Commentary 1

There's something about living with a work for a period of time which changes the work. You begin to see a myriad of possibilities in form and function, and discover limitations which wouldn't otherwise become apparent, and - sometimes, if you are patient and ask the right questions - you find answers which take you off in unexpected directions. The best part about finding extra uses for already existing aspects of a work is the tidiness. The sense of order is inherently appealing.

In comics, noting first appearances are important. I doubt anyone will argue that point, but finding a compelling reason for the existence of a list outside of identifying those crucial first appearances was immensely difficult. It was an index in search of a body of work to accompany, and only by adding more pages would it finally have a purpose beyond itself, which is how the endless character pages¹ began accumulating. And they needed more purpose, which is why all the strips, posters, cover appearances, and other sub-pages needed to be added.

Having seen how characters benefit from having all their varied appearances brought together, it seemed reasonable to do the same for living people. All those Eagle pin-ups, Look-In features, and various biographical strips add up. Of course, you need order in the mass of data which this throws up - all VC recipients need to be on one list, actors on another, the royal family all brought together on their own page...²

When it came to footballers I gave a shrug, figuring that someone would come up with a way to order them more creatively than putting them on their own page(s).³

For popular characters, as for celebrities, this meant that at least half a dozen pages were needed to cover all possibilities. That's before the information was added, necessitating yet more pages. At some point in all of that, probably when adding in creators to strip listings, I figured that there needed to be something similar for their work. If photos are going to get so much coverage, then it is only right that the creative forces driving a comic get due recognition.

That was most likely where the madness began.

The endless list of names needed something extra. When I ported over the principle of the character sheets, I found that the birth and death dates gave more reason for the lists of names - it would now be possible to quickly search for everyone born on a given date, or on a specific year. All of the creator sheets, along with military, celebrity, political, and royalty names, thus needed to have their birth dates added. And deaths, obviously, where appropriate.

Newspaper and magazine strips, long overdue proper assessment, have always been a pain to gather information on. When I was putting those pages together (driven by the need to add those to creator pages), it seemed to make sense to index the magazines as well while I had them available. All the features, interviews, reviews and other elements.⁴

By this time, with so many pages proving to be more than mere lists, the publisher list began looking a little threadbare. Those pages were a necessity, but one which sat uncomfortably among the more complex pages. It took more than a while for the answer to come to me, but when the answer came it made perfect sense: the companies can be considered to have a beginning, so I would need to have their "birth date" and company number. That's something which was really hard to do without the internet, so it is ongoing.

Much of the work was done while offline - from copious notes, photocopies, and what was recovered from the old external hard drive with the original website - retaining access to the internet is a whole other problem which is going to require thought, but I have a couple of months before it becomes a pressing one.

And I haven't even mentioned the addition of adding in biographies, publisher histories, or even novels.

Back in 2012 I downloaded a great deal of public domain books which touched on areas that the database was heading in. Some of the titles turned out to be very useful indeed, while others merely reinforced what was already available. It was apparent, in many of the texts, that nothing had been done to contextualise the information. Prominent Victorians, now barely known (if at all), are mentioned without providing any hint as to their importance, nor why they should be highly regarded. It was something that was crying out for attention.⁵

At the moment, sorting out the history around books about Punch are proving to be something of an obsession, but peeling back the layers of time in order to make the books come alive again required a completely new approach. There's a lot of work still required for those, yet the fun (for it is so) is digging out the lines which illuminate an individual. It was a possibility, for about a week, that they would make suitable companion pieces - items to be sold in order to fund the site itself.

Oh, optimism. You cruel and tormenting feeling.

As more explanations were added to the books, dates and references essential to making sense of cryptic comments, it became increasingly obvious that the books belonged on the site proper. Forty Years of Spy, alone, now has over 300,000 words. Untangling the incredible web of artists and authors contributed to the size, with numerous mentioned individuals requiring their own pages with links to their works. So that leaves me in a rather awkward predicament of not having anything which is obviously aimed at bringing in money.

At the moment the database is sitting at staggering number of pages of various length⁶, though at least half of that consists of "I'll get around to this, sooner or later" pages, with only the name of the individual, or the title of a work, at the top of the page. All requiring attention, and all of equal importance.

And then there is the "subject" sections. This particular aspect of the database is all Christopher Cockerell's fault.

There's a wonderful L. Ashwell Wood cutaway⁷ of a hovercraft in Eagle Vol.10 #36 which caught my attention, and raised a question - how would I go about finding every instance of a hovercraft in British comics? How about helicopters? Or racing? What about animals, and... Well, everything else. A proper listing of every instance of war stories was the kicker, as so many real-life conflicts have slipped between the pages of popular titles. It was important (to me, at any rate) to have a way of seeking further material on a given subject.

Actually, that isn't the complete story...

A while after sketching out rough guidelines for subject listings I found that there were significant gaps, even though I was certain material existed. It was the search for specific material which truly drove that element of the guide. Where were the strips and features about shoe-making throughout history? How could I find instances of seaside piers in stacks of comics, to compare and contrast depictions? Discovering these relatively mundane linking elements was a challenge which demanded answering.

Of course, things never really go as expected. For every date and name which was pried from the dusty pages of history there were a dozen gaps which frustrated me with their cunning elusiveness.


<sup>1. Don't get too excited - I only have 32,106 characters listed at present, a fraction of the overall total. When completed, each entry will have a potted biography, a couple of iconic images, a complete list of appearances, a list of collections, adaptations, works about, and anything else that seems important. There are, at present, no non-British characters, so US reprints will have to be properly assessed in future.

2. I don't think this has ever been attempted before, but it makes sense. All those Charlie Chaplin appearances have a place in the history of comics, and it is difficult to argue that they "don't count."

3. There's a rule I have been (loosely) following since (what feels like) forever - no list should be longer than 500 lines of text. Of course, if a title has 505 issues, then it isn't worth creating an additional page for overflow, but to keep page size down, longer lists are broken down into several consecutive pages. This has had the knock-on effect of pushing the page-count up, but it is better to be comprehensive than it is to be concise.

4. No, I don't know how this fits in to the database-proper. I'm going to work it out later. One really interesting aspect of old magazines (especially from the forties and fifties) is the complexity and depth of articles. Much more interesting than any title currently in print, outdated as much of the information actually is. Many film magazines may be lightweight, but the science and technology magazines are fascinating.

5. While work done (by a great many wonderful groups) to keep books available is, indeed, admirable, popular culture has moved on a hundred and fifty years since some of their topical references were penned.

6. I don't want to jinx myself here, and also - because it was easier to do so - there are some things which are 'bundled' in one file. Before the material gets uploaded, and quickly checked one last time, I'm going to split the page contents into the dozens or hundreds of separate files. It is that kind of organisational headache.

7. Yes, cutaways get a page listing all of the images in one place. There are a significant number of non-Eagle cutaways which also require indexing, but one thing at a time...</sup>