Which was unfortunate, because the Marvel’s documentation and API seemed pretty decent. The upshot of this exploratory work was that I had to abandon the idea of using the Marvel API and look elsewhere. No Marvel Presents, which is why I’d come up empty in my first searches no Marvel Treasury Editions, which were oversized books that sold for the princely sum of $1.50 each fewer Giant-Sizes and Annuals than I remember and no reprint titles, like Marvel Tales and Marvel’s Greatest Comics, either. There was plenty there-around 20 issues per month-but there was plenty missing, too. To confirm this, I wrote a short script to get the titles and issue numbers for everything Marvel published over a three-month period in 1975. Eventually, I tried searching for things other than Marvel Presents, and when I got hits on those searches, the unfortunate truth dawned on me: the Marvel database is missing lots of issues, at least from “my” era. This is not uncommon when trying out a new API, so I figured the problem was with me and kept at it. Every search I tried returned an empty JSON structure. With my issues of Marvel Presents at my side, I started exploring.Īnd got nothing. Although I intended to write scripts to do all the searching, I started off using the interactive tester to make sure I understood the API. Marvel has an interactive API tester with documentation that lets you try out calls to collect info on series, creators, series, and individual comics. So my initial plan was to work through my collection and use the Marvel Developer Portal to gather all the publication information and credits for each issue through the Marvel API. I knew I had a handful (four, as it turned out) of non-Marvel titles, including a Jack Kirby Sandman, but my database wouldn’t need too much adjustment if I initially treated it as 100% Marvel. 2Īs for the nature of my collection, it’s basically all Marvel. This turned out to be a significant underestimate, probably because the books in the box are squeezed more tightly together by the weight of the overburden. So maybe 250–300 comic books in my collection. Measuring the height of that stack led me to guess that the density of the box was about 10–12 issues per inch of height.
Back when one of the Guardians of the Galaxy movies came out, I had pulled several issues of Defenders and Marvel Presents 1 out of the box, and they were still stacked on a bookshelf. I’ll describe those scripts in a later post, but here I want to talk in more general terms about the overall process, the obstacles I encountered, and the dead-end paths I traveled down.įirst, let’s talk about the size and nature of my collection. Until this past week, when I took advantage of the usual holiday slowdown at work to sit my butt down at my computer and build-at the age of 58-a database of my teenaged purchases.Īs you might expect, my work consisted mostly of writing little scripts that collected, organized, and assembled the data. The answer, of course, was yes, that would be nice but turning that answer into a database required an effort I was never able to muster. Wouldn’t it be nice, I asked myself, to have not simply a list of titles and issue numbers-which I had written on sheets of paper or index cards-but a real comprehensive catalog of artists, writers, and storylines? It’s a question I’ve continued to ask myself off and on over the ensuing 30+ years. In the mid-80s, I bought a computer, and my thoughts turned to making a database of my comics. They all went into a single box that I have managed to maintain and keep with me for the past 40 years. In the late 70s, when I went away to college, I bought the then-obligatory stereo system with big speakers that came in boxes, 12″×14″×25″ high-the perfect size for storing my comics. What I really did was buy and read comic books, which I then stacked up on bookshelves or other flat surfaces. Next post Previous post Building a comic book inventoryįor a couple of years in the mid-70s, I collected comic books.
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