Site Update: Unsorted

January 20, 2008

This weekend, as an experiment, I decided to go through this past week's stack of unsorted comics. These are comics which Diamond doesn't provide publisher names. For the mainstream publishers (Marvel, DC, Dark Horse, Image, and IDW) an automatic script gathers information from their respective web sites and dumps it into ComicScout. But smaller publishers are out of luck. For the week of January 16, this comprises 80 books.

Tracking the books down was quite difficult. One of them I couldn't find online for the life of me. It seems like they don't go out of their way to publicize their product. The publisher web sites I could find varied in quality. Virgin Comics' all flash site is useless for my purposes. They should consider an all HTML site for scrapers like me who'd love nothing more than to give them free advertising.

Along with the Archie Comics and Fantagraphics, there's an abundance of furry comics and yaoi, homosexual romance manga marketed to females (which is apparently becoming very popular). Only a handful of these 80 books were outright pornographic.

Although the majority were either not-to-my-tastes or low-quality, I found a couple books I might give a shot. Papercutz production quality looks pretty slick and although I've never been a big manga fan (Joe Mad not withstanding) some of it looked better drawn than I remember.

Will I be continuing this indy comic effort? On one hand, I added over 120 new creators. On the other, the whole thing probably took me over 6 hours. If Diamond, at the very least, provided the publisher names with each comic on their shipping list, it would cut that time in half. What do you think?

Comments

  • MarcSummers 10 months ago

    Aside from a handful, most of those books are pretty crappy. It's kind of sad. The indy scene used to be a lot more exciting.

  • slvrnblk 10 months ago

    I don't know. I enjoy a bunch of books from Oni, Virgin, Boom!, Archaia, Aspen, Devils Due, Dynamite, Red 5 and the rest. Mainstream (Marvel, DC) seem to be same old same old. I do not understand the fascination with Manga. How do you tell the characters apart? They are all drawn the same! Art is half if not more of the story for me. Oh well no accounting for taste,

  • unicron 10 months ago

    I like it. Virgin's Dan Dare is now the #6 most scouted book. There is interest in these so called obscure titles.

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