Tag: Comic Books

ComicBase

With my comic book collection growing a bit out of control, I needed something to track all the issues I’ve got and, more importantly, the issues I still need. It’s not perfect, but ComicBase was the most full-featured, complete comic book collection tracking system I could find.

The main drawback with ComicBase is the price. On the one hand, they do offer a relatively low-cost ComicBase Express version for $39.95. For that price you get a fairly slick interface to the program’s database of several hundred thousand comic books, plus free database updates for a year. From my usage of it so far, the database is fairly exhaustive (a bit too exhaustive sometimes for those of us who could care less about crap like variant covers — but if that’s your thing, this is your program).

Unfortunately, the main difference between the Express and the Professional version — aside from the Professional version being $129 — is that the Express version lacks most of the export features. You have to upgrade to or buy the Professional version if you want to export your comic book collection as a text or HTML file, or transfer your collection to Pocket PC/Palm-based platforms.

I’ll probably spring for the professional version at some point just for the HTML export, but that’s a lot of extra money for such a basic feature.

Comic Book Reading Software

I wish there were a comic book reading program for Windows as slick as Comic Book Lover which, alas, is strictly OS X.

For Windows users, the choices boil down to Comical, CDDisplay, or PyComicsViewer (which requires Python to be installed).

For the most part, I use CDDIsplay which is great for what it does, but once you’ve got 20,000-30,000 comics on your hard drive, organizing and managing them becomes a major issue.

Comic Book Lover solves that problem by creating an iTunes-like interface for tracking comic books and attaching metadata to help organize them,

Once you’ve got the metadata about the comics entered, then Comic Book Lover lets you create lists and smart lists of different comic books. Show me all of my Avenger’s comics in which Vision appears. Or compile lists, of say, all Identity Crisis-related books.

Somebody please create something halfway as usable as this for Windows.

Smallville Hit By Copyright Kryptonite

Brian Cronin does an excellent job of explaining the very odd legal situation that DC Comics has found itself in over the copyright to the Superboy character.

DC owns the copyrights and trademarks to Superman, Clark Kent and the other characters created and derived from Jerry Siegel and Joel Schuster’s famous creation.

But a funny thing happened to Superboy — in 1976 the U.S. Congress extended the term of copyrights from 28 years to 47 years. It also made provisions so that copyright transfers originally made for 28 years could be cancelled after that period and the additional 19 years could revert to the original owner.

Suppose, for example, that you created a character in 1948 and transferred the copyright for what then would have been 28 years — i.e., the copyright would have expired in 1976. Under the new provision, you could file to regain the copyright in 1976 and decide who to sell the remaining 19 years of copyright protection to.

In 1947, a judge ruled that Jerry Siegel was the sole owner of Superboy, who had first appeared in comics in 1943. In 1948, Siegel and Shuster signed away all their Superman-related rights, including Superboy, to DC for $100,000.

In 2002, however, citing the provisions of the 1976 copyright provision, Siegel’s estate informed Time Warner, which owns DC, that it was reclaiming its right to Superboy.

Unfortunately for DC, it now has a hit show called Smallville which focuses on a young Superman. What a trial court will now have to decide is whether or not Smallville is a series about Superboy, as the Siegel estate contends, or a young Clark Kent, as DC and Time Warner contend.

And the situation is even more complex, since DC and Time Warner are the sole owners to the Superboy trademark, meaning no one could market Superboy-related comics or other media without DC’s approval.

What a weird mess, and frankly one that DC deserves given the shabby way it treated Siegel and Shuster for creating characters that made the company literally hundreds of millions of dollars.

Source:

Judge Says Siegels Own Superboy. Will It Affect “Smallville”. Brian Cronin, ComicBookResources.Com, April 6, 2006.

Next up for Marvel: 40 Years of the Avengers DVD-ROM

The other day I was wondering what Marvel would follow-up its 40 Years of the X-Men DVD-ROM with, and it turns out my speculation was right. The latest issue of Previews has a listing for a 40 Years of The Avengers DVD-ROM that will “collect over 535 complete Avengers comics spanning September 1963 through December 2005. Scheduled to ship in April 2006.” Suggested retail price is $49.95.

40 Years of X-Men on DVD-ROM

The other day I finally picked up the 40 Years of X-Men DVD-ROM at the local comic book store. That’s 480 issues of X-Men/Uncanny X-Men (the first series) from 1965 through 2005.

Like the previous offerings of Spider-Man and The Fantastic Four, all of the comics are scans of actual comics in PDF format. There is some lite-DRM in that you have to use Acrobat 6.0 or great to view these properly and when you print them, there is a watermark added to the printout. As with the Spider-Man and FF collections, however, it is easy enough to just use a screen capture utility to get high quality color print-outs without the watermark.

For $50, a package like this is just too good to pass up, though it is not quite as useful as the Spider-Man or Fantastic Four editions since the best years of the X-Men series often involved stories that spanned across multiple different X-Men related comic book titles.

No word yet that I’ve seen on if there’s going to be another in this series or, if so, what it might be. Avengers Assemble?