Catalog your comic collection

Pick up a comic and open it to the indicia, the block of small print inside the front cover or at the foot of the first page. It names the publisher, the issue number, the cover date and often the printing. Cataloging a comic collection on ctlgs starts with that small print.

The comics catalog holds 55,883 comics in about 8,100 series, and one click adds any of them to your collection as a copy. The grade, the box it lives in and what you paid can wait until the comic is in your hand, or be left out altogether.

If you have never cataloged a long box before, start with the ten comics at the front of it, and find each one in the catalog.

Find the comic you actually own

Every run in the catalog is a series, and under it sit its comics, one for each printed thing you could buy. An issue, a trade paperback and an album are all comics, and the series page lists them in number order, so #2 comes before #10.

Watchmen shows how far that goes. The twelve issues DC published from 1986 are there, starting with No. 1, and so are the collections. Two of them carry the ISBN 0-930289-23-4. One is the 1987 trade paperback, listed with the twelve issues it collects, and the other is its fifteenth printing. Each has its own page, because a collector sorting a box wants to know which one is there.

Newsstand and direct copies are kept apart in the same way. Spawn #27 is in the catalog as 27A and 27B, the second being the newsstand edition. Translations have their own entries too. Le Lotus Bleu has the 1966 Casterman hardcover and the 1984 English edition, in a Tintin series of 439 entries.

So when you add a copy, add it to the comic you are holding. A variant cover or a later printing gets an entry of its own, and its Variant of field points it at the main one. Variants and limited editions explains when a difference earns that entry. A collected edition lists the issues it collects, as the 2017 Vision hardcover does for all twelve of its run, and each issue links back to it.

Record the copy

Adding a copy opens a small form you can skip and come back to. The fields are the ones a collector cares about:

• Condition, graded Mint, Near mint, Very fine, Fine, Very good, Good, Fair or Poor. Condition grading explained says what each one means.
• Notes, for anything that belongs to your copy rather than the comic: a signature, a subscription crease, a slab and its grade.
• Location, purchase price and date acquired. These three are always private, whatever privacy setting your collection has.

You can also add fields of your own to the comics catalog. A field can be a yes/no, a line of text or a list of choices, such as "Signed by". Only you see them.

Two copies are two records. A reader copy and a bagged copy of the same issue each get their own grade, and the comic's page lists both in a row you can drag into any order.

Your wantlist

Beside the collection button is a wantlist button. It sits on the comic too, so your wantlist can say you have the trade paperback and still want the twelve single issues.

Your collection page

Your collection lives at one address, across every catalog. The comics in it show as a grid of covers you can search, filter by condition or location, and sort by title, date added, date acquired or condition. It exports to CSV, with your private fields included when the collection is your own. Collections and wantlists covers the lists in full.

Shelves are separate from the collection. A shelf is a list you make and publish, in your own order, with a note on each entry, and it can hold things you do not own, such as every 2000 AD prog you are still hunting. See shelves. When you want to part with a copy, mark it for sale from the copy itself. Selling from your collection explains how.

When your comic is missing

The big Marvel and DC runs are mostly there. A later printing, a variant cover, a translation or a small-press fanzine often is not. The catalog leans European, as Comicogs did, with 709 entries in Journal de Spirou and 465 in Suske en Wiske beside the manga, strips and fanzines.

Anyone signed in can add a comic. Copy what the comic says about itself: title, volume and issue as printed, date, publisher, the writer and artist as credits with their roles, cover price and every code on it. Link it to its series, and if the series is new, type its name and create it from the same field.

The catalog came from Comicogs, and what happened to Comicogs tells that story. If you had a collection there, it can be attached to your new account. The reasoning behind all of this is in what you own, down to the copy.