Board Thread:Policies/@comment-32540247-20200216120319

One of the most common types of recommendations among comic readers are specific runs. "Mike Grell's run on Green Arrow" or "Alan Moore's run on Swamp Thing", such stuff.

However, there is currently NO way on the internet to find out out how long a specific creative team was on the title. If a run wasn't collected in a trade, you have basically little chances of finding out about it, barring going issue by issue - for example, I recently found out that Mike Grell had a short-lived run on Iron Man (I know that's Marvel, it's just an example) simply by randomly clicking issues on Iron Man vol 3 on the Marvel wiki. Similarly, I found out that Ed Brubaker wrote some Batman stories in early 2000s simply because I randomly found an old trade of these stories, I had no idea he did.

Similarly: how many of yall reading this did know that Alan Moore wrote an issue of Vigilante, and some Green Arrow backups in Detective Comics? If you did, it's very likely because you stumbled on a trade of DC Alan Moore stories.

I propose we do something to alleviate that. Here are some suggestions on how this can be implemented: 1) Headers The volume pages already contain headers that divide issues into groups. However, currently they seem to almost entirely divide it into arbitrary numbers like 1-50 that means absolutely nothing to the reader, and do nothing that can't be accomplished by ctrl+F. We can rework these headers to instead point to eras of specific creative teams. Of course in some cases runs aren't obvious or consistent, like e.g. Bronze Age Batman that constantly changed creators - but we could still divide it into eras, so Batman vol.1 would get Golden Age, Silver Age, Julius Schwartz No-Joker Age, New Look, Bronze Age - and then actual consistent runs like Chuck Dixon or Alan Grant etc.

That of course would require manually changing every volume page, so it'd be pretty work intensive in the long run to do for every volume page on the wiki.

2) Credits I don't know how possible it is with Wikia software, but I wonder if we could somehow create a system where a direct link to a comic - at least on the volume pages - displays the names from the "writer" and "artist" infobox (or nothing if article doesn't have an infobox) next to it. Or perhaps hovering mouse over the link could do that? It'd still require users to manually search for runs, but it'd make it hell of a lot more convenient than current trial and error.

3) A dedicated article Each book, or at least major book, would get a special "runs" article that describes most notable/recommended by consensus creative teams on the books, and on which issues they worked. We could use subpages for each volume for that, like "Batman Vol 2/Recommended Runs". Similarly, that article could be simply amended new section inside "Recommended Reading" pages. That's probably easiest option to implement, but only partially solves the problem, as it wouldn't allow for easily searching for more obscure runs.

I know that's a huge undertaking, but it would make the DC Wiki drastically more useful for comic lovers looking to expand their horizons, and for beginners looking to educate themselves and find their tastes. 