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Apr 3, 2015

The 40 Years of Comics Project: Weird Metadata Post #1

New feature. Not even remotely sure why, or what good it does, but I think about this collection this way sometimes. I'm going to try to do this approximately twice a month, but that might not last. Or it might be significantly more. But there's a lot of different ways to interact with this kind of collection. This is one of them.

When I type "Steve Gerber" into the filter on my database, I am returned with 206 comics.

At approximately 15 minutes a comic, that means I will be spending about 51.5 hours reading Gerber's work. (I should note that this doesn't include any of his stuff in collected editions. I'm having thoughts about how to handle collections that I also own runs of. Different post.)

This also means that I'll be spending 206 days reading Gerber's work, or 56% of a year.

In contrast to the collection, as it stands today at 11832 comics, the Gerber sub-collection constitues about 0.02% of the collection.

The Steve Gerber Collection is housed in 2 short comic boxes. Also housed with the Gerber Collection is the ancillary collection of Man-Thing. Gerber rose to prominence while writing Man-Thing in Adventure into Fear, so I class further Man-Thing series and appearances as a sub-division of the Gerber Collection.

The Man-Thing Sub-Collection constitutes another 21 titles not written by Gerber.

What might be interesting at some point is to take a character like Man-Thing and read everything in my collection that features the character in chronological order. There are 40 Man-Thing comics, spanning the years 1974 to 2012, and I know for a fact that I don't have everything he's been featured in.

(For number junkies, that's 11% of a year reading Man-Thing comics, and they make up 0.003% of the general collection.)

The earliest Man-Thing comic to enter the collection, by virtue of its ID number is The Man-Thing v.1 #1, January 1974. The earliest Steve Gerber is Howard the Duck v.1 #1, January 1976.

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