So Many Graphic Novels, So Much to Manage - Inventory Part 1

I'm sure it has come up once or twice that I am into comic books. There are posts that I have written, please check them out at your leisure. Or don't, that's your call. I promise not to be offended.

The vast majority of my graphic novel collection has been purchased from my good friend @blewitt through his store. As with most collections, it started small, with a couple of stray and random books here and there. Then in November 2008, I walked into @blewitt's shop for the first time ever. I was approached in a friendly manner with no sales pressure, which struck a proper chord. I wandered about and I was impressed with what I saw. Then I spoke to the the guys and told them what I wanted.

"Every Nightwing graphic novel published up to that point."

It was an expensive venture, but I had money coming in, so I was OK with it. The books arrived, they called me, and I picked them up. Reading them was an absolute joy, as I am a fan of Grayson in any and all of his incarnations - Robin, Nightwing, secret agent, and even Batman.

After reading those, I was kinda hungry for more, so I went back in a few weeks later looking for Tim Drake as Robin.

@blewitt asked me how I was doing, how I liked the Nightwing books. I was thrilled and told him so, and how I appreciated the service and the friendliness. My request for the Robin books came out in the same basic way: "Every Tim Drake Robin book that you can get up to this point." This turned out differently, but that is not to say worse, as Robin graphic novels were more difficult to come by at the time. Still, the guys delivered and I had some Robin books to read over Christmas.

This eventually lead to having a whole buncha books, including the entire Ultimate Spider-Man line, Spider-Man: Back in Black Vol. 1 and 2 - and subsequently collecting everything Amazing Spider-Man (1963), Superior Spider-Man, and the next two series of ASM. I also took to Wolverine very readily - I grew up in the '80's and '90's, and he was pretty awesome.

Other books came into my collection, mostly the "epics" of the 1990's - Age of Apocalypse, Spider-Man's Clone Sage, the Ben Reilly Epic, the Onslaught Epic, Batman's Knightfall trilogy, and No Man's Land. I scooped up copies of DC's "Crises," as they have history and call back upon one another - Crisis on Infinite Earths, Infinite Crisis, and Final Crisis. I grabbed staples such as "Watchmen", "V for Vendetta", "The Crow". I expanded also to titles such as the stories from "Firefly" and "Heroes," as well as some "Star Wars" titles from Dark Horse and "Star Trek".

I realized my love for the "flagship" characters - Batman, Spider-Man, Superman, Wolverine - was actually overshadowed by my love for the "supporting cast" of characters. Nightwing and Robin, being the foundation of my collection, gave rise to Batgirl; Ben Reilly's Scarlet Spider and Venom came to the forefront of my interests thanks to Spidey. Eventually, my collection grew to include the families:

• Bat Family
• Superman Family
• Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends
• Wolverine and company
• Transformers

It got to the point where I was shopping one day and looking at some books, and I honestly had no idea whether or not I already had the books in my collection. By this point, I had all sorts of stuff going on, and it was getting more and more difficult to keep track of my books. I lost some books, insofar as I lent them out and forget who had them. When my friend returned them to me, I realized that I definitely needed an inventory system. Thus was born the spreadsheet.

I kept it to a static page:

I put all of the authors for a single volume into a single cell, likewise with the issues of each book that were found in each graphic novel. I eventually added the "Publisher" column, although that was somewhat unnecessary, as I was not collecting DC's Shazam/Captain Marvel nor Marvel's Carol Danvers/Captain Marvel. It became necessary when I snagged Transformers, as Marvel published the title in the '80's, and the modern era found the Cybertronians under the label of the failed Dreamwave and then IDW, lo and behold, Marvel also had a UK publishing team, and the UK stories were different from the US stories, plus the series ran far, far longer across the pond.

Something else happened that caused me to expand my system - weekly pulls. I had the income, and I decided that waiting for the stories was a massive pain, and I enjoyed going to the shop. I had to add a page for the comic books in the spreadsheet workbook. Despite having taken an advanced class on Excel during my undergrad, it had been years since I did anything with it, and I was working on a different system now - I had learned on Microsoft Office 97/XP, expanded a bit to 2003, but it was now 2009 and I was using LibreOffice (http://www.libreoffice.org). I found that LibreOffice was a bit of a nice upgrade, as the cross-platform nature and the substantially large array of rows and columns combined to make their format superior to Microsoft's. I was getting into Linux by now, and I wanted something that could be viewed properly without shifts in formats between systems.

This system worked for me for a spell, although I did try to set up a database for it using MS Access. I loved the idea of the database - queries and searches would make things far easier to find out what I was missing from my collection or what I already owned. I could set up multiple tables for graphic novels and comic books, import images of the covers of the books, maybe incorporate my regular novels and books... Endless possibilities! However... I had no way to access this when I was on the road - which is where I often needed it. I fiddled around for a spell and remembered that Excel and LibreOffice allow for grabbing information from one sheet in a workbook and "sourcing" it over to another sheet. Now this had potential for queries! I pondered the potentials of everything, but I also found that there was a problem with my organizational structure by having a single column of cells for all of the Issues and Author(s). I expanded out the cells into multiple columns - 15 of them for Issues and 20 of them for Authors, each of which have been maxed out or close only once each. Now I would be able to set each of them as individual values and I could query the whole sheet easily. Having done this, would I be able to access this from anywhere in the world?

Yes! Dropbox (http://www.dropbox.com) made this more than possible, which was convenient, and I found that there was a cloud-based storage set up by Ubuntu, the Linux OS that I was using. UbuntuOne was terrific, and I stored my spreadsheet there and I accessed it from my laptop. Still, that meant that I was traveling with my laptop every single time I was going to the comic shop.

Enter the world of Google Sheets. I had been resisting Google for some time - Firefox was my browser of choice, and I was pleased with how light-weight it was (at the time). I thought Chrome to be a bit clunky, and I was not a fan of the gigantic Google having too much insight into my life. Time changes all things, and Firefox grew to be just as clunky but without all of the advantages of Chrome. The company for which I was working at the time also allowed for freedom of browser choice, although the database(s) functioned best in Chrome. So I became a Chrome user, and I found that it was far, far better than Firefox. Google Docs soon became my bread-and-butter, and I was hooked.

Now I had the 'round-the-world access to my information that I wanted, and as of the end of January 2017, I had copied the spreadsheets from the *.ods formatted workbook onto Google Sheets. That meant a minor reworking of the formulae that I used for certain queries and calculations. I also decided to freeze header rows and leading columns on some of the sheets as needed, and to apply filters for the header rows.

My leveling up was not done, as I realized that, by using Google Forms, I could streamline my data entry when I received new books. I could not link the sheet that held the Form Responses, but I could copy-and-paste the data from that sheet into the main inventory list. OK, that was not so bad, especially because I eventually added some more columns and had to go back and fill in the relevant data for them, and that would be too much for the Form. I added barcode scanner app for my phone, and that meant that I could include the ISBN for each book; another column, and some back-tracking on the data entry. I also decided to use the database model of having a unique identifier. I had considered using the ISBN as that BookID, but when I tried sorting the spreadsheet based on that, things were a bit out of sequence. I decided on the BookID because I was sorting first by "Series Name" and then by "Title" (of the book), but that sometimes proved to be troublesome: the Batman Knightfall Trilogy and War Games Trilogy both incorporate the wording for the numbering in their titles - "War Games Act One:Outbreak", "War Games Act Two: Tides", "War Games Act Three: Endgame". Putting them in alphabetical order by Title actually puts it in this order:

• Act One
• Act Three
• Act Two

Alphabetical, yes. Sequential, no. That also made it a bit more troublesome with the "War Games" prelude and epilogue, "War Drums" and "War Crimes", respectively. I wanted them to appear in order (as much as possible), especially for groupings like this, so the BookID became vital to that role to keep the sorting first by Series name, then book Title, and ultimately keeping them clustered together.

Over the last 2 years, I have cultivated a number of Query sheets. I can now conduct the following searches:

• Issues of each series that are found in the graphic novels and the comic book tables
• Author: a cell for first name, a cell for last name, and a command to search by either one or a combination of the two using a command that links the values
• Character: a cell for heroic name, a cell for secret identity, and a command to search by either one or a combination of the two, which are separated by a "/" in each cell in the searchable range.

The Characters had to have a special separation, as there are number of characters who appear in different ways. The mantles of Spider-Man, Batman, Robin, Batgirl, Wolverine, Venom, and Scarlet Spider have all rested on the shoulders of multiple people:

• Spider-Man: Peter Parker, Miles Morales, Ben Reilly, Otto Octavius
• Batman: Bruce Wayne, Jean-Paul Valley, Dick Grayson, Terry McGinnis, Damian Wayne, Tim Drake
• Robin: Dick Grayson, Jason Todd, Tim Drake, Stephanie Brown, Damian Wayne
• Batgirl: Barbara Gordon, Helena Bertinelli, Cassandra Cain, Stephanie Brown
• Wolverine: James "Logan" Howlett, Laura Kinney
• Venom: Eddie Brock, Flash Thompson, Mac Gargan, Lee Price
• Scarlet Spider: Ben Reilly, Kaine Parker

The Secret Identities of each hero have sometimes had different monickers:

• Laura Kinney: X-23, Wolverine
• Dick Grayson: Robin, Nightwing, Batman, and as himself as a secret agent
• Ben Reilly: Scarlet Spider, Spider-Man, the Jackal
• Eddie Brock: Venom, Toxin, Anti-Venom
• Stephanie Brown: Spoiler, Robin, Batgirl
• Barbara Gordon: Batgirl, Oracle

So I broke that search down into parts based on either the Secret Identity or the hero name, or a combination of the two. Perhaps I want to see how many different books "Batman" appears in, regardless of who is wearing the cowl; or take the case of Bruce Wayne who is Batman and appears in "Batman Beyond" only as himself; or I am looking specifically for, say, "Wolverine" and "Laura Kinney". It works nicely to help filter out the results.

I also created a single sheet that compiles information and updates itself "live" as more information is added:

• The # times a Character appears in different books
• The # of books in each Series
• The # of books written by each Author
• The # of Trade Paperbacks (TPB) and Hard Cover (HC) books
• Some other fun numbers for analysis
  

Lastly, I have a breakdown of all of the books based on the Publishers. Boy, am I glad I added that column! Now I have a count of exactly how many books I own from each publisher, which Series is the biggest title for each Publisher and how many books in each Series I own. There are also percentages, because I do like me some numbers.

Also, all of that bold and colorful text is not just for show - I used conditional formatting for each cell that relies on the values of other cells or of formulae that relates these other cells. This means that if there is any sort of mathematical error, then the cells will lose their formatting, so I can see if something is not right at a glance.

I made a copy of the Inventory spreadsheet and then cleared out my information from it so that I have a blank form that can be filled in and will spit out the values automatically. If you are interested, please let me know. I've had a ton of fun in the process of making this inventory "database" and I really do enjoy tweaking it to see what else I can make it do. Having the pie chart of the Publishers is a nice visual, considering especially that the other groupings of data are far too massive to really have an effective chart or graph to go with it.

And there you have it! I'll have a follow-up soon regarding the actual formulae that I used to make the queries and the lists happen. Stay tuned til then!