Bob Fisher's comics

When I started the process of organizing my comics I was more than overwhelmed by the task ahead. Thousands of comics that really were not organized other than being in long comic boxes. Some of the boxes had short lists of the titles inside but most did not. I started with the boxes labelled various or misc. As it turned out most of the various & misc. titles are from the Bronze age. As I write this I have entered 1,725 comics (now 2,345 as of 9-18-08)out of maybe 3,500 to 4,000 or so comics, of which most are from the Silver Age. As I scan and enter them I also put them in new bags with backing boards. "Entered them where?" you ask.

Not knowing where to even begin I got online and did some searching for some help. I had begun to write my own database when I realized it would take years to fill in all the info about each comic. So a search found several applications that might be of some help so I downloaded all the apps that I could test free for awhile and decided to buy Comic Collector from http://www.collectorz.com and what a great purchase it was. Comic Collector is a great program that has allowed me to enter a lot of info, incuding covers, for over 1,700 comics in less than two months for just an hour or two every other day or so when time permitted. Most of the time is taken up by scanning the front and back covers, saving them to disk and then subtituting my scans for those downloaded from the Comic Collector database. It only takes minutes to actually enter the comics into Comic Collector.

One of my favorite features of CC is the Export to html feature. The following pages are an example of the output to html with only minor tweaking of the CSS for fonts and colors the program did the rest. There are several layout choices and other options to make yours unique but I have only scratched the surface of this great application.

Click the red button below to see these entries. All of the covers are scans of my own comics except where the cover of mine is missing. In that case I have put the non cover scan in the spot where the back cover usually goes and a downloaded version of the original cover for reference. It's a miracle any of these comics survived so the fact that some are missing is no surprize. What is a surprize however is that quite a number of them are in beautiful condition. Others are, well let's just say I was a kid who liked to have a comic or two in my back pocket, just in case. :) Also when I was a kid there were no dedicated comic book shops like today. Every week I'd take my allowance to the drug store or grocery store or any place I could find comics. For a long time that allowance got me 5 comics, 2 packs of baseball cards, a hot dog and a coke. Sometimes I didn't get the hot dog :).

If you have any questions feel free to send email. Thanks for stopping by to take a look.

To see some interesting statistics click here.

Bob Fisher
Richmond, VA
bob@lostandfoundstudio.com