Board Thread:Policies/@comment-220364-20141112024521/@comment-3361105-20141112044603

Comic Book Resources releases previews of the issues (five pages plus all dressed covers of the standard and variant variety) at some point prior to their release, but not as early as solicits. These, (one would assume) come directly from DC's PR department or the distributor (who probably wants people to buy them based on the preview, right?), and are therefore considered accurate.

Here's an example.

They follow a standard format, and while the credits they list are not always accurate, the internal credits which occasionally appear as part of the five-page preview, are exactly the same as they are in print - whether that's accurate or not is another kettle of fish. I don't care one way or the other whether the CBR preview's credits are accurate or not, because we will, inevitably, get the correct ones, and DC's own solicit pages are far more inaccurate on a regular basis.

I don't know what you imagine, but comic books don't go to the printer the day before you get them. They are complete and printed weeks before we ever see them. If we're wrong, we're only wrong temporarily.

As for us trying to avoid spoiling things for people - too bad. We spoil stuff. We have spoiler warnings built into the templates. Doesn't help if you're as keyed in to the site as we are, but them's the breaks.

Textless covers from DC or "solicits" may or may not be the one that gets used. Obviously, we should have both, because both the one that gets used and the one that doesn't are valuable to us. In an ideal world, we'd replace solicits that have blacked out characters with the real deal, as soon as the real deal becomes available.

Pretty sure I said days and not weeks. Making comic pages the day before they come out is hardly a problem, anyway. And it certainly saves me time, since for the past several years I have been spending six dreadful hours of my every Wednesday making every single one of those pages and uploading all of those images by myself with no help from any of you scum'.

I agree, plots and appearances should not be listed until the book is out. For the most part, because if you haven't got the book in your hands, and you fill those fields out, you're a filthy liar. As far as credits go, in an ideal world, DC would give us all of the credits for the issue on their website, but they have done a terrible job of that. They list the artists in the wrong order. They don't distinguish between pencilers and inkers or who wrote which story.

Given the fact that I have been filling out credits on issues and correcting bad solicit information for years, as I said, I've got experience enough to know who does what and how the books are going to be laid out. It would be nice if other people developed those skills, so that I can actually do my for real life job on Wednesdays...

CBR, ComicVine, and a few other jerk-ass buttheads put watermarks on "exclusives" which are usually textless covers or textless variant covers (mostly the latter). That is a huge pain in my butt. Don't upload those.

Byfield said: "DC has in the past change covers or deliberately used solicit art that omits/hides details." I say: They change their solicit art to hide the details. They don't change the trade dressed cover art. The solicits typically come out two months in advance. If you frequent most comic news sites, you know that DC also spoils its own secrets on a pretty regular basis - usually by the next month (in their own solicits, even), which itself is a full month before we even get to read the issue in question.

Anyway... tl;dr: Comic pages should get made the week they are released, and not just the day of, because the solicits have been our for two months by the time we even start, and nobody's going to be surprised. They should not be made the week before, though. We're not a news site. The trade-dressed covers? Don't care. CBR's previews are legit. I don't think they're required as part of the page-creation process, but if it can be done, might as well. I'm happy enough to leave a textless there until the book's out. Credits from within the book? If you really do lump that in the "not a good idea" bin, then your criteria for lumping is too stringent.