developed by John Walsh at Indian University. CBML is an XML vocabulary based on the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). CBML attempts to address the issue of trying to encode images, text and those elements unique to comic books like panels and word balloons. Walsh provides resources on CBML on his website Comic Book Markup Language as well as a more detailed article, “Comic Book Markup Language: An Introduction and Rationale”

(Walsh, 2012). There also the article by Suzanne Covey “Beyond the Balloon: Sound Effects and

Background Text in Lynn Johnston’s For Better or Worse” (Covey, 2006), which discusses CBML as well as provides several examples.

Prototype 5

I have created a wireframe with some examples of some of the pages that would be included on the website. The prototype can be found at: https://www.lucidchart.com/documents/view/53222679-1b02-450b-b6f2-85c6380e79d5

The prototype includes a sample homepage as well as advanced search options. I’ve also

included a sample search results page. Users will be able to enter a keyword and limit it to

certain fields. These fields would series name, issue number, title, characters, format, publish

and ISBN. Also included are fields of creators, such as artist, writer, inker, etc. This advanced search feature would be available anywhere within the website. It will also allow users to search within results, or within a specific comic.

I’ve also included what a sample comic record as well as a sample page record, with their metadata. From a comic record, users can download the comic (along with the appropriate XML document) as well as edit the CBML. From a page record users can also download and edit the record. But they also view an example of what the XML record would look like.

Users who would like to participate can do so in a number of ways. They can track errors and notify the site administrators. They also can upload comics, become indexers or encode individual pages in CMBL. Those who choose to upload comics or become indexers can add basic record information about the comic through an interface on the website. Once submitted, this information will be added to the header of the XML document. The users who choose to encode individual pages of a comic can do so either with the online interface or to upload an

XML document directly. The online interface would allow the users to log in and begin editing the comic. They can select the page they are working on and work with fields on the website to 6

add elements and attributes. The fields will auto populate based on what the user has selected.

The user can save the changes and continue at any point. As a user is editing a comic it will

become unavailable to other users, until that user decides to submit those changes. After changes to the comic have been submitted the changes are updated in the XML document and any user can go in and add or edit the CBML. All changes made to a document will be tracked, and viewable.

I’ve included an example a page from a comic book as well as a sample of the CBML markup (see Figures 1 and 2). 7

Figure 1. From Captain America Goes to War Against Drugs. [David 1990] 8

Figure 2. CBML fragment illustrating an encoded page from Captain America Goes to War Against Drug.

See Figure 1 above.

Future Directions

With the current proposal users will be adding information about the comics manually.

There are several comic book databases that have already done much of this work. Specifically,

the Grand Comics Database has over a million comics in their database, with much of the metadata created. Right now, this information can be downloaded, but it consists of a single database dump. In the future I would like create a partnership with the Grand Comics Database that would allow users to search for the comic they are going to upload and if there is any metadata for that comic it will auto-populate in the fields on our site.

Another feature I would like to pursue in the futur is to create an interactive comic interface. As users search or browse a comic panels, balloons and even characters on the image of the page will be hightlighted to illustrate where in the comic the user is. 9

Meta-Critical Reflection

Comic books and graphic novels have begun to become viewed as serious scholarly subjects.

This began in 1992 when Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus received the Pulitzer Prize. Since then a number of comics have won literary awards including the Hugo Award, the Guardian First Book Award and the Costa Book Award. Now comics are used in a broad range of interdisciplinary studies, including

American literature, popular culture studies, art, mass media, history and sociology. Comic books are beginning to become a serious field of academic research. However, unlike other literary fields of study, there are limited resources available to further this pursuit. A large database, like I am proposing, would allow for the types of searching and data analysis that is already being done with digital collections of literary texts.

Bibliography

Covey, Suzanne. "Beyond the Balloon: Sound Effects and Background Text in Lynn Johnston's

For Better or For Worse." . ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies. 2.2 (2006). Dept

of English, University of Florida. Retrieved November 21, 2014, from

http://www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/archives/v2_2/covey/

ComicbookDB. (2013, November 01). The comic book database. Retrieved November 21, 2014,

from http://comicbookdb.com/

Comics by comiXology. (n.d.). Retrieved November 21, 2014, from

https://www.comixology.com/

David, P. (1990). Captain America goes to war against drugs : Government Comics. Retrieved

November 21, 2014, from

http://contentdm.unl.edu/cdm/singleitem/collection/comics/id/55/rec/5

Educational Comics. (n.d.). Retrieved November 21, 2014, from

http://contentdm.unl.edu/cdm/landingpage/collection/edcomics

Government Comics. (n.d.). Retrieved November 21, 2014, from

http://contentdm.unl.edu/cdm/landingpage/collection/comics

Grand Comics Database. (2013, November 01). Grand comics database. Retrieved November

21, 2014, from http://www.comics.org

Image & Narrative. (n.d.). Retrieved November 21, 2014, from

http://www.imageandnarrative.be/

ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies. (n.d.). Retrieved November 21, 2014, from

http://www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/ 11

International Journal of Comic Art (IJOCA) - 2010. (n.d.). Retrieved November 21, 2014, from

http://ijoca.com/

The Comics Journal. (n.d.). Retrieved November 21, 2014, from http://www.tcj.com/

The Digital Comic Museum - Free and Public Domain Comic Books. (2010). Retrieved November

21, 2014, from http://digitalcomicmuseum.com/

Walsh, J. (2012, May 17). Comic Book Markup Language. Retrieved November 21, 2014, from

http://dcl.slis.indiana.edu/cbml/

Walsh, J. A. (2012). Comic Book Markup Language: An Introduction and Rationale, 6(1).

Retrieved November 21, 2014, from

http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/6/1/000117/000117.html