Credits: Print vs Digital

It’s been a while since we’ve updated the blog about our progress this project. Despite the pandemic - or, in many ways, because of it - we are actually ahead of schedule at this point. Back in March we hired three dozen additional research assistants to work on counting the panels of every comic book in the corpus, and that data has now been collected (although not input into the database, so we can’t begin analyzing it yet). WIth that task completed, we moved on to counting the words in all of those panels, and we hope to have that data finished by the end of the calendar year - although it, too, will need to wait a bit before going into the database.

In the meanwhile, Bart spent most of the first half of 2020 fighting to process the RA invoices (an amazing tale, full of administrative hurdles, tax forms, and supplier IDs). When he wasn’t working on that, he was fairly mindlessly entering all of the creator credits into the database. We’re just at the point now where we can begin to do some preliminary analysis - and we’ll share some of that over the next couple of weeks.

Today, a word about credits in print and digital.

We have mentioned previously that we are fortunate that we have physical copies of every single comic book in our corpus. While there are legal scans of many of the books in our corpus on sites like ComicBookPlus, these are sometimes incomplete, so it is necessary that we have our own copy. There are scans of many of our more recent books on sites we won’t link to, but these have their own challenges.

Take, for example, this scan of our corpus book #2840 (Exiles #55 (2005)).

Flipping through a scan, we found no creator credits, but, this being a 2005 Marvel comic, that seemed highly unlikely. Turning to our physical copy, however, we found a full set of credits (albeit a fairly complex one, as artist and writer roles are not distinguished, rather there is a joint author credit signified by the “By”)

What happened to those credits? I’m not sure, because I don’t know the source of this scan (is a pirate edition? a publisher-produced edition?). You can see that the credits haven’t been dropped in yet. The scroll effect is outlined here, and it will cover part of the drawing of a ship, but this page wasn’t final at the time it hit the web.

Moreover, as you can see below, the title of the story (which we are also indexing) has been eradicated in a way that suggests an unskilled worker with a copy of Adobe:

Of course, this isn’t a one-off. There are dozens of examples of this phenomenon out there relating to our corpus books.

Our takeaway? A scan of the comic book (whether by the publisher or by pirates) is not the comic book. Always, always check the comic book.