ISFDB talk:Comics Cleanup

Comics: in or out?

Is Neil Gaiman's work in or out? I ask because Sandman has been arranged into a series; does that mean that a decision has been made to include it? He has prose works which belong in here, definitely, but he's best known for the comics. And what about SF works by SF authors in comic form, like David Brin's The Life Eaters? Given that Neil Gaiman writes a significant amount of fantasy (American Gods, Anansi Boys), does that put Sandman back in? grendel|khan 23:11, 21 May 2006 (CDT)

Good questions, all of them. The main reason why we decided to stay away from comicdom -- if I remember my last exchange with Al on the subject correctly -- was that the ISFDB is not well designed to support comic book information. I don't think there is any harm in leaving comic books/graphic novels written by major SF figures in the database, but we will need more definite guidelines. Ahasuerus 23:16, 21 May 2006 (CDT)

Right now publication records only support the idea of authors and artists as contributors (with authors overloaded as editors for magazines and anthologies). There has been interest expresed in tracking the editors for records like novels. At some point it would be interesting to come up with a structure for contributors to a work such that editors, illustrators, and narrators of audio versions could be tracked. Once that is in place, then we could track things like comics, where there are numerous contributors with specific job titles to a particular work. That's at least a year out.

At a minimum, if we're going to track comics or graphic novels, there needs to be explicit support so that they're not listed as novels. Alvonruff 05:08, 22 May 2006 (CDT)