Talk:Legion Publication History/1958-1964

quibbles & bits

I've been away for a bit. Heavy workload and a death in the family. Anyway, I wanted to voice a few thoughts on the publication history pages. First, let me say how amazing the pages look overall. I really appreciate the work you guys have put into them. So, I am not necessarily saying anything is "wrong" per se, I'm just voicing a few I-might\-have-done-it-differently quibbles. If a few of these stick to the wall, great. If not, no bigs.

1) Originally, I wanted it all on one big page. I was not only wrong, I've now swung completely to the other direction. I think some of the pages need to be broken up even further, perhaps into 5 year segments i.e. 1950-1960, 1961-1965, 1966-1970, 1971-1975, 1976-1980, 1981-1985, 1986-1990, 1991-1995, 1996-2000, 2001-2005, 2006- I know that does not fall with making the pages start and end with "eras" but you guys have done a nice job of color-coding the years on each page. At any rate, I think the 70s and the 80s are will each have too much data on one page.

2) I do concur with whoever said leave all DC reprints, AR, elseworlds on these lists and then duplicate them on other individualized lists, for people who only want to look at that stuff. I do think other publisher parodies and easter eggs can just be on the AR list and not duplicated on this one.

3) I like the shading for AR, eleworld and reprint issues. However, I notice that while my browser at work picks up the light orange and light pink of AR and Elseworlds ok, on my home PC they look nearly identical. I'd suggest shifting one or the other to something more blue, or green.

4) I believe listing books publication data, instead of cover date, is the wrong way to go. We can only aproximate the publication date for a lot of books, and the format seems inconsistant with hobby standards of listing things by cover date. Don't get me wrong, I think the publication date is useful information, I just think cover date should be the default for how to list and search for individual books.

5) I also think listing the date over the cover image and next to the issue title is redundent. No need to duplicate info that close together, I think. I'd lose the month in the image column and just leave it listed next to the issue title.

6) I like the horizontal "years on this page" on the 1950-1964 page. I think links by year is sufficient. Later in the list there are tables in a vertical format linking year and month. Not sure if that was an early placeholder of sorts, or an alternate version fighting a Darwinian battle of supremecy. I'm new to wiki still, but I suspect that's how things happen, and competing ways of formating data competes in a digital survival of the fittest. Anyway, I like horizontal, just years format best.

7) I think listing the entire creative team for each issue is too much information for the purposes of this list. My belief, for whatever it's worth, is that this should be a sort of superhighway down the middle of the wiki. Lots and lots of offramps, but maybe not a lot to see, just enough to wet one's appetite. I believe giving users a general what came out when chronology, with title, one sentance plot and a snippet of what's important about that issue should be enough to guide them to what they want to get more info on. I suppose I can see one jumping from this list to all books by a favorite creator, but I'd limit it to writer and artists, at most, if even that. I mean, I cant' see someone running down this list and thinking, "Oh boy, I want to check out every issue lettered by Ben Oda!"

8) FWIW, If it were me, I'd also have the published on date only on the actual issue page, since I feel that's one level deeper on the info than this list needs.

9) I thought I read where one of you cats intimated that lots of bullets suck up wiki bandwidth. If true, I'd recommend killing some of the bullets for each issue. I know I use bullets a lot, but that's only becasue I'm too dumb to know any other way to format stuff. Anyway, I thin kthis quick-reference list could be just one time or two for each issue.

Anyway, that's all I got. Again, I think you guys are doing a terrific job and these quibbles are not meant to detract from that or to sap your enthusiasm in any way. Duke 14:24, 25 September 2006 (PDT)

Just a few replies for now. I'll get to the rest in some form later...

1) Oh, there's more breaking-up coming. For the '94-04 page, for instance, it's more a question of "is it four or five seperate pages?" than "does it need to be broken up". You can't really judge until the pages are done or nearly so, though, so the rereformatting will have to wait a bit longer.

3) I know. The problem with going much different though (baring in mind it needs to be very light, since it's for in-page use rather than insets or headings) is that it runs into one of the other colours, making it look like it's something different (green would make it look post-ZH for instance). Right now, I'm leaning towards fractioning that too, so that a pink-red will stand out for the Archives in the later pages as being a pre-Crisis reprint, if you know what I mean.

5) The headings are a visual break, whereas having undifferentiated lines hammers the eyes after a while.

6) *points out that "four or five different pages" from the #94-04 page amounts to 2-2½ years a page, and so three seperate years on a page, max, and could be as few as one single header on one particular page given the amount of comics in that year without month headers...*

7/8) I'm only linking frequent creators at all, rather than one-offs without a major LSH contribution, and I'm only linking them on the first mention on a page and the very occasional later mention after ages without a link. But, at the same time, it's useful publication data so you can see runs, etc. And, even when they're approximations, publication dates are IMO more useful than cover dates. Helps to disillusion you a bit once you see how often a particular creator kept an issue late or needed fill-ins :)

It went beyond "quick reference list" the moment it was broken up into individual issues and included AR stuff :)

9) Dunno who said that, but they were flat-out wrong. Bullets are images, but they're a single image - an image which is loaded anyway for the sidebar. Bulletting, again, helps the readability. - Reboot (SoM) talk page 15:51, 25 September 2006 (PDT)

Color coding

I know I've seen it somewhere, but shouldn't there be a color key on each page for each color that appears on the page? This one has only hot pink for the year (which I think is pre-Crisis), light pink for some stories (cameos? AR stuff?), and light blue for some other stories (Elseworlds?), so we wouldn't need every possible color. -- Omnicom 22:05, 15 October 2006 (PDT)

I've been thinking the same thing, just haven't designed one for the page. I'd like to use a design that will work on all pages. I'll put some ideas together and place a sample on this discussion page. -- Gopher 04:41, 16 October 2006 (PDT)

Meant to do a key, but I wa having a bit of trouble, then RL intervened with a vengeance.

Basically, the year headings are pre-Crisis; über-light-red is AR, über-light-pink is pre-Crisis reprint (yes, these two are annoyingly similar, I know, I'm having trouble finding a colour for AR that doesn't imply something else... and because it's in the text rather than a header, it needs to be really bright. And I specify pre-Crisis reprint because the Archives and some other reprints come post-1985, and they need to be distinguished as such on later pages), and über-light-grey (which you thought was light blue) is Elseworlds (inc. Adult Legion). - Reboot (SoM) talk page 12:57, 16 October 2006 (PDT)

Why do pre-Crisis reprints of pre-Crisis material need to be colored differently from post-Crisis reprints of pre-Crisis material? -- Omnicom 21:40, 16 October 2006 (PDT)

To me, a reprint is a reprint is a reprint, but it might be useful to some users to distinquish between them with different colored shading. The difference in shading should reflect the era of the material being reprinted, not the era in which the reprint was published. Who really cares when a reprint was made? Its age of the content that people are interestd in. I was envisioning that the shading would be an "über-light" version of the era color for the reprinted material, which in most cases would be Pre-Crisis pink. Some of the Tales issues contain reprinted Post-Crisis material, and of course the trade paperbacks reprint more recent stories.

My problem is, I was kind of envisioning the same coloring scheme for AR issues. Not sure how to distinguish between AR and reprint shading with any meaning. One solution would be to make either all reprints or all AR issues the same shade, leaving the other option to use the era-reflected shading. Of the two, it makes more sense to me for the AR issues to reflect the eras, beacause they are actually part of that era, whereas reprints of Adv 247 have been in produced during many eras, but are reprinting the same material. Also, I cant think of one, but how would we handle a reprint that contains material from multiple eras? Another good reason why all reprints could be the same shade. -- Gopher 04:53, 17 October 2006 (PDT)

To Omnicom - they don't. But it does help to distinguish pre-Crisis material reprinted in later eras, and it is as well to maintain the same shade consistantly. - Reboot (SoM) talk page 06:10, 17 October 2006 (PDT)

Just reread that, and it may be a bit confusing. Basically, all reprints of pre-Crisis material will have a light pink bg regardless of when the reprint is done be it 1960 or 2000. :) - Reboot (SoM) talk page 17:05, 17 October 2006 (PDT)