Comic Books

Scott Peterson: Split

2008-07-25T18:57:13.0017Z

I don't think this particular Scott Peterson is a TV Writer.

Comic Books: Annuals: Stand-Alone Series or Special Issue

2008-07-07T11:41:41.0005Z

Should Annuals (Like Superman/Batman Annual or Sensational Spider-Man Annual) be listed as separate series or under the corresponding series with a special issue number?

Comic Books: Variant Covers

2008-07-06T17:19:29.0005Z

Is there a means of cataloging variant covers in the current system?

Comic Books: Multiple Cover Prices

2008-07-06T14:52:45.0005Z

Would it be possibly to allow more than one cover price on the Comic Book Issue type? I'm looking at my collection of The Spirit and they all have separate US and Canadian prices.

New York: I agree with deletion request

2008-07-03T02:38:41.0006Z

Officially the article should be "New York" or perhaps "The City of New York" but not New York, New York

New York: The Official Name Is...

2008-06-20T17:13:59.0012Z

And Sting’s official name is Gordon Sumner.
We have discussed the notion of adding an “official name” or ”legal name” property to some topics, but for now, the display name of a topic should be its most commonly-used name. In particular, cities show up in address information frequently; no one addresses mail to The City of New York, NY 10021. I am changing it back and adding T.C.O.N.Y. as an alias.
Your point about verification is a good one. However, this open model seems to work acceptably for Wikipedia, and with our finer granularity of assertions and login requirement, we have better means for detecting and undoing abusive usage patterns. As with Wikipedia, I would encourage you to watch (subscribe to the RSS feed of) topics that particularly interest you.
Another approach used by some of our users is to perform QA on the topics of interest and note the last-known-good timestamp. Queries via the API can then be scoped to only return information older than the last QA check.
Thanks again for your many contributions.

New York: The Official Name Is...

2008-06-20T14:35:18.0006Z

The City Of New York not "New York." New York is an "aka." But I'm not going to change it back and forth every other day. This is the only thing I don't like about Freebase. Anyone can just come in here and change the information abd screw up the API.

I really think Freebase should look at verifying information or utilize editors to approve changes before they go live. I'd hate to see all my hard work replaced with bogus information.

New York: Don't merge with state of New York

2008-06-20T09:58:56.0000Z

Absolutely do not merge this topic with the state.

New York: Don't merge with state of New York

2008-06-20T03:42:20.0019Z

The state and the city should not be conflated.

The Mask: Split character and comic book

2008-06-13T21:58:17.0012Z

Wikipedia is conflated.

Comic Books: New type: Graphic Novel

2008-05-31T03:33:34.0029Z

Concerning the story continuation across different media (i.e. comic book series continued in a graphic novel), what about bigger media jumps, i.e. Firefly TV show -> Serenity: Those Left Behind comic book mini series -> Serenity movie -> Serenity: Better Days comic book mini series?

As it's unlikely something like this can be precisely modeled, I think the best we can do is to have an encompassing type that would facilitate finding story incarnations across different media.

For this I created a Media Franchise/Media Property type. Spider-man would be an example that spans all media: movies, MTV animated series, the upcoming Broadway musical, movie novelizations, comic books (obviously), OGNs, computer games, and movie soundtracks.

Comic Books: New type: Graphic Novel

2008-05-31T02:44:11.0000Z

>If CBC doesn't include GN, how would the continues/continued by properties work for series where there are both collections and original graphic novels?

That's a good question and an argument for reusing the GN type. Is it possible to have a property that has more than one expected type?

>Does the property "stories collected" really belong?

I think so. Comic Book Story (CBS) type has no publishing implications. Just like a comic book issue consists of one or more comic book stories (some of which might not be original), an OGN also consists of one (in which case CBS can be left blank) or more CBSs. Some examples of latter are Fables: 1001 Nights of Snowfall -- of an OGN with multiple original stories by one writer but different artists, and anthologies like Flight with multiple original stories by various authors.

If a book has both previously published comic book issues and new original stories, I would classify it as a comic book [issue] collection. Some Hellboy volumes exemplify this.

Comic Books: New type Comic Book Collection

2008-05-31T02:17:11.0013Z

>typelibrarian

Thanks for the input. I agree about the CBC writer. As for the editor properties, I could go either way, but it never hurts it include more properties as someone might use them.

Comic Books: New type: Graphic Novel

2008-05-30T23:43:46.0008Z

I'm not sure I have any answers, but I have lots of questions. (O Joy.)

If CBC doesn't include GN, how would the continues/continued by properties work for series where there are both collections and original graphic novels? (I think both Gaiman's Sandman and Carla Speed McNeil's Finder fit this description.) On the other hand, I'm not crazy about using a boolean for something like that -- I prefer to use the type system if at all possible.

Other thoughts on the GN type:

Does the property "stories collected" really belong? If it's an original graphic novel, doesn't that imply all new material? Otherwise, isn't it just a collection?

Comic Books: New type Comic Book Collection

2008-05-30T23:30:27.0000Z

In terms of editor, I'd say that if the level of precision is valuable, then we should keep the CBC properties. But if we only care about the primary editor, or don't mind lumping all editors together, we could use the property from Written Work.

For writers, I guess the advantage to the denormalization is that "comic book collections written" is more specific than the "works written" property on Author. Chances are, CBCs will end up with values in both properties, which would not be wrong, and is not necessarily bad.

Comic Books: New type: Graphic Novel

2008-05-30T07:12:30.0000Z

If graphic novel (GN) type was included in the CBC type, the GN could have a property 'Original' which would be true for original graphic novels (OGNs) and false for comic book collections. This would work with freebase API, but the keyword search would still be a problem: if you just want to browse the OGNs, the CBCs which are more numerous would pollute the search results.

Comic Books: New type Comic Book Collection

2008-05-30T06:59:18.0009Z

I guess the Book type Editor property might be reused too, depending on how precise we want to be at the collection level. Some comics credit Editor, Assistant Editor, Senior Editor, and Editor in Chief, but it's not that precise at a comic book issue level either.

Comic Books: New type Comic Book Collection

2008-05-30T06:51:02.0007Z

I removed the CBC publisher, and also removed the collection cover artist, as different editions might have covers done by different artists. I still think the CBC writer might be good to keep, especially if the comic book writer had a 'Comic Book Collections written' property which would be automatically linked to collections.

Comic Books: New type Comic Book Collection

2008-05-30T00:16:39.0007Z

I definitely think that publisher should be removed, since it's properly a property of book editions, not books (Jeff Smith's Bone collections, for example, have been published by at least three different publishers). I'm not 100% sure about writer and cover artist. I'm starting to think that these properties are not that different for comic collections than for other types of books. For example, visual artists will probably be listed as authors of monographs; newspaper comic collections will have the writer as author and illustrator as cover artist. I could be convinced the other way, though. (I'll take a look at Graphic Novel tomorrow.)

Comic Books: New type: Graphic Novel

2008-05-29T08:08:05.0012Z

I'm creating a new type Graphic Novel. It will be very similar to the Comic Book Collection (CBC) type except it won't have the following properties:

Series Collected
Issues Collected
First Issue Collected
Last Issue Collected
Number of Issues
Collection Cover Artist

Should I leave the CBC type as stand-alone or include the graphic novel type and just add the additional properties listed above? If latter, how would a user search for graphic novels only and not get comic book collections too?

Comic Books: New type Comic Book Collection

2008-05-29T07:39:54.0007Z

I ended up including the Book type in the Comic Book Collection (CBC) type. Both TPBs and hard cover volumes can be modeled through its Editions property. This would also work better for data import: i.e. Amazon has Punisher War Journal Vol. 1: Civil War as hardcover and links to the TPB edition.

Do you agree that Comic Book Writer, Comic Book Cover Artist, and Comic Book Publisher should not be removed from the CBC type even hough they map to more general Writer, Illustrator, and Publisher properties? The users can add comic book specific data after data imports that prepopulate general properties.

Comic Books: New type Comic Book Collection

2008-05-23T17:40:38.0000Z

I think including the Book Edition type is probably the best solution. And I really think only a few properties don't apply to comic book collections. TPBs and graphic novels are, after all, published like books, and have ISBNs and Dewey classifications and all that stuff. Audio reader is obviously not applicable, and the cover artist and illustrator properties are less precise than we would want for comics; contributing author is about as wrong for comics as it is for everything else -- it's there only for when we don't know more specific data.

(You did, however, just give me a very scary thought. It would not be wrong to model comic book issues using an abstraction/instance model, although it would probably only apply to the cover art in most instances, since variant covers tend to come in and out of fashion. And every once in a while, single issues are reissued, like for Free Comics Day. Not that I really want to do this -- it just occured to me that it would be possible.)

Comic Books: New type Comic Book Collection

2008-05-22T07:17:20.0007Z

Comic Book Collection does resemble a book edition, but it's not really an instance of abstract written work. And it's definitely not an abstract book/written work.

After all, a comic book issue is a written work in some sense, but we don't have an abstract comic book issue and then an actual published comic book issue.

I think there's too many properties not directly applicable to comic books. But I see your point about importing book data, so maybe inherit the book edition and live with the differences?

Comic Books: New type Comic Book Collection

2008-05-21T23:49:23.0007Z

I think this is an interesting type, and it has some potential. I'm concerned about its overlap with the types book, book edition, and written work, though. I think it would be good to take out the properties that are duplicated from those types, and get them via including the other types. Before we could do this, though, we'd have to figure out whether comic book collections are books or book editions. The difference is that the topic with the types Book and Written work is for the abstract notion of the work, and contains information that is always true about the work, no matter how it's published -- author, copyright date, genre, etc. Book edition is used for specific publications of the book, and has properties for publisher, publication date, etc.

Comic book collection has properties that correspond to both the abstract and specific notions, so we'd need to figure out where they went.

I want to reconcile the two schemata because we're ultimately going to be getting a lot of book data from various sources, and comic collections/TPBs/graphic novels will almost certainly be included with some of that data, and I'd like to avoid duplication.

But I do like the specificity of contents and contributions that this provides, which is more specific than the contents model in the publishing domain. We could do issues and stories collected using that model, but the roles would have to be less specific (author, editor, interior illustrator, cover artist).

Comic Books: New type Comic Book Collection

2008-05-21T08:14:22.0005Z

I created a new type Comic Book Collection and populated all Fables TPBs data. Let me know what you think.

If the type is useful enough, what's the process of adding it to the official comics domain? If it gets added there, do I still have some control over it or do further changes need to go through review?

Thanks

Comic Book Fictional Universe: New property Comic Book Series Set Here?

2008-05-18T05:51:30.0012Z

Could you please add a new property Comic Book Series Set Here? For example, the Fables universe would have 2 values there: Fables, and Jack of Fables.

Thanks

Comic Books: Linking Story to Issues

2008-05-13T18:55:11.0007Z

Ah, sorry. Didn't realize printing was a compound value. Thanks.

Comic Books: Linking Story to Issues

2008-05-13T17:18:19.0007Z

The properties "contents" (on "comic book issue") and "appeared in" (on "comic book story") are for that purpose.

Comic Books: Linking Story to Issues

2008-05-13T12:06:43.0012Z

Could we add a property that links Comic Book Story to Comic Book Issue?

Ethiopia: Somaliland

2008-05-07T22:57:43.0015Z

That raises an interesting question: does a place have to be recognized in order to border something? If we agree that it does have to be, then we cannot assert that Somiland borders anything (except possibly Puntland, which seems to be in a similarly unrecognized state), which seems sort of counter-intuitive to me. I'd suggest that Ethiopia borders both Somalia and Somaliland, even though the two might be mutually-exclusive constructs.

Ethiopia: Somaliland

2008-05-07T22:13:44.0008Z

I removed Somaliland from 'adjoins' in location because it's not fully internationally recognised.

New York: Merge

2008-01-09T20:22:36.0005Z

Duplicate instance with no data

Batman: Renamed from "Batman"

2007-12-28T18:44:27.0000Z

I agree with Faye that the superhero articles should not be renamed to their alter-egos' names. If the intent of the "primary identity" type is that it should be used for the non-super identity (e.g. Bruce Wayne), then it should be applied to the article for Bruce Wayne, and the "alternate identity" type be applied to the Batman topic. If no Bruce Wayne topic exists, it should be created as a primary identity.

Batman: Renamed from "Batman"

2007-12-22T02:01:53.0012Z

I really think this article is more appropriately named "Batman" than the renamed "Bruce Wayne". The article is more concerned with Batman as a character than Bruce Wayne. I see that the article for "Superman" has been renamed to "Clark Kent" as well. Only the Spider-man article retains its original name instead of being renamed to "Peter Parker".

I'm really curious: Why the name change? The thing is, more people think of them as the superhero identies than their more "normal" alter egos. For example, would you talk about the latest Batman movie or the latest Bruce Wayne movie? Are you a fan of the Superman comics or the Clark Kent comics? Is your little brother/cousin/son dressing up as Spider-man or Peter Park for Holloween? It also affects search because the way I see it, more people would search for "superman" than "clark kent", and if there's only one article for Batman/Bruce Wayne, shouldn't we keep the name "Batman"?

Speaking of only having one topics for these heroes with hidden identities, maybe it's time to consider splitting up the superheroes from their everyday alter egos as separate topics, especially if we want to use types like Primary Identity to link them to topics for alternate identities.

The Tick: No need to split

2007-12-13T05:21:05.0000Z

Hi duck1123,

I've removed the mark for split flag. Thanks for the cleanup effort!

The Tick: No need to split

2007-12-12T23:37:04.0012Z

I have cleaned up the incompatible co-typing. There is no longer a need to split this entry.

Comic Book Series: Include periodical

2007-12-12T16:11:15.0005Z

Since in almost all situations, a comic book series could also be considered a periodical, it should be added as an included type. This would allow us to remove many of the redundant properties from comic book series as well as having aditional information not currently available to comic book series. (such as publication frequency)

Comic Books: comic book artist?

2007-11-19T18:17:13.0007Z

"Comic book creator" exists as a profession already, which includes both artists and writers. You could use that, or create a new topic.

Comic Books: comic book artist?

2007-11-16T07:21:44.0007Z

I ask because I wanted to give a fictional person that as a profession in his fictional universe...but I couldn't find any such profession as general as a comic book artist.

Comic Books: comic book artist?

2007-11-13T17:18:43.0000Z

You mean "only does art" as opposed to someone who also writes? Sure -- there are lots of them. If you mean someone who exclusively does pencils, probably only on a per-project basis.

William Shakespeare: Shakespeare is not a Location, Film Character, or TV Character!

2007-11-12T20:31:05.0012Z

Hi, I've removed the Location type from this topic and I see that Gordon has done the same with various fictional character types that were added to Shakespeare. At the risk of sounding silly, may I just say that people are never Locations. Real people, alive or deceased, should not be typed Film Character, TV Character or any other fictional character types.

The correct way to model a "Shakespeare" character in a film or TV show is to create a Fictional Character with the same name, link it to the fictional work that applies, then indicate the name of the real person based on whom the character was designed in the "Based on" property of Fictional Character. The real Bard himself (along with other people who exist or existed), on the other hand, should be typed Person Or Being in Fiction instead.

Comic Books: comic book artist?

2007-11-09T04:22:19.0012Z

is there such a thing these days as a comic book artist? (that is, someone who only does the art) inker and colorer are way too specific for what i have in mind.

Comic Book Character: A couple suggestions

2007-09-23T22:53:56.0007Z

I'd be eager to see these all shaped up. How many instances do we have of these redundant properties?

Comic Book Story: "Story Arc" versus "Story"

2007-09-18T05:37:08.0000Z

I've created my own types as an experiment. I made "Comic Book Work" to represent a story with a single set of creators, which might be a graphic novel, or a sequence of issues. A Comic Book Work has a list of Contributions from people. I also created a "Comic Book Contribution" which is a pair consisting of: (Role: of type profession) (Contributor: of type Person) and (Notes: of type text). A Comic Book Work can also have a reference to a "Comic Book Series" if it occurs as part of an ongoing series (it doesn't have to). I'm not sure other people can see my types and data. I've tried to open it up. Can other people see the types, and the data I entered? http://www.freebase.com/view/domain/user/quenelle/default_domain

New York: I agree with deletion request

2007-08-26T16:08:00.0012Z

This should be deleted as there is already a New York, New York topic started by mw

Comic Book Character: A couple suggestions

2007-08-23T21:16:44.0007Z

Actually to clarify: adding an included type does not fix the problem of redundant properties. In fact it forces the issue by guaranteeing that the topic has both of those types. Fixing it will require adding the included type, migrating the existing values, and then removing the property from the type. So it will take a little bit of time and effort.

Comic Book Character: A couple suggestions

2007-08-23T19:15:39.0000Z

Thanks Dan,

I'm right there with you on the foes and allies properties. Also, I'll shuffle some things around a bit to get it to fit well with fictional characters and go ahead and and the included type.

Tristan

Comic Book Story: "Story Arc" versus "Story"

2007-08-23T06:31:48.0053Z

At the risk of belaboring this a bit, I have to say that I agree with quenelle since I'm running into many of the same problems as him.

For example, I'm trying to figure out how to enter Batman: A Death in the Family into the KB, a story arc containing four issues. I'd like to enter the artists, the writers, and the 4 prominent characters involved in the story. The way it is currently modeled though, instead of 8 people I would have to enter 32. It also requires adding 4 individual story components, on top of the 4 issues that I would otherwise enter, presumably linking the correct image from the corresponding issue for each. It is a lot of extra work for adding a single story-arc.

Most storylines in comics these days seem to last for multiple issues, all with the same artists and characters. I'm happy to help you guys out by entering some of the information I enjoy, but this level of repetitious entry quickly becomes tedious and isn't something I can imagine myself or others doing. It seems to me that if you depend on voluntary user input, that it should be crucially important to keep things simple for the user to enter.

I'm not quite sure I follow your point on optional properties making queries difficult. So perhaps that's part of my problem. I'm new to freebase but it's rare that I see a topic with all of its properties filled in. It also seems to me that the current representation would cause the same sorts of problems with a query by page or issue. On top of that, it would create unnecessary specification for queries by artist or character, which I imagine would be more common. For example, I imagine a user querying for stories involving the Joker would prefer to see "A Death in the Family" rather than "A Death in the Family, Pt. 1", "A Death in the Family, Pt. 2", etc., especially since the latter could have been retrieved from a query over issues rather than stories. Maybe you can give a specific example of a query that would cause problems under quenelle's suggestion but not under the current implementation? That would help me understand.

I do recognize that some large arcs/crossovers can involve multiple artists, characters, and plot-lines. (eg Marvel's Infinity War, DC's Knightfall). But given the trade-offs, it makes more sense to me to implement that either with a new "cross-over story" type or maybe even with some transitive relation allowing stories to contain other stories. Knightfall is a particularly horrifying example since it is an umbrella title for the four sub-story-arcs Knightfall, Kinghtquest, KnightsEnd, and the Aftermath, containing 73 individual issues in all.

Just so we're on the same page, the way I envision quenelle's suggestion working is with a multiple-value property called something like "Told In", where each value could contain an issue and optionally, a starting and ending page. (Could also do it with separate properties for Issues and Pages but that would probably just complicate things).

Looking forward to your response.

Comic Book Character: A couple suggestions

2007-08-23T03:06:10.0012Z

Thanks for all the new comic book types, Tristan! I'll definitely be spending a lot of time using these.

One suggestion I have though is to make "Fictional Character" be one of the included types for "Comic Book Character". You'll see that "TV Character" and "Film Character" for example, did the same thing. That way we don't get multiple properties for Creator and Universes when it's listed as both types (which it pretty much always should be).

I'd also like to suggest including a property for a character's traditional foes, and maybe for the traditional allies as well.

Thanks again for the great work!
Dan

Comic Book Story: "Story Arc" versus "Story"

2007-08-07T19:05:53.0007Z

I think you need to connect the writers and artists to the individual story, because you can very easily have arcs which encompass the work of many artists and writers.

In this sort of modeling I've tried to use the finest grain detail necessary for the vast majority of situations. Our current model does make more work from a data entry standpoint (though we have autocomplete, so that helps), but the way your proposing I think makes it far too difficult to query.

We will most likely have loading from spreadsheets at some point in the future (we have internal tools now that are just too dangerous for the outside world). So if you want to use spreadsheets, we could probably load it.