So, keeping my mind off the Warner news at the moment. We all know that one of the weaknesses of the comics cataloguing, is that there is not a great way to read based on publishing dates.
I have been slowing working on an excel sheet for this. You can find the current in-progress list here. I am updating/replacing the file until I have it complete. I am looking for help on this project, see below if you are interested.
A couple of notes:
I have started working oldest series and moving forward. I am mostly using the publish dates that DCU has for issues. It appears to me that there are SEVERAL cases where the dates DCU has are clearly wrong and if I can assume that the titles fit together in a particular time frame I am making my best guess.
Prior to ~1980, most titles all are listed as releasing on the first Tues/Wed of the month. It isn’t until after this point that the titles are correctly dated for weekly releases. Rather than have 52 rows for each year, I have been only tagging each issue by month. If there appear to have been multiple issue of a single title released each month, only then have I expanded the row.
Sometime in and around ~1998, there was a shift in how the titles are dated. Prior to this, the dates correspond with issue dating, after this it appears the normal ~1-2 month post dating of publishing is applied to the dates, so there is a weird period where some titles overlap.
4 Since this is a large project, if have been able to establish a pattern of reliability in release schedule for certain time periods, I have assumed that it continues until I encounter an aberration. If that means I have introduced an error on a release date, please feel free to let me know.
I am working on this slowly, but there are a lot of series. If you are interested in helping speed this project along, send me a pm and I can send you a template excel sheet to work with. If you are willing to tackle a numbers of series, that would speed things along.
Also, as I get more info on the google docs, I could use some proofers to make catch any errors.
Finally, if this goes well, and DCU stays up for comics, phase 2 would be to create reading lists for each year of publishing under a final thread.
You are after my heart with that spreadsheet! Seriously, I love spreadsheets and comics, and when I can use a spreadsheet for comic data, well that is just heaven.
This spreadsheet is amazing and I will try to remember to come back to use it for reference. Also, running out of steam on a project of this magnitude is natural. Just remember that is there and keep returning to it, as long as you aren’t burning yourself out on it. Seriously, this is great work.
Updated 10/24/20 Includes from Action Comics (1938-2011) - The Daring New Adventures of Supergirl (1982-1984)
I decided to collapse the multi issue months into a single line for all releases to make the sheet more uniform.
Also, I cleaned up the titles for most of the previous updates to better reflect how they are catalogued on DCU. I did note that DCU has been doing some updates to dates in their system as well, giving better ranges for some of the older series.
Updated 10/29/20 Includes from Action Comics (1938-2011) - Wonder Woman (1987-2006)
Largish Update. There were a lot weird publishing dates for some issues in this last batch. The New Teen Titans/The New Titans in particular was badly misdated. I actually chose to correct this comics based on the on-cover dates so that it flows correctly.
On other series, i have not corrected the dating issues. In general, as far as reading the story, go by issue number reading order. Until this can be corrected by DCU there will be some general weirdness, particularly around the publishing date change in 1988-1992.
Side note: This brings us up to 132 series listings our of 1205 series. So at this point, it’ll be just this side of forever before this is complete. If anyone wants to tackle some series entries, please reach out to me via PM to help.